Messages

26

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-31 00:16:19 »

Interpolated animations is all we have for the foreseeable future.  It would be great if someone had the knowledge and time to deal with creating programs to import custom animations and mesh deformation, but it's going to be a long time before that happens, if ever.

However, I do have enough free time to dedicate to interpolating what we currently have, I just can't do it one animation at a time.

Actually, I'm not pessimistic about the interpolation itself, but about it's practical usage in-game. Since effects are hard coded into the EXE and each of them manages timming on it's own way, I can't help but feel there is no way the new animations and the effects will ever match.

The V_ALPHABLEND state has to be enabled either in the group itself or somewhere above it in the render tree. Presumably models themselves usually don't touch this state at all and leave it up to the engine to enable it before rendering.

It seems all battle pieces actually set V_ALPHABLEND in both field_C and field_10 on the hundrets chunck. So I guess the engine simply forces the blending off for these models. I can't help but find this really bizarre.

27

Troubleshooting / Re: problem with texture of a field model

« on: 2013-07-30 23:24:05 »

That was totally unplanned. It's almost as if I summoned you!

You know, sometimes the universe conspires to fullfill our demands.

By the way, problem solved. The name of the texture file had space which apparently is a no-no for FF7.

28

Graphical / Re: Fixing the field models mouth blinking

« on: 2013-07-30 22:30:59 »

Yes, sorry, I didn't make myself clear enough. Groups reordering wasn't implemented on the last bugfix version.

Kaldarasha's method would definitely work too, though it's kind of unconfortable.

29

Completely Unrelated / Re: EarthBound

« on: 2013-07-29 23:21:39 »

Well, I don't think the AAA market isn't that bad actually. I enjoyed Deus Ex a lot, for example, and I've got high expectations about Dishonored (which I bought moths ago but still couldn't find time to play). Unfortunatley, I didn't enjoy Bioshock Infinite as much as I expected...

There sure are lots of interesting indie games out there too. I recently played FEZ and loved it. Black Mesa was also an excelent homage to one of my all time favourite games. Mark of the Ninja is provably my next step. That or maybe an adventure game. I think I own the whole Watjet Eye catalog and I've just played Gemini Rue.

30

Team Avalanche / Re: Out of hibernation

« on: 2013-07-29 23:10:03 »

I'm with Covarr. You never have enough artists. At my job they must account for over 75% of the staff.

31

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-29 22:55:38 »

Blend mode doesn't matter if blending is turned off

Mmmm... But is blending explicitely turned off in real-time or is there some sort of flag in the file that specifies it should be diabled?

hello! First sorry for my english, i´m from spain and use a traductor 

I have a problem to put the textures on a model, I explain:

I have the mogu head model and I make it with biturn to open it in 3dsmax, I put a texture and edit the UVWs properly. I open with pcreator and placed texture correctly, I assign the number of textures and save it in ".P" format. Then open it with Khimera, edit the size and position, I put the right texture and save. I extract with lgptools char.lgp file and replace all the files that I created with Khimera and return to compile the file. I replace the new char.lgp created and the model disappears, but when I remove the texture the the model appears. What am I doing wrong?

This post is all explained with pictures:http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=14470.0

Please I need help!
thanks

I sent you an MP.

I was wondering how feasible it would be to change the dialog box asking "is this animation a loop" to "which animations loop".   Granted, a version like that would probably only be useful for me converting everything to 60fps.  But it would save a lot of time if I could type 1,2, 4, 7, 16  and have it interpolate all of the animations and loop the ones I specified. 

Mmmm... yes, I think Kaldrasha's idea would be more generic. Interestingly, It seems it's already possible to obtain a list of the looping animations (and even a list of sequential animations) since the battle scripts (stored in the **AB files)  has been already partially decoded. I'm still kind of pessimistic about the future of interpolated animations, though...

and a system which imports-exports animation sets in the most common/useful formats 

Sorry Dark_Ansem, but that's beyond the scope of this project. Dealing with extra file formats it's a dull and pretty time-consumming task. If I ever decide to continue with the import/export project it will be only for a single standard transport format (COLLADA, in particular).

