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Topics - yarLson

Pages: [1] 2
1
Completely Unrelated / The New State of CHAZ...
« on: 2020-06-13 03:53:45 »
In case you haven't heard, some miscreants have set up their own "country" on capital hill in Seattle.

Comments? Concerns? Raging angry rants? Just curious what you guys think.

2
Is there anyone who still has a working knowledge of the code base? I see it's been dead on GitHub for about 5 years. I really love the idea, as am sure most of us do, so what went wrong here? Did it fail due to some sort of engineering oversight? Some sort of structural design problem? Or was it just a time commitment issue? Anyone know?

I mean I can grep through the code base and get an idea of what's up but I'm just asking if anyone already knows before I go through that... shall we say... fun process. Nothing quite so fun as reversing a legacy C++ code base after all.

Just looking at the stats I see it's a pretty far along project, almost 70,000 lines of code. I need a new side project, something more low level than what I'm doing at work and it'd be awesome to either pick this up and try to get it further along, or if it has some sort of critical design flaw maybe even start from scratch in a language I much prefer, like Rust and begin this hopeless endeavor all over again!

These are all just thoughts, don't anybody get excited now. I would really like to see a fully working open source engine for these games though, and it doesn't seem like anyone else is gonna do it, so I could waste a few years trying. Why not? Always wanted to build a game engine from scratch anyhow and the world doesn't need yet another general purpose engine. One for old classic games sounds much more fun!

Just collecting information to guage how feasble such a thing would be. But if someone pays me... :evil: (haha yea right)

I'll be lurking through this forum, the code and the website to see what I can find out over the next few days, but there is no substitue for hands on experience, so if you have it, please share.

I'm gonna try to at least add nix build support since that's what I do all day anyway. That will make it a lot simpler to package and build, and create a unified dev environment. Maybe that alone would be enough to kick up interest from some others. I know it wouldn't work on Windows but I don't care really.

3
Releases / [FF7PC] Field Resurrection [0.1]
« on: 2016-12-19 21:21:38 »
I apologize for the long silence.  I have had a pretty intense year with not much free time, but I was finally able to put together a little script which processes the images in a new way to avoid some of the "black pixel" bugs of previous versions and also uses the new photo method I was talking about before.  I still have some things I would like to do with this like refactor it in Haskell to add parallel processing of scenes and add support for FFVIII.

Unfortunately it looks like I won't have much time to do that for a while so I figured I should share what I have so far.  The script is written in bash and expects the palmer exported files to reside in "~/FFVII_fields".  I have not tested this on a Windows environment at all but it may work.

This script depends on the ImageMagick suite, as well as Potrace for layer tracing and waifu2x-cpp-converter and will fail if they are not found in you PATH.

Check it out here.
https://github.com/timde9/ffvii_frp

4
Troubleshooting / exporting field layers in Makou Reactor
« on: 2016-12-04 05:43:13 »
Is there any way to do this in the same way you can batch export in palmer?  I am asking because I am running a linux server and don't have easy access to any Windows machines right now.  I found the ability to mass export but it doesn't output all the layers just the whole image.

I wrote a new script from scratch to process field upscales more efficiently and want to test it on some actual fields now rather than just the test files I have been using.

Also if anyone has access to palmer and could just send them to me that works too.

on a sidenote.  does anyone know if Aali ever released any of his source code for any of his tools.  I would ideally just like to port palmer to *nix if I could and fix it up a bit from a user perspective.

5
General Discussion / Anybody need a Steam Key for FFVIII?
« on: 2016-04-03 19:01:20 »
I got the Easter Surprise Box from Square this year and I already owned FFVIII but it came with a key.  Asked a couple of my buddies here but they didn't want it so anyone who might need it can have it.  Just post here and I will PM someone at random.

6
Graphical / At it again...
« on: 2016-02-01 02:44:56 »
So I just can't leave well enough alone I suppose.  I know someone already did an upscale using waifu2x but I believe his model choice was poor.  He used the original "trained" model for anime art, whereas there is another "trained" model you can use with waifu2x that is based off of photography. 

Using this "photo" model instead of the anime model I have gotten incredibly clean and sharp results without the blotched or smudgy look of the anime style waifu2x.  I already modified Omzy's facepalmer script to work with waifu-caffe, trained with this new model and using cuDNN to make the processing time reasonable.   As a result I am posting a demo of the bombing mission so you can get an in game taste of this new method.  Also posting some sample images from an imgur album but keep in mind these are compressed a bit.

