Messages

1101

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-15 15:16:30 »

Going back to shaders and filters, what causes the glitches when you apply it to the whole scene ?  The fact that some layers show artifacts when rendered ?

If so, wouldn't it be possible to apply a filter/shader individually to each layer and skip the ones that show artifacts (the alpha layer comes to mind) ?  Pete's GPU drivers seem to use a similar principle for filtering and it works well for ff7 on epsxe.  I have to admit I don't recall if it improves the backgrounds at all though.

If it doesn't show, I don't know much about these things and I'm tossing (probably ridiculous!) ideas out there based on what little I do know but realistically, I think this is the closest somebody has ever been to improving the backgrounds as I doubt anybody is ever going to go through the 758 or so field files of the game to re-render them at a higher resolution!

Regardless, keep up the good work.

Its very possible to apply filters *after* the scene has been fully rendered (since it is essentially just a 2D image by then). But then you'll be filtering everything, not just the low-res field tiles.

1102

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-15 15:04:45 »

This driver don't work with the french version of Final Fantasy VII. He said : "It's not the 1.2 version". Yet I have patched the game, but with the french 1.2 patch.

Version detection is a bit of a hack, yes
I might just remove it if its going to cause trouble with other languages.. (but that will make it crash instead of displaying the message if ff7.exe really is incompatible)
Could you please upload your ff7.exe somewhere so I can compare it to the US english version?

1103

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-14 22:58:55 »

The only thing thats holding off the 0.2b release right now is a bug in the ffmpeg truemotion2 codec that leads to oversaturated and sometimes just plain wrong colors.

It's still missing some battle effects, no idea why, but that is also the only big thing that sets it apart from the original drivers, everything else should be working now

1104

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-14 02:23:41 »

I was talking about color depth, not machine word size

And I assume Terid__K was too, since one of the known issues with running FF7 in 32-bit color depth is messed up movies.

64-bit systems will just have to pretend to be 32-bit systems, just like they do for FF7 itself

The DLL exports only one pretty trivial function, the constructor for the graphics driver "object".

It's enough work to create this thing in the first place but I do intend to document my findings on .tex and .p file formats and if someone wants to have a look at the source code, thats not a problem.

I doubt it would be of any use to the Q-Gears team though, if anything, they should be trying to move away from the old outdated concepts used in the original engine. (And this driver just handles graphics after all, its 90% generic OpenGL code, 10% FF7 specifics)

1105

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-13 12:53:17 »

Err, this driver was never running in anything but 32-bit

And I already have movies playing (no sync, no sound, just video) so that would be a definite yes

1106

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-12 23:14:37 »

Working on movies right now though, I'm replacing the entire movie player with my own routines, using ffmpeg to decode them (so no more shitty propietary truemotion codec)

After that I'll probably make a 0.2b release, and THEN work on my new idea for field
(that release will be fully playable, the only known problems right now are some missing effects and field glitches with custom resolutions)

1107

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-11 10:03:25 »

No, that will be in the next release, along with fixes for the battle camera, snowboard and submarine minigames and (hopefully) the directinput bug.
Oh and a very minor fix for non-paletted textures (I have found _one_ so far, the ropeway station background is in BGRA 5:5:5:1 format and wasn't working in 0.1a)

The screensize-feature is not terribly useful yet though, since it messes up field, but I have something in mind that will both fix that issue and in the long run make it much easier to replace field backgrounds

1108

Archive / Re: Need Help Playing PSF and MP3 files on FF7Music

« on: 2009-04-10 15:34:36 »

Just put the plugins in the same directory and it should find them and use them when appropriate.

1109

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-10 06:31:24 »

Hmm, seems I'll have to provide more .reg files next time.. thanks magixts.

Added another fun feature just now, it is now possible to run FF7 in any resolution without modifying FF7.exe

Field looks pretty bad though, I'll probably have to adjust the TNT fix (which is really just alternate pixel center "emulation") for this to work 100%

This will pretty much kill the high-res patch since now you can high-res FF7 without getting any of the bugs/glitches. (This is a "real" fullscreen resize and FF7 doesn't even know about it)

Unfortunately, only multiples of 320x240 are going to look really good (because thats just how the engine works) but "laptop resolutions" (1280x800 etc) should still see an improvement over 640x480

1110

Archive / Re: Need Help Playing PSF and MP3 files on FF7Music

« on: 2009-04-10 05:25:34 »

I have the same setup, except I use the .psf version of cintro (904 Sephiroth intro), works flawlessly.

Double, triple and quadruple check the mp3 plugin, file paths, file names etc

1111

Aali's Custom FF7/FF8 Driver / Re: Custom graphics driver for FF7

« on: 2009-04-10 02:02:33 »

In a flash of genius I figured out what was throwing off the Z-coordinates for high-res models

Since I could not get the new models to align with the "old" stuff, I simply threw out the old stuff
The fix is even possible to implement in the 0.1a release, simply replace the config file and vertex shader with the files from the following archive:
http://backup.ninjaloot.se/share/ff7_opengl_0.1a-zfix.zip

Technical details follow;

The thing I had overlooked is that TLVERTEX (Direct3D vertex type) bypasses _all_ transforms, projection AND viewport, in OpenGL its not possible to bypass the viewport transform so I had to setup a projection matrix to "reverse" the viewport transform, it was this projection matrix that messed up the Z coordinates for "everything else", the high-res models were in the right place all along.