32

Troubleshooting / Re: problem with texture of a field model

« on: 2013-07-29 22:35:13 »

Hello jusete.

I'm spaniard, so we can continue this conversation in Spanish by MP.

Holy crap. Never saw that tool before... Looks intimidating. Borde is so legit it's sick. Where'd he go? Thank you Borde for all you did!

I'm right here

33

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-29 07:22:24 »

Oh, by the way Aali, I've got one more question about blending modes. I found out all the battlefields have their pieces set to Average. Yet they appear completly opaque in game. Are their values overwritten in real time or is there something I'm missing?

Borde, great to see you back!  I was hoping to sneak in a request on the interpolation side of things before a release, but I see I'm too late.  If you'd be interested in just a little more tinkering, let me know.

I'm open to suggestion Obesebear. What were you thinking about?

34

Graphical / Re: Fixing the field models mouth blinking

« on: 2013-07-28 22:38:12 »

The only way of changing which group will blink is by changing their order. This is currently not possible, but I'll add the option to the next Kimera version.

By the way, the problem changing texture identifiers is fixed.

35

Completely Unrelated / Re: EarthBound

« on: 2013-07-28 20:49:48 »

If you enjoyed Earthbound, I suggest you giving a chance to the demo of a recently kickstarted game: Undertale. I found it really charming and brought me memories from the time I spent with Earthbound. Check it's web page: http://undertale.com/

36

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-28 14:09:09 »

Ok, thanks for the information Aali.

EDIT: Done. You can grab 0.97a at the first page.

37

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-27 23:52:49 »

I think a better default value for the alpha would be 128, that's what it's set to in all the stock models IIRC.

Excelent, thanks for the suggestion Aali. By the way, how is the alpha interpreted by the engine when the Average blending mode is used? Is it Alpha/2 or something like that? Does it work the same for the other blending modes?

By the way, I'm having trouble understanding what's the real meaning of the TexID field on the P models groups. It doesn't seem to have any real effect in-game no matter the value I write to it. Where is the actual texture index specified at?
EDIT: Never mind, now I see the TexID field is duplicated at the Hundrets chunck at offset 0x10 and that's the information FF7 actually uses.

That would be awesome!

Now I remember what I actually want to ask: The global prelight function is very useful, but I need to set the colors of the light to give the battle models a more similar look to the original ones.
Oh, and the prelight doesn't work for battle models in the current (.97) release.

Wow, yes, it's certainly broken. I'll have to look into it. I'm also working on per vertex ambient occlusion which I think will look much better.

38

Team Avalanche / Re: Out of hibernation

« on: 2013-07-27 23:45:14 »

Making FF7 render weighted meshes isn't very difficult at all actually, the problem is inventing a new model format to support it and writing the loaders/exporters/etc for it. This is something I've wanted to do since like version .6 of the driver but I don't think I will ever have the time to actually do it.

You never cease to amaze me Aali. But yes, you're right, writting the associated tools would be a chore. If you ever decide to go on with that, I'd suggest using an existing format (such as Cal3D) and expand it with any additional data needed.

39

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-27 22:40:18 »

You mean setting directly the color of a vertex? Yes, it could be done. It's not hard. I'll have to make room on the interface for the new button though. It's very crowded.

40

Team Avalanche / Re: Out of hibernation

« on: 2013-07-27 22:24:53 »

I think it'd be easier to make a new game with current era tools

Pretty much. Though that's what QGears is, to some degree.

Was Q-Gears stopped by Square? Like when they tried to port Metroid Prime to Cryengine 2 and got shut down?

I don't think QGears project was ever officially stopped. The last version was released more than a year ago, though. Since there are still several aspects of FF7 that noone seems to have figured out yet, the project isn't going to be completed anytime soon (if ever).

41

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-27 22:02:20 »

I fixed the proeblem with invisble polygons. As expected, the alpha value was wrong. It wasn't even initialized, in fact, which implies any value could have ended up being written (although it seems it was 0 pretty much always). I'll fix it to 255 so you will only need to save the model again.