So here is the demo, just rename "demofin" to "field" and place in modpath.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/o8p04qwwaifgsms/demofin.7z

Also here are just a few samples to see what I am talking about
https://imgur.com/a/IjxFa

What do you think?  Would it be worth processing the whole game again?  With my new rig it probably wouldn't take nearly as much time as it did in the past, but then again even with CUDA and cuDNN the waifu2x resizing does take a fair bit of time to process even with a gtx 970, so just looking for feedback as to whether or not I should go for it?

7
General Discussion / need older version of OpenGL driver
« on: 2016-01-31 16:29:01 »
High I need a link with an older version of Aali's custom OpenGL driver 0.7.11b.  I need it because the newest version NEVER worked for me without using the "FF7Config.exe" from the older versions along with it.  So really all I need is the modified "FF7Config.exe" that came with those older versions.  Alternatively, if anyone had issues with this problem before and found a fix that will help me as well.

8
aren't they based on the same principal

namely that
collective > individual

any takers?

9
I got locked out of my account last night for trying to update from my old email to my new one.  Apparently the forum email is down but thankfully I found LeonhartGR on YouTube and he contacted to Covarr to help me regain access.  Much appreciated gentlemen!  Perhaps this will serve as a warning to others.  Maybe we could put a "contact us" button on the main page just in case this happens to others?

10
General Discussion / anyone have asmodeon's shader?
« on: 2014-07-08 17:50:15 »
Specifically the one listed below.  I believe shader's would compliment my upscale project very nicely and would really love to get my hands on this for testing.  The link has been dead forever though.  If anyone has this shader I would really appreciate it.

ComplexMultiShader.zip                          Asmodean        New Complex Shader for Aali's Driver    Qhimm FILE

11
Troubleshooting / [Solved] Need Serious help with Palmer
« on: 2014-07-06 10:39:17 »
Okay so after batch importing some backgrounds I want to batch export mod path textures and this doesn't seem possible from the ui.  Was figuring there is some kind of command line argument hopefully but trying "palmer --help" just launched it so I am stuck for now.  Also is there a way to suppress the ui messages so I don't have to press enter every 10 seconds?  Hope I don't have to write the mod path one by one since there are over 700 field files that would suck.  Any help is greatly appreciated.

*Update*
solved my own problem.  Realized that Palmer auto creates an output folder when you run batch input.  Also found a cool little program that auto clicks the dialog box.  Just in case anyone else has this problem its called Dialog Devil

12
Troubleshooting / Weird disc issue
« on: 2014-07-06 05:57:42 »
So yeah out of the blue I am having an issue loading FF7.  Its not detecting the disc even though its in the drive and its asking me to insert it.  Its weird because this wasn't happening yesterday.  I need to test some textures.  Has this happened to anyone before?  I tried changing the drive path in the registry like I did in the past but it didn't seem to work.  Maybe the registry is different in Windows 8.1?  I have no idea.  Any help would be great thanks.  Oh yeah I have the old version not the 2012.

13
Release

Download v2.0 Now!
Small Fix for 2.0

or try the...

2.0 Demo


Compare

Click an image for full size, left half is old and right is new






Learn

What is it?
Re:Sampled is an upscale of Final Fantasy VII's field backgrounds with the intention of keeping them as true to the original as possible.  Spiritual successor to my unfinished Project Blackfan, this new project is not only superior in quality but also 100% complete.

If you use my pack please keep an eye out for any minor imperfections (I got most of the big ones I think), so I can fix them up and make this pack glitch free.  The thumbnails above show a quick preview of the quality difference between mine and the original.  Please note that lighting is an un-fixable issue for now unless aali fixes it in his driver.  Hope you all enjoy it!

Also, The demo includes just the first bombing mission so you can get a feel for the pack before committing to the 4 GB full download.  Cheers!


How to install
Make sure you are using Aali's driver, preferably the latest one.  Simply place the "field" folder from the download into your mod path folder.  So for example if you had Reunion installed it would go in (wherever you installed FF7)/mods/Reunion/.  After that make sure you have the mod path set in your "ff7_opengl.cfg"; the config file that came with Aali's driver.

So in the example above you would make sure the line reads

"mod_path = Reunion"

To install the demo do exactly the same steps above but first rename the folder "demo" to "field". 

Credit:
Very special thanks to Omzy for creating the Facepalmer script without which I may have never attempted to finish what I started (since it does virtually all the work).  Thanks to Aali for both his driver which makes this possible and his Palmer tool which is an essential piece of the puzzle as well.  Also thanks to sl1982 for helping me out in the beginning many years ago.  Also a big loving thanks to my wife for helping fix errors and for her support.  Finally, thanks to Napper for helping me find and debug minor issues, and to anyone else who contributed feedback, encouragement or a helping hand.