1112

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-09 12:27:43 »

I guess you could double check the registry yourself,

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Square Soft, Inc.\Final Fantasy VII\1.00\Graphics

Driver should say 3, while DriverPath should point to the dll

(if for some reason the dll fails to load, it will silently revert to d3d, so that might be something to look into aswell)

:EDIT:

Oh, and DriverPath is relative to the working dir of ff7.exe so it should not matter where you installed it

:EDIT2:

I should also point out that I have only tested this on XP SP3, for all I know, it may not work at all on Vista/Windows 7 (Although it really should)
You will notice when the driver is running, it will skip the intro movie and go instantly to the credits scene when you start the game.

:EDIT3:

It seems the snowboard minigame is not completely broken, you just can't see anything unless you pause it. (And when you unpause it will start filling the screen with garbage, so you have to pause/unpause all the time)

1113

Troubleshooting / split

« on: 2009-04-09 00:54:58 »

I recently discovered that FF7 has support for custom graphics drivers, with the right config it will load a dll and use that instead of its internal drivers (I also found the OpenGL driver, which works surprisingly well although its not really playable due to massive glitches)

So, my question is this, has anyone ever tried implementing a new graphics driver for FF7? I don't care if it worked or even displayed anything, any info you could provide would be great

I'm going to play around with it for a while, I have already mapped out parts of the direct3d driver and many of the internal structures in FF7 (including .tex, .tim and .p formats if anyone wants some info on that) but if we got some talented people together we could probably make a reasonably good OpenGL driver and never have to worry about poor DX5 compatibility again

:EDIT:

Link to latest release: http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=8306.msg133947#msg133947

1114

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-02 10:16:50 »

Indeed, the animation is already done before it hits the graphics driver, I get a bunch of .p groups and a set of matrices to transform them with, thats all.

1115

General Discussion / Re: FF7 Troubles

« on: 2009-04-02 00:33:29 »

There's one big difference; pirating is, by most peoples standards, immoral. Improving an old game (or even extracting content from newer games for non-commercial use) is not.

But we're not going to discuss this, so stop discussing it already.

1116

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-01 23:37:21 »

Got some VERY nice new screenshots

This is actually a debug shader I use to determine z coordinates, but it makes for a cool effect; here odin going up against a dragon


Normal battle, with menus hidden for extra impressive screenshots





Now the bad news, sorting out z-coordinates (pun unintended) turned out to be really tricky, these new battle and field models are inconsistent with both the world map and field tiles, making it fit perfectly everywhere is going to be a b*tch.

1117

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-04-01 14:02:25 »

Did I just get field models working? Well no, not really, that image was generated using a hardcoded matrix, positions are all wrong anywhere else

But I have the rendering down, the savepoint rotates, the power soul shimmers etc

1118

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-03-31 23:11:49 »

If you modify the backgrounds, you have to do it properly (improve the picture as a whole, then re-cut it)

Otherwise you'll get all sorts of artifacts as the different layers bleed over into each other

Even linear filtering for textures (standard feature in opengl) has to be disabled for field to look good

1119

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-03-31 17:44:39 »

The "problem" with battle models is simply that I haven't written that routine yet
(As you can see, field models are missing, battles show menus and text, the rest is just black)

A lot of stuff happens in that routine that I don't fully understand yet but now that I have (pretty much) everything else sorted out, it should be easier.

Worst case scenario I'll just "borrow" most of it from the d3d driver (I do that with some things already, for example, every transform goes through the original code to ensure its correct)

1120

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-03-31 16:19:05 »

Seems like we can cross #1 off that list

1121

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-03-31 15:21:53 »

4 main issues to take care of before I can make a proper, playable release

1. even though I now have the palettes all sorted out, field files still look pretty crappy, things that should be transparent aren't and vice versa

2. battle models and other 3d objects

3. blend modes; this one is pretty tricky, getting the exact same (or atleast close enough) blending effects as dx5 _in the right places_ will require some serious digging into both FF7 and DX5 internals

4. in-game movies simply hang the game for now, for the first release I'll probably just skip them

1122

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-03-31 11:23:57 »

Finally made some progress with the palettes (still not quite right though)





I also implemented a very simple fragment shader that inverts colors, as a "proof of concept"

1123

Archive / Re: Kimera Problems

« on: 2009-03-30 12:35:49 »

from what i can tell borde is a bit busy with school work and other commitments i have a copy of the source if that would help, i doubt he would mind if you squashed a couple of bugs solong as you credit him for the majority of the work.

I could take a look at it
PM me or post a link to the source here and I'll see what I can do.

1124

Archive / Re: Kimera Problems

« on: 2009-03-30 01:25:01 »

Looks like Kimera can't set the shade mode properly (Modified version is flat shaded, original is smooth)

Very technical information follows;

After the polygon data in the .p file follows a section of 100-byte sized chunks, at offsets 8 and 12 you have two dwords that enable/disable all sorts of effects, among those smooth shading. If this information is missing or zero it will (apparently) revert to flat shading.

If Borde is still around I could help him implement some of these effects in Kimera

1125

Troubleshooting / Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

« on: 2009-03-29 11:44:36 »

Oh I'm not saying the in-game viewport (visible area) should be made bigger, the "internal" resolution would still be 1280x960 (with high-res patch) but the final output can be scaled and/or stretched.

That said, you *can* make the visible area bigger aswell, but that would lead to more glitches as MrAdults pointed out. (The game was never meant to be widescreen, after all)