Messages

1

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

« on: 2009-09-12 13:54:51 »

Did you change the driver's settings? they are in a file. You can choose what resolution to use, and if you want it on  window, or fullscreen, if you dont' mind editing a text file

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

« on: 2009-08-11 01:51:31 »

gigaherz: The source is technically available on request, but not in a form that compiles directly (partly because of some sensitive stuff, partly because I don't want to see any modified clones released). Oh and to be honest, "porting" it to D3D is just a massive waste of time, OpenGL is superior in every single way.

I fail to see any superiority in ogl, but I'd rather not start a war here. :p
If you prefer not to share the src, or can't, it's ok. All I wanted was something "fun" to do this week, never pretended to make anything useful out of it anyhow. :p
Hell the way I am, even if you did share the src, I'd probably never get it working anyhow. I tend to get bored as soon as I get stuck somewhere for more than a few minutes.

As for releasing modified clones... well I'm rly not that kind of person, but you wouldn't know. All I did around here was some tiny little contribution to qgears (when it was still meant to be a ff7.exe replacement and not a generic engine :p)

Anyhow all I'm/was interested in would be the how to interface with ff7 engine, and decode/parse the file formats. If that's where the sensitive stuff is, and lacking it would make me do too much reverse-engineering work to recreate it, then nevermind. I don't have the patience to do reverse-engineering work myself.

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

« on: 2009-08-10 22:00:39 »

Omfg..... some dude asks about ogl vs dx, and WE END UP IN A VISTA VS XP VS LINUX WAR! Xd

I know ppl who used linux, then tried vista and decided it was better.
I know ppl who used xp, then tried vista and hated it so much they switched to linux.
I know ppl who used xp, tried vista but couldnt' get usedto it, then went back to xp, but finally decided to try vista again and they realizedi t's not rly so bad at all.

I have been using Vista x64 for over 2 years and what I have to say is:
 - It does take more HDD space than XP, but with over 1.5Tb of HDD space in my pc, I don't care.
 - It does use more RAM than XP, but given I have 6Gb in my pc, I don't care.
 - Some apps and games do fail to work with Vista, but in MOST of the cases it's because those apps use the API calls in ways which weren't supposed to work, and which Vista fixed.
 - Many devices from before vista was released don't have x64 drivers. I had to buy a new scanner, and new printer, and new webcam, but  I can't really complain, given they all were over 10 years old. I think the money I spent on them was already worth it years before I got the new PC with Vista on it.

On a side note: there are some benchmarks of xp vs vista vs win7, and in cheap/old PCs, win7 wins over vista, and gets really close to XP, beating it sometimes. Microsoft just forgot some of their users would want to use Vista in low-end (or old) computers.

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

« on: 2009-08-10 21:39:39 »

Hey XP is about to be 2 generations old... time to move on ppl... :p

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

« on: 2009-08-10 21:34:34 »

Hm... that's one of those questions that could start a 1000-page flamewar, so I will try to write a reply without getting either side "insulted"... :p

This is just a very rough list of what I think are the 4 major points of each API:

Opengl:
 - Crossplatform
 - C-based functional API
 - Up to 3.0, still keeps compatibility with almost every feature of the original OpenGL (3.1 drops some).
 - Extension support allows to create new features without needing a new API version.

Direct3D:
 - Windows-Only
 - COM-based Object-oriented API
 - Each new version of D3D has its own interfaces, meaning that while it loses the source code compatibility, you dont' have any "clutter" from deprecated stuff
 - The feature set is fixed on each version of Direct3D. (In d3d9 there was a capabilities list, but since Direct3D10, Microsoft dropped that design and in D3D11, replaced it with "feature levels", so a level "11_0" device requires all features of d3d11, where a "9_0" device only requires direct3d 9.0 features)

As you might see, each one has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Personally, I think OpenGL is rather "messy", but I also think COM adds a bit too much code clutter which could be avoided.
I prefer Direct3D mostly because it seems a lot more organized. And it's clearly documented what you can do, and how to do it,
where openGL is more "free-form", and the optimal code path depends a lot on hardware, drivers, and operating system.

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

« on: 2009-08-10 19:41:26 »

Basically just the same benefits you get from having an OpenGL driver, except I kinda hate ogl myself. Also just like you can replace the models in the game itself, it should be possible to add "extras" by analyzing calls, crc'ing data, etc. Just a bit like how some emulators let you replace textures on the fly.

In any case, it's not about the benefits. More like I like to "prove" myself I can do something, when I believe I might be able to.

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

« on: 2009-08-10 18:27:27 »

Hi people,

I'm not in the mood to read through 45 pages of replies so I'll jsut ask here: Is there any chance at getting the source for these drivers, or at least some documentation on the interface?
I'm just interested in playing with it, specifically I'd like to try making a Direct3d10/11 version of the driver.

8

Archive / Re: Aeris model wip

« on: 2009-07-15 01:49:37 »

Hello people, hadn't been around here for ages...

Just my opinion but, shouldn't her... ankles be around the same line as the neck (when seen from the side), right now it seems like she's losing balance and gonna fall backwards any moment... makes me feel kind of dizzy looking at it. :/

9

Completely Unrelated / Re: Ban's are Useless...

« on: 2007-06-15 17:59:13 »

That's the one of the saddest attempts at drawing attention I have ever seen... actually it's just as sad as lots others, so he doesn't even get a prize for being the saddest one.