14
Graphical / possible new upscale
« on: 2013-07-06 21:31:04 »
okay so maybe some of you are aware that I am rather obsessed in my spare time with finding the highest quality method possible for improving ff7 field backgrounds.  I won't go into all the details but since my shader idea isn't really moving I have been messing around with other alternatives. 

As a note, at the time I was more concerned with just getting the project done and experimenting and learning that with quality, but now that I look at the results I can't help but tell you that I absolutely hate the fractal method.  There is sooo much blotchy distortion in the resulting images and even though omzy was kind enough to take my idea and automate it  and bring it everyone I am still not very thrilled with the final results.

Of course I'd really like to give up on this entirely and just help the cause of remodeling the scenes one by one, however that is just not practical and even with team avalanches valiant efforts I think we are still a long way off from making that a reality, if it ever even happens. I have messed with everything and not really satisfied enough to start my project again.  But I have something new here and I'd like to get an opinion.

I won't bore anyone with the technical specifics now but I have been experimenting with a procedure called super resolution and am really intrigued with the results.  Since imgur and other image services tend to compress and therefore destroy the quality which I am here trying to convey, instead I have uploaded a png file to my google drive account.  To those who are interested, download and judge for yourself.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3FK0dqybqUCREpOdk1mdVdYOFE/edit?usp=sharing

This is a 4x blow up of the original.  As you can see there are no ugly blotches and while not perfect, better than any other program I have tried so far at maintaining detail without blurring the image.

Opinions, ideas, criticisms...


15
Here is a screen of what this could look like if we can get it to work.
http://i.imgur.com/azEZkAs.jpg

And here is what I have so far.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3FK0dqybqUCZ3lzR3dvY1c1Zmc/edit?usp=sharing
(download is not a working shader but a wip progress, causes extreme glitches and should only be used by someone who knows how to fix them.  I am only posting them up in hopes that someone will fix the errors, if you do try them back up your original shaders)

Okay so a lot has happened since I last posted here, but I have a great idea that will be well worth the time if someone can help me figure this out.  I am sure most assumed by now that I died or just killed my project.  For those who do not know me I was working on Project Blackfan, you can find it somewhere on here.  It eventually evolved thanks to Omzy into his field rescaling package.  His script work wonders but honestly I was still dissatisfied with the results for several reasons. Firstly that there were still several glitches, and that I never really liked the blotched look that fractals seemed to create.  Also I was extremely upset about the filesize of the project which pretty much ensures that only the most fanatical will spend the time to download several gigs just for a moderate graphics improvement.

Believe it or not I continued working out ways to improve my project over the years however a lot has happened to slow progress (graduated, married, baby, work, etc.).  But I have been doing tons a research on image scaling, and working out different ways to improve my results.  I have tried literally every program that claims to scale images well (well every english language program at least), and even came across a patent that may or may not prove very interesting if IBM ever decided to do anything with it (however there is nothing so far).

check it out if your interested here
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-patent-image-resize-quality,15472.html

But back to the point.  So far my results have been very unremarkable and really not worth mentioning.  But I have stumbled across something that could do exactly what I was trying to do with Project Blackfan, only automatically, with better results and without having to do any manual work.  Best of all it would only require a file download of a few kilobytes in size.

I am talking about a relatively new open source shading algorithm called xBR and xBRZ that is being used to improve the graphics of several game emulation programs.  I have already tested the algorithm on both 2x and 4x the original background sizes and it looks beautiful with no blotched effecct that fractals produce and it works in real time and uses a reasonable amount of resources.  If you want to see for yourself, check this out



this is 2x the original image size.  I personally feel it looks even better than the fractal method.  Although nothing provided perfect results I feel this shader is the best overall solution since it provides the highest quality image without any major file replacements and can be downloaded and installed in seconds.  This is actually an even bigger deal if you were to realize the insane glitches that came from upscaling these images and then trying to put them back in the game.  Its just an unreasonable amount of work.

Basically the layers had to be cut out manually or they looked blocky and horrible which kinda ruined the effect completely but then smoothing them out required several manual edits to get them to fit correctly and they still looked kinda awkward in game even after hours of work and you've only finished a single scene... (and it never ended)

The only problem with my idea is that I know absolutely nothing about programming shaders.  I can provide everything I have found so far and of course since this is an open source project there are several common shaders (which are not inherently compatible with aali's driver yet), which i am sure someone with the know how could convert into a texture filter.  I am not even 100% sure this is at all possible for aali's driver.  I don't think a fullscreen filter effect would work because it would probably blend the 3d objects in undesirable ways but a texture filter is theoretically possible (and has already been implemented in PPSSPP emulator with great results).

