Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - ficedula

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 ... 58
1
FF7 Tools / Re: Question about textures
« on: 2023-10-25 22:29:12 »
Correct. Both field and battle models use vertex colours for almost everything, with a very few textures used for (usually) eyes and mouth.

Not sure what the current easiest option is for editing the models - whether to use an editor like Kimera on the models directly, or export into Blender and do the edits there.

2
@ficedula Nice to see you shrug my concerns off like that. :D
Again, cool project, cheers for possibilities!

Eh, I'm saying it's fairly straightforward once the battle engine's already implemented in single player. Which is still not anywhere near done! So don't expect anything like that next week :)

Well, first of all, it's an honor having you back in the scene :) Welcome back! I'll be really happy if you could join us on Discord so we can get in touch more often. I truly think this project is revolutionary, and I'm happy to see someone finally kickstarting it. We've had many times the idea to do so as well, but the only challenge I foresee is how to handle the likely event SE would DMCA back. How are you going to handle this situation eventually? Have you already thought of a plan or have you got some kind of whitelisting on their own side?

Congratulations again, looking forward for this project and to get in touch with you!

Thanks! Well, nothing stopping SE from DMCAing the project, but I get the impression they care more about the remake than the original release. There's a lot of mods distributing large chunks of the original game and they don't seem to care a lot (possibly because in general the modding community is fairly good about not supporting pirated copies where possible?), so hopefully the same applies here.

In any case - the source is fully available on github, so if anybody wants to keep a copy in case github get a DMCA notice and take it down, please do...

Progress in the past few days:

-Fixed transparency in field models (so, save points render correctly now)
-Improved BG scrolling
-Added basic plugin support. Not going to work too much on this until somebody actually has a mod they want to port over, but: replacement files, background replacement, and dialog events are supported. Quick hacked up plugin to insert hi res backgrounds:

https://braver.ficedula.co.uk/hiresbg.jpg

3
Huge? Eh, once the battle engine is fully done (and that's a fair bit of work!), it wouldn't be a horrible amount of work to add in something like that since it's almost entirely reusing the existing code for damage calculations, animations, and so on. Not anywhere near that yet, though!

I'd've thought the bigger problem with PvP is that the FF7 battle engine isn't balanced at all for PvP - i.e. players often have abilities that do massive amounts of damage because monsters aren't capped at 9999HP. So spells and limits that would just take off 10% of a boss monsters HP will kill a player outright. Unless you took the simple approach of just "multiply everybody's HP by 10" or something...

4
Been a long time since I released anything, but I got the FF7 bug again a while ago, so here - have Braver.

Quoting from the readme:

Quote
Braver is a from scratch reimplemented game engine for the original (1997/8) FF7 PC release - although it should run with the more modern Steam re-release since that changes very little. The idea is to run the original game compatibly, from the original game files where possible, but also provide an easily moddable/hackable engine for adding extra functionality.

Yes, another engine implementation. Hopefully it won't peter out and die, I'm aware I'm not the first to try this, but I am releasing the code https://github.com/ficed/Braver so everything's available for people to look at regardless.

How close is it to done? NOT AT ALL. It's loading more field locations than I expected, but that just means you can play through from the opening to, like, the train scenes after the first reactor explosion. (And maybe further, but I haven't tested further yet!). Most locations will have graphical glitches, the battle engine is very incomplete and so on. But you can technically play a non-zero amount of the game and maybe see the possibilities. Example field location (few more screenshots on the website linked above):



Since this is a first release there is every chance I've missed something obvious and it will crash, not load, etc. on some (many? most?) PCs. However I did do the bare minimum, i.e. tested it loads on at least *one* PC other than my development box...

What's the immediate plans? Not going to promise anything, because I'm mostly writing this for fun. But some things that are definitely on my list to think about:

  • Continue working through the field locations and fixing/implementing functionality that stops the locations from working at all
  • Look at loading some of the simpler mods, at least - Braver will happily run in 2K resolution, but you can't yet take advantage of mods with higher quality assets
  • Look at finishing networking support. I've had a few ideas which are partially implemented; one was to allow a multiplayer mode where each player is assigned control of certain party members ... so you could maybe play through FF7 with three players, each controlling one character in battle. I've written the basic code to synchronise the game state over the network, but it's probably broken because I haven't been keeping it up to date as I add new functionality in. Might try and bring that up to date.

What can anyone else do right now? Well, not loads, but...

  • Confirm whether it does, or doesn't, work on their PC at all. As mentioned, very likely I've screwed something up in this first alpha release.
  • I know there's a lot of glitches in the early field locations (although they are playable ... more or less). If someone wanted to make a definitive list of the places where Braver is getting things wrong in those first few locations (with screenshots/video clips comparing to FF7 official) that would be useful as a reference/to-do list for "things that still need work"

5
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-12-12 06:49:19 »


Can't start it either.

