Author Topic: WIP - battle scene mods!  (Read 12705 times)

Timu Sumisu

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WIP - battle scene mods!
« on: 2009-07-08 00:19:52 »
I've spoken about it before, and i finally got around to ripping out a battle scene.



epicing it out + hi resolution textures and inserting back into game is imminent.

if anyone has any reference art or conceptual art that was used for any battle scenes it'd b nice to see, as a lot of things in the scene are kind of vague and i'm not sure what everything is :P

EDIT:

okay before i start making a high poly model of this, i need some suggestions/ input.



the flat ground has a bajillion polies in it... n it makes me wonder if they're for something... i would've just made one flat square... cuz thats all it is. any ides on this?


in this shot we see on the edges of the main area (not the sky ring) these shadowy areas, with.. building side? windows? chunks of train? they're only in the middle of each side, and i have no idea what they are supposed to be. I'm not quite sure how they look ingame.

wait, looking closer i can tell they're walls, with a wire along the middle, but the issue is, why are they only shown in some parts, and not entirely circling the battle scene? If somebody can grab me some ingame shots it'd be great (my ff7 isnt working atm, and i dont have a psx copy onhand)
« Last Edit: 2009-07-08 00:38:37 by timu sumisu »

Borde

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #1 on: 2009-07-08 01:14:13 »
Those extra polygons are there to add pre-calculated lighting to the scene. The floor is tiled and each tile has a different tone of white so when it gets textured, texels are darkened on the dark places.

Timu Sumisu

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #2 on: 2009-07-08 01:14:43 »
long story short, do i need to keep em?

obesebear

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #3 on: 2009-07-08 01:41:42 »
If they are only for shadows, Aali mentioned something about trying to get true lighting into battle.  And since he's pretty much done everything he's said he will, I would count on him being able to get lighted battle scenes.

I say go ahead and make your big square :-)

nfitc1

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #4 on: 2009-07-08 01:54:59 »
Very nice! Do you have any documentation on how and where these scenes are stored? Are they the files in battle.lgp?
I'm still playing with ideas myself...
« Last Edit: 2009-07-08 01:56:50 by NFITC1 »

Timu Sumisu

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #5 on: 2009-07-08 02:01:16 »
they're in battle lgp, this one is ocaa, and all the battle scenes are close to it.

Prince Lex

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #6 on: 2009-07-08 02:03:13 »
Are there limits to what you can do to these? Could you, say, replace them with something completely different if you wanted to? Do things like filesize, area size, etc matter when placing them back in?

Timu Sumisu

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #7 on: 2009-07-08 02:04:30 »
:p i'll tell you when i try and get it working

EDIT:

redid the texture for the gorund and made a curb... its not great, and might completely redo it, but a taste of what can be done.

« Last Edit: 2009-07-08 03:28:17 by timu sumisu »

Izban

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #8 on: 2009-07-08 04:56:13 »
as far as i can tell there just like any other battle model in the game so all the same rules apply however whats the point in makeing them possitively huge when you really only get to see a little bit in battle due to the lake of being able to edit camera data at this stage

nfitc1

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #9 on: 2009-07-08 05:05:52 »
as far as i can tell there just like any other battle model in the game so all the same rules apply however whats the point in makeing them possitively huge when you really only get to see a little bit in battle due to the lake of being able to edit camera data at this stage

Yeah. I vote that someone study those camdatx.bin files and find timings for those camera positions. They don't look GZipped or LZSed so they're probably raw something. They look indexed, but I see a lot of 801Ah's floating around in them.

Timu Sumisu

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #10 on: 2009-07-08 05:08:13 »
the main purpose of this is to increase poly count of battle scenes, up the texture resolution. as for the camera, i dont really mind how it moves or what it does... i'd rather be able to modify the character animations.

Covarr

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #11 on: 2009-07-08 05:22:37 »
That ground is ugly as sin, but it's a good example of the potential of a project like this. I hadn't thought about how blocky the old battle scene textures were until now.

Izban

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #12 on: 2009-07-08 05:24:19 »
someone may or may not be working on that or thats the hinti got no pointing any fingers *cough*Borde*cough* but really if you can read them with some time and alot of hex editing you can do it **da being the files you have to play with also on qhimmwiki FF7 there is a whole code perty much devoted to battle animation however the difficulty lyes in the player character battle animation because its slightly different to the regular way of doing it.

there are 6 people to consult about battle animations due to the face each have got them working outside FF7 to varying degrees
Seb
Borde
Alhexx
L.Spiro
Akari
Qhimm << the man himself

i vote character animations first then cam data

Hellbringer616

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #13 on: 2009-07-08 06:27:42 »
I myself like the floor Coverr, only issue i see is the tears, But i think thats from blender because they aren't ingame.