So as for what I have discovered so far there are two implementations of this algorithms with several variations.

The original is simply the xBR shader and the original author and is algorithm are presented completely in this forum
http://board.byuu.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2248
in the forum you can find links to several variations of the shader

There is also the xBRZ project
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?p=287296
This is essentially the same algorithm with different rules and it was completely rewritten to support multi-core processing and 64-bit architecture.

Pretty much all the resources and information regarding this method can be found if you follow these two links.  Hopefully we can get someone who knows what they are doing or perhaps even raise up a few bucks to pay a professional if we can get aali or someone who would know if this would be achievable with the driver in its current state.

If so I think this could be one of the best enhancements so far.

16
Completely Unrelated / independent media
« on: 2011-09-05 18:49:02 »
I am curious as to how any of you obtain the information that you rely on.  I am presupposing in this thread that all corporate media has some sort of agenda to mask, marginalize or alter information for the sake of political or monetary gain, therefore I am only asking about independent sources of information.  CNN and NBC do not count.  I know of a few but I am always interested in learning about new ways to get my hands on generally reliable information so please do me the pleasure of filling me in.

I will link a couple of sources that I use on a regular basis
http://tv.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.linktv.org/
http://wikileaks.org/
http://english.aljazeera.net/
http://www.democracynow.org/
http://freeviewdocumentaries.com/
http://academicearth.org/

among others...

17
Completely Unrelated / which side of the fence are you on
« on: 2011-07-30 04:22:12 »

who here believes that pharmaceutical companies are actually here to help cure our illnesses?
Who here actually believes that this money that we all donate to all these "cancer research" foundations actually goes towards finding a cure?
And finally, for now, how many of you believe that the cure for cancer is right under our nose, and that actually, there is more than one known "cure" and "somebody" is funding a massive cover up of information, and cutting the funding to anyone who is trying to research these alternatives?

These are issues that I am being faced with more and more on a personal basis and I am interested in hearing what some of you might have to say about it.

18
I need a solution for opening windows programs and .exe files on a mac OSX. I am not very familiar with this kind of thing, so when a google searched turned up a ton of results I didn't know which would be best. I figure someone here would know so if you do please help. Which would be the best (preferably free) program to use.

19
General Discussion / beta testers needed
« on: 2011-07-13 19:38:55 »
so now that I am working on a mac, I cannot test my field backgrounds in game. I do a lot of work in palmer to make sure there are no mistakes but the only way to be absolutely sure is to run through each screen and make sure there are no problems. So basically I am going to need beta testers to help me very soon, but I will only need a few so please only apply if you are serious. The job is easy enough, I will send you about 10-20 backgrounds for you to test in game every couple of weeks. While it is very easy I need you to be very thorough in testing and descriptive when describing any errors or inconsistencies. Any takers will be well appreciated and as a small reward I will allow you to keep the finished backgrounds before they are released. Hope to you hear from you all soon!

20
Completely Unrelated / this guy...
« on: 2011-06-02 18:45:02 »


May 21st, 2011 = epic fail
bounces right back stating that it was an invisible judgement day
New Apocalypse scheduled for October 21st, 2011

I won't say too much, if anyone remembers any of my previous statements on the topic of religion you can probably guess how I feel

I was just curious to hear your thoughts, opinions, jokes, beliefs, etc., etc.

21
Completely Unrelated / problem transfering hard drive
« on: 2011-05-08 19:44:40 »
as I just finished posting in my project thread I will be able to use a computer all this week to work on my project but I am having problems, I already got permission from a friend, who I am house sitting for, to replace his hard drive with mine and use his computer to work on my project. The reason why he trusts me is because I built this computer for him last year.

Anyway the problem is whenever I put my hard drive into his computer it won't load windows 7. It just restarts automatically when it gets to the first screen where it shows the window logo surrounded by black. I have put this drive into another computer to make sure it wasnt the problem and windows 7 loaded fine. I need to use my HD because all my programs and actions are saved on it. I have never seen this before, I have transfered over hard drives between computers several times in my life and have never seen this problem. I was just wondering if maybe anyone had any ideas.