But befor uploading the new version, I'd like to fix the texture IDs bug too.

42

Team Avalanche / Re: Out of hibernation

« on: 2013-07-27 20:35:30 »

Nop, I don't think there is any way of making FF7 render skinned models. Maybe Aali could somehow do it with his custom driver. But really, I think QGears would the most viable option for getting rid of that restriction (and many others).

43

Team Avalanche / Re: Out of hibernation

« on: 2013-07-26 21:29:16 »

Both field and battle animation formats are pretty much fully decoded already Cyberman. Kimera sourcecode includes functions to decode and encode both formats.

It's true battle animations representation could pose a problem for a scripting languange since they involve working with a bit stream, but one could work with an intermediate format (such as COLLADA) and do all the conversions on a separate program written in C++. Many modeling suites also include an interface for writting plug-ins directly in C++, though they are usually pretty nightmarish (I shudder to think of the time I had to write a plug-in for XSI).

44

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-26 20:34:49 »

Sorry TheHierarchy, but adding more formats support is not in my plans. The source code is available, though, so anyone else could write it.

Anyway, the 3DS format does support multiple materials with diffuse colors. Maybe Biturn doesn't export material data, but it certainly would fit. Shaded models, on the other hand, would need per vertex color which is certainly out of the specs of that format.

Anyway, I don't think any of this will really help you here TheHierarchy. The real solution is fixing the discrepancy between Kimera and FF7 engine color handling.

45

Team Avalanche / Re: Out of hibernation

« on: 2013-07-26 20:08:09 »

I'm sorry Timu Sumisu but right now I'm working on something else. Also, as I said, it's not exactly the most exciting task to tackle. I promise I'll give it a shoot some day (if nobody does it first), but don't hold your breath.

By the way, I'm curious, what do you want to do exactly? Is it the cape physics simulation?

46

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2013-07-26 19:16:20 »

Hello everyone.

Sorry for not answering for so long, but I needed a break. I'm glad you could figure out how to get those pesky dlls registered. Thanks for your help.

As for the invisible models, I must confess it's something I still need to look into. I think I know where things went wrong. Most lilkey the alpha channel has bad values, though I thought it was not used at all. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

47

Team Avalanche / Re: Out of hibernation

« on: 2013-07-26 19:05:53 »

Hello everyone.

Yes, Kimera can edit animations, but it's a real pain. The option is there more as a proof of concept than an actual end-user feature. I've got plans to make it more reasonable, but it's going to take a while to implement.

I'm actually surprised nobody came up with a script to, at least, import the animations into Blender (or any other modeling suite). It would be pretty easy. It would be rather tedious too, though.

By the way, nice job Timu Sumisu. Good luck with it.

48

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: The S Files (FF7 PC)

« on: 2013-01-12 23:23:04 »

That's what I feared. It sounds like getting everything to run properly would require an awful lot of work. Thanks for the information Aali.

I can't help but feel this whole STP system comes from some early implementation that became too rigid somewhere during the development and ended up having a marginal purpose.

49

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: The S Files (FF7 PC)

« on: 2013-01-09 18:30:16 »

I see. Well, thanks a lot for clarifying everything NFITC1. I guess the actual movement patterns, combinations and textures used must be hardcoded somewhere just like other aspects of the effects.

As for tracing the exe, I've got bad memories from when I tried doing so using SoftIce. Anyway, I'm curious, what tools do you use nowadays?

50

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: The S Files (FF7 PC)

« on: 2013-01-07 22:40:08 »

Glad to see you working on this NTFIC. And great job, by the way. Sure you're fast.

So X and Y are actually offsets to center the image at target? Yeah, that sound reasonable.

The way these files work is really odd. The case of fir_1.spt and fir_2.spt seems specially strange. bombo_1 to bomb_16 also seem to use a separate S file for each frame, which pretty much seems to defeat the purpose of having a system that can handle the image sequences. Maybe they ran into memory problems? Could it be that the texture where the images are uploaded too has a very limited size (maybe 256x256) and the only way to use bigger images was to define additional S files?