BlitzNCS

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #14 on: 2009-07-08 17:09:50 »
to become even close to a "remake" in my mind, it'd have to at least have new battle/field animations which include model deforming, instead of the awful "model part" skeleton system thing square did for FF7. don't know how easy that would be to accomplish, if possible at all. but yeah. that and some voice acting maybe. *coughFF7voicecough* :-P
but yeah, even if we could get some new animations in there, i doubt there'd be any way to get 'em to deform the model, unless a completely new bone system was introduced. but then where would that be stored? arrgh im confusing myself :|

Kudistos Megistos

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #15 on: 2009-07-08 17:16:20 »
to become even close to a "remake" in my mind, it'd have to at least have new battle/field animations which include model deforming, instead of the awful "model part" skeleton system thing square did for FF7. don't know how easy that would be to accomplish, if possible at all. but yeah. that and some voice acting maybe. *coughFF7voicecough* :-P
but yeah, even if we could get some new animations in there, i doubt there'd be any way to get 'em to deform the model, unless a completely new bone system was introduced. but then where would that be stored? arrgh im confusing myself :|

And us chibi lovers still have to put up with blocky field models  :|

Well, at least they have a retro charm  :-)

BlitzNCS

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #16 on: 2009-07-08 17:21:43 »
yeah, you're actually right, voices would kinda suck without lip syncing, which would require an insane amount of animation, and probably scripting too.

also, its not too hard to make battle models chibi. i've done it before with sephiroth, one of the hardest to mod imo and i expected it to be absolutely rubbish, but i was actually quite pleased with the results. all it takes is an hour here and there for each character of resizing crap.

Kudistos Megistos

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #17 on: 2009-07-08 17:29:20 »
also, its not too hard to make battle models chibi. i've done it before with sephiroth, one of the hardest to mod imo and i expected it to be absolutely rubbish, but i was actually quite pleased with the results. all it takes is an hour here and there for each character of resizing crap.

Well, that'll work for field models that have battle equivalents, but there's still the issue of the NPCs   :?

yeah, you're actually right, voices would kinda suck without lip syncing, which would require an insane amount of animation, and probably scripting too.

Not to mention that doing voices one of the most time-consuming things and is a talent rather than a skill, so (with no offence intended to those working on the project) the chances of us being able to have professional quality voiceovers is low. Meh, I prefer RPGs without voices ayway.

Hellbringer616

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #18 on: 2009-07-08 17:30:50 »
Please... No battle Chibi's @.@

Kudistos Megistos

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #19 on: 2009-07-08 17:32:44 »
Please... No battle Chibi's @.@

We were talking about using the battle models to turn into chibis for the field; there are no plans to have chibi battle models  :lol:

Then again... :-P

BlitzNCS

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #20 on: 2009-07-08 17:37:38 »
OMG

CHIBI BATTLE MODELS!?
just like FFIX!

...i might actually try that at some point
xD

Kudistos Megistos

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #21 on: 2009-07-08 18:09:11 »
Quote
yeah, you're actually right, voices would kinda suck without lip syncing, which would require an insane amount of animation, and probably scripting too.
Yeah voices wouldn't just be hard to do. It would ruin the Final Fantasy feeling  :-P In the old Final Fantasies the text didn't display the emotion of the characters as much as the music did. A great example in FF7 is when you are in the slums for example, or when you are on the world map after meteor has come. The slum music has a ghetto feel to it, while the world map after the comet was just despair. Just as a picture can tell a 1000 words. The music in this case describes how to characters are feeling. Therefore if anything should be done to the sound, it would have to be better music. (Not midi). Maybe throw in some nice remixes...

My feelings exactly; the music is really what makes this game special. Unfortunately, it's something else that's hard to upgrade. And the problem with remixes is that they are often designed as stand-alone compositions rather than background music and tend to be either techno or rock (which just don't it into the game). If anyone has an orchestra lying around, that would be great  :-D

For the moment, we'll have to make do with the mp3s from the OST, the few orchestrated or otherwise improved tracks done by Uematsu himself and the few fan remixes that use a classical style.

DarkVenomandCarnage

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #22 on: 2009-07-09 01:48:15 »
Overall... I think that the new battlefields might be cool!

ooc: Kudistos, Final Fantim did a Remastered version of the FFVII Soundtrack.

Timu Sumisu

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Re: WIP - battle scene mods!
« Reply #23 on: 2009-07-10 01:05:16 »
oh my what happened to this thread... anyhow most of the work for this kind of project is retexturing (no upscaling!) and a small degree of remodeling, depending on the background. It would be a big specific from scene to scene, but this one, the only things that could do for some adjustment are objects like the pipes and wires, and the two tank like objects on the side, so to all that are interested, brush on on your texturing skills!