22



Has anyone ever heard this album?! It just arrived from amazon today and its amazing.4$ cds, 45 tracks and they all appear to be awesome so far.
I'm thinking about putting this in my game  :-D

here are a couple of tracks from it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng9eXWhf6Y4&playnext=1&list=PLF7D286A16694F1EF&fmt=18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi8WmfzdS3Y&fmt=18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX0btKdei18&fmt=18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qmQtTf93n4&fmt=18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n63sSipTzII&fmt=18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VZ48Uem8Ac&fmt=18

edit: I just realized that this probably belongs in general discussion  :o

23
Completely Unrelated / favorite fighting game
« on: 2011-04-13 16:02:09 »
I am a big fan of fighters. So I was just wondering what everyone's favorite fighting game is?

mine is

mostly because spam=lose in this game. And also because it is Dragonball  :-D
also the new ones for PS3 suck complete ASS!

There is supposedly a new version with all kinds of sweet new features, such as 2v2 battles, but its only available in Japanese arcades so that doesn't help me much  :|

I KNOW ALL THE COMBOS!

I would challenge you all to an online match but this has got to be the worst online game in history. At least for me; ultra lagtastic.

my favorite character is...

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

 :mrgreen:

24
To help understand what I am about to inquire you might like to skim through this thread
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=11596.0

this is concerning my "Project Blackfan"
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=11505.0

let me say first that not smoothing these layers is not an option. After my 0.35 release I realize that a ton of these images look like absolutely crap without smoothed layers essentially nullifying the purpose of this project. It smoothing or nothing at this point.

basically I have finally found a way to carry out the smoothing layer process entirely automatically but I am having problems.


Right now it takes about 45 minutes to an hour just to smooth all the layers in a single background. This is because there is a lot of tedious manual effort. For images with tons of layers it can take up to 2 or 3 hours to get everything perfect. Using what I have discovered I can bring this time down dramatically to well within just a few minutes. The problem is that my screen isn't big enough to carry it out.

Let me now explain what I am trying to do. In the first thread that I mention above, I talk about and show that their are tiny area's of pure black that show up in Palmer and in game when the layers are smoothed, and these little black pixels must then be filled in automatically. This is what takes me an insane amount of time to fix manually. However I discovered that if I import the smoothed layers into Palmer and then print screen when the image is at its true size that I can align the image up to the layers perfectly. This allows me to run a color select of the black areas and all at once fill them in using the base image. It brings down hours of work into a single button push.

However I have a major problem. I have to print screen several times and align the image manually several times since my screen isn't big enough to show these entire images at their true pixel size. This takes a lot of time especially for the images that are something like 5360x2080 pixels. This can mean I have to print screen 8 or 9 times and then align that print 8 or 9 times. Doing this takes just as long as fixing the black areas manually so in its current state this method is absolutely useless. So here is where I need your help. Please note that I have already sent a request to Aali to include a special mod in Palmer to help me solve this but I can't rely on him to fix this for me so I need everyone's help.

Now here are some questions that have arisen in my mind at this point:
Is there some kind of hack I can run to get print screen to print more than just what shows on my physical screen? This would solve the problem.

If you run more than one monitor and you "print screen" will it print both screens or just one of the two? This will help solve the problem if it prints both screens but I'll have to go out and buy a as big a monitor as I can find which is never cheap, on top of the fact that I would need a new graphics card to go beyond my current resolution. This is not an option I'd prefer but since I plan to upgrade my machine sometime this year it may be feasible.

Is there some other way besides print screen, (ie maybe some special kind of software I have never heard of) and besides modding palmer to get what shows up in palmer to show up in photoshop in exactly the same manner? This could solve the problem

Has their ever been source code available for any version of Palmer? I am a piss poor programmer but I will at least try to include the modification myself if I can

I have a 1080p big screen TV and a dvi to hdmi cable. Is there a way I could hack my tv to have it show more than just 1920 by 1080 pixels. Say maybe 4000 x 4000? This wold solve the problem but it doesn't sound easy.

thats pretty much it for now. I am completely stumped. If I think of anything or discover anything else I will post it here. Please help me! if I can figure this out I can bring the ETA for a final release down from a year or even 2 from now to maybe about 4 or 5 months conservatively. I could potentially do it even faster than that. Smoothing is the only process that I have no way to batch as of right now. If you can help me solve this I will be flying through these backgrounds! Thank you for your time everyone.

25
I find myself having to restart the game quite often as to be able to load different saves for testing. I have already removed the two intro movies but I can't seem to remove the intro credits.  I beginning to wonder a few things: first, has anyone ever tried adding the functionality of loading a different game from the menu while already in a game, as in some later FF titles, or is this already possible via some kind of cheat? Second, is there some kind of shortcut for a soft reset for the PC version? And lastly, is there any way to disable the opening credits so I can just start right from the main menu? Thank you  :mrgreen:

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