Kaldarasha: I've got that error on my PC, when I had FF7.exe set to run in compatibility mode. In order for 7H to work when that is set, I have to run 7H as an administrator - then it's able to launch ff7 correctly. Worth trying...

What's the purpose of having a delay on a hex patch? I don't know, so I'm wanting to learn something here :)

Tsunamix asked for it ... I'm guessing the point is that if you want to patch something that's built into the exe, you don't need a delay; but if you want to patch some data that's either loaded from file, or calculated when the game starts, you need to wait until after the game has actually loaded/calculated it. If you load your patch immediately, it gets overwritten when the game does load/calculate its own data...


@Tsunamix: Hm, thanks for the log, but no error messages :/ I'll have to alter debug mode to log more information...

6
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-12-11 20:59:47 »
Run 7H in debug mode then (right click on the Launch button), and send me the debug log it produces. Hopefully it will have enough information to track down the crash.

7
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-12-11 19:36:19 »
What's the contents of the hex file you're using?

8
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-12-11 14:44:16 »
New release: v1.55

http://www.ficedula.co.uk/7thHeaven/7H_1.55.zip

Fix: IROs with too many folders/files in them, or loading too many mods, might cause the game not to launch
Fix: LGP files >2GB may now work with 7H

New: Hex patches can be applied delayed. Add a line to the hex patch file like:

"Delay = 10000"

to apply it 10 seconds after the game starts

9
Mm, 7H can also apply hex patches, but doesn't (currently) support the delay option. That would be really quite easy to add, though. I'll put an update up later today that adds that in.

(EDIT: Done)

10
Support / Re: Sound effects with Ultrasound
« on: 2016-12-10 13:51:36 »
Another problem you will encounter is that Ultrasound can only replace around 40 files, if you use more than it's very likely that the program crashes. I don't know if Ficedula has fixed it. I actually planed to outsource the entire sound files and give them as good as I can proper names.

Didn't actually know that - if you have a set of files that causes crash, that would be good to look at...

11
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-11-27 10:37:29 »
Quote
It seems 7H does not load the kernel from a folder triggered by a variable. It does load the kernel from a base folder that is always being loaded, but when I set a variable and all the other folders like battle.lgp and char.lgp switch the kernel is not switched.

What sort of variable - a config variable, or a runtime variable (like PPV)?

If the latter - then that won't work, no. FF7 loads the kernel files when it starts and doesn't reload them afterwards, so switching folders doesn't make any difference - FF7 isn't even trying to load the files. Field and battle files are loaded every time you change location / enter a battle so 7H can switch them out and have it take effect.

12
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-11-04 21:16:47 »
Once I get a chance to work on the bug, sure ... afraid I haven't had a chance to do it yet. But I think it should definitely be possible to remove the limits.

13
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-10-29 10:57:53 »
I had done that using CFF explorer, and while it does seem to fix FF7.exe with larger lgp files it doesn't help 7thHeaven.exe with both large iros and large lgp files. It is a problem with versions after 1.5 since almost all the previous versions could handle the large lgp and iros.

It's not directly due to the size of the iros - it's how many are loaded and how complex they are. If you had an IRO with the same amount of files, and the same amount of custom folders in it, it wouldn't work even if it was only 10MB in size (and an IRO with 6GB of movies in it would probably work fine if it didn't contain many files or customer folders).

14
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-10-23 19:53:32 »
The error message is fairly helpful, so I have an idea about what's causing it - just don't know exactly how I'll fix it. Will require some digging through the source code, but it will definitely be fixable, just depends how much needs changing to cope.

15
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-10-05 16:55:45 »
I would love to get the source code for it, i'd like to redisign it myself even just for personal use

It is available: https://bitbucket.org/ficedula/7h/overview

Can you and ficedula continue to update the app?

So, yes.

16
7th Heaven / Re: Problem with 7thHeaven
« on: 2016-10-02 15:33:01 »
1.54 fixes both of these issues, thanks for the report. (Although there's no other fixes so no need to upgrade from 1.52 if that's working fine).

17
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-10-02 15:31:55 »
Version 1.54:  http://www.ficedula.co.uk/7thHeaven/7H_1.54.zip

-Fix crash when loading preview images
-Fix crash when trying to edit OpenGL driver config
-Move auto update to new server

Once you've downloaded 1.54 the auto update will work again, but older versions won't update to 1.54 I'm afraid.



Would there be any way for the compatibility and auto update features to recognize from manual downloads/imports?

Should be possible, I'll see what I can do.

Quote
I believe any. If it doesn't establish connection with the first, it's supposed to switch to the second. I asked for this feature because of monthly bandwidth issues.

I'm having trouble reproducing this - because I'm having trouble downloading any mods at the moment (not just with the new version of 7H, same with the old one) - are all the accounts currently over their limits...?

18
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.53)
« on: 2016-10-01 08:53:44 »
Great, guess we'll need to sort out auto-updates to deal with the manual downloads being flagged.

Could you look into the memory usage during downloads? It's possible that the larger downloads are freezing for some users because the memory usage reaches too high of an amount before finishing.

Sure, is that on any downloads, just Mega, just Google Drive, ...?

19
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.52)
« on: 2016-09-29 19:49:53 »
Hm :/ It's not being blocked due to being a downloaded file, is it? If you right click on the 7thHeaven.exe file and choose Properties, does it say at the bottom of the properties that it's blocked (& give you the option to unblock it)?

Can anyone else confirm?

20
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7PC] Mod manager - 7thHeaven (v1.52)
« on: 2016-09-29 19:31:54 »
Nobody's told me the test version I compiled earlier this week worked ... but nobody's said it didn't work either, so.

http://www.ficedula.co.uk/7H_1.53.zip

This only contains a few bug fixes, specifically;

-7H won't crash out when loading if the settings or library file is corrupt
-7H won't crash if the ff7.exe is missing / not found, or if permission is denied trying to run it

This update won't show up via the auto update mechanism since I don't have access to Iros' mega account; perhaps longer term, the auto update mechanism should be changed. For now, you'll have to download it manually.

If 7H is working fine for you - there's probably no point applying this update, unless you feel like testing it out. Might be worthwhile using this version if you're setting up from scratch, though, since it'll behave a bit better if you configure things incorrectly.

21
Troubleshooting / Re: Help with XML code
« on: 2016-09-29 06:38:42 »
Okay well the original problem is solved but instead of making a new post this comes under the same category.

Can i have a separate xml file that is not in the root folder?
Ultrasound uses many xmls and right now they have to all be in the root.
I CAN live with this but would be easier for convenience sake.

No, that isn't possible right now. It's more likely that I'll change the Ultrasound plugin in a future version, than change the way 7H works.

22
Repository is public, anyone should be able to pull from it?

The dependencies are (now) all specified as nuget packages, so anything that supports nuget should be fine.

23
We should make a few development threads for 7th Heaven. The normal Release thread, an FAQ (only for tech related issues) and a roadmap with a global aim, subaims and the milestones to reach every aim, this would help new interested people to claim in into the development process more easily.

Sure, go for it.

If anybody has some time, I have a test version at: http://www.ficedula.co.uk/7H_1.52_test.zip

This doesn't have any new features over the last 1.52 release, but if it works (works for me, so hopefully it's good...) then it'll confirm that I've got all the dependencies working correctly - I've had to upgrade some packages and correct some half-complete changes to get it compiling.

24
Quote
This was made in .NET right?

Yes, it's all in .NET
The source is up at:  https://bitbucket.org/ficedula/7h/overview

@EQ2Alyza: If you're able to keep track of outstanding issues and let us know what's a confirmed bug and needs fixing that would be extremely helpful.

25
FF7 Tools / Re: [FF7] HRC Resizer
« on: 2016-01-22 17:49:17 »
I would want to be able to type them in. It would need to load the hrc to verify how many and what bones.

The only issue, like kaldarasha was saying, is that some of the models, like the children, use animations that adults use due to having the same number of bones. However, I think that problem can be bypassed by not adjusting bone lengths too severely

More specific, please.

Do you envisage loading a HRC, being presented with a grid showing all the bones with their current lengths, and just moving down the grid and applying an adjustment to each one? Or some other interface?

Would you overtype the current length, or would you want to type in an adjustment (+2.4, -0.45, ...) ? Would you need the ability to apply an adjustment to a whole bunch of bones at once? If you adjust a parent bone, should it apply any changes to the child bones at all, or leave them unchanged?

What you are doing is entirely different from my resizing method (which I have completed since 2 years or so). I have changed the scale the model would have in a certain field within the flevel.lgp. You change the size a model will have globally in any field. Never the less both ways create a big problem: the models aren't placed on the walkmesh correctly and will standing through it.

Sadly the only realistic solution to compensate that is to change all animations to the new high, and even then there are animations which hardly can be corrected because they have a full move a scene (a MP animation springs in my mind).
Here what I had done for Cloud so far:
https://mega.nz/#!WYtR1Y4A!MMXit515P2WEYQEVf_Qp_mQ7x7DQHXbwWT5foam7ax0

This is a tricky task because some models get a body correction trough the animation (see Tifa and Aerith). I think it would be clever to normalize the leg bones and changing the other bones by the percentage the upper leg bone has grown.


I actually need a tool which can edit the animation files itself because it would be much better if I could convert an animation with 24 bones to 40 bones. The new bones doesn't even need to be animated.But  this way we could unify all human animations and never getting trouble anymore if we change a model with a different bone number.

Just adding new not-actually-doing-anything bone entries to the animation files should be pretty easy. Fundamentally it's basically just inserting a bunch of zero rotations into the file.

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 ... 58