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Q-Gears / Re: Anyone want to write a PSX file extractor?

« on: 2007-06-05 21:07:51 »

hmmm...
Why to reinvent a bicycle?
Those of you, who are interested in mode2 files grabber - look in Q-Gears SVN q-gears/trunk/src/utils/moviedump/moviedump.cc - an utility to dump ff7 movies from image - for making it work with CD-ROM it's just enough to replace fstream iF calls with appropriate calls for reading sector of CD-ROM.

My extractor doesn't do any conversion so the output is a plain STR file.
I don't know if this is correct, and I can't check, because none of the psx movie players I found in internet play any of the movies in ff7.

I wonder why you doesn't just check MOV files with Q-Gears but searching closed-source players to check?
I see, that there are only a few people, that are interested in progress of Q-Gears, and these people know, that movies are working in Q-Gears, ADPCM sound is working too, and there actually _is_ utilities in utils directory, which makes life easier. There are so many things that need to be done on engine - battle module, intro, ... But I see - no one wants to write something new - you just reinvent your bicycles...

halkun, sorry, that I don't modify moviedump yet - me & Zidane are reverse-engeneering AKAO format, and there is some progress on it.

heh, you see, I'm selectively lazy. I can spend hours coding something "new" (even if it has been done before), but when it comes to use other's code I get lazy. I don't know why, but the effort of understanding others' codes seems worse than just coding everything from scratch.

Also, there's many reasons to reinvent a bicycle: it could have a poorly designed frame, the wheels could be of wrong sizes, the handler could be uncomfortable, the pedals could make it harder than necessary... same with software.

"It already works" isn't a reason not to improve it. And sometimes starting from scratch is the better way to improve things.

From what I said before, you'll notice I prefer to use some closed-source player than taking the time to make the qgears code load the videos for me.

Anyway, I'm busy ATM, exams time.

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Q-Gears / Re: Anyone want to write a PSX file extractor?

« on: 2007-06-02 21:59:53 »

While testing the MOV file extraction (it seems only MOVs have form2 sectors), I compared my output with the one given by windows and noticed something weird: either windows or the driver "convert" the files with form2 sectors so they include a RIFF CDXA header, and the data contents as raw sectors.
That means that, for a STR player to read the sectors correctly it must be aware of that "special" format.

My extractor doesn't do any conversion so the output is a plain STR file.
I don't know if this is correct, and I can't check, because none of the psx movie players I found in internet play any of the movies in ff7.

EDIT: I just found a better version of PSmplay that does play all the ff7 movies as windows gives them, but fails to play my "raw mov"s.
Still, I don't know if my files are correct or not, because all the pc programs could assume the format given by windows, and not support raw form2 data in a video.

EDIT: I always used the same source drive, so I never noticed the program had this drive letter hardcoded (even if you used a diff letter in the cmdline)!
as I suppose you won't want to change your drive letters to V:, I'll upload a new build in a few mins.

http://www.uploading.com/en/files/LP490OIB/CdExtractor.zip.html

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Q-Gears / Re: Anyone want to write a PSX file extractor?

« on: 2007-06-02 14:21:56 »

I'm not sure if this forum marks modified messages as "new", but in any case, bumping it up.

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Q-Gears / Re: Anyone want to write a PSX file extractor?

« on: 2007-06-01 17:24:42 »

The problem is most CD-ROMs assume that there is error-correction data throughout the disk, and when it lands on a "mode 2" sector, can't read the data because the error-correction has been "corrupted"

If you set the drive to read raw sectors, then you tell it you don't want correction, so you have to do the checking yourself, if you want to make sure the sectors are right.

Right now I'm a bit busy, but I'll look at it later. I think I can do one, I'll just have to take a look at the ioctl api to see how can I read raw 2352-byte sectors from the disc, once I know that it should be easy

EDIT: Status update:

I managed to have working raw reading code using windows ioctl calls, and I can detect if a specific sector is form1 or form2, so right now I can read anything, once I have the LBAs.

Next step is to add ISO9660 parsing code, so I can find the files.

EDIT2: Status update:

Listing works. I can see (printed the filenames to the stdout) the list of all the directories and files in the first ff7 cd (recursively).

Next step: sleep.

Next step(2): Extracting (copying) files (if the destination file doesn't exist).

EDIT3: Status update:

Extraction seems to work, but I have no way to play the videos so I can't test them.

Right now the program is a console app, so the next step would be adding a small window with a progressbar, once I know extraction works.

Beta build: http://www.uploading.com/en/files/FU8C5L0Y/CdExtractor.zip.html

If anyone wants to test it, and tell me if the resulting files work.

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Q-Gears / Re: PS1ISO Utility <-- find those pesky files!

« on: 2007-05-30 19:46:39 »

I uploaded the battle stage viewer to uploading.com... it works well... xcept of the amount of ads in the download pages.

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Q-Gears / Re: Battle Environments

« on: 2007-05-30 19:22:55 »

I got home and tried and the statically linked runtime only makes it grow from 14k to 104k... o_O I suppose they improved the linker since the last time I tried.

http://www.uploading.com/files/4SEB5810/StageView.rar.html

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Q-Gears / Re: Battle Environments

« on: 2007-05-30 11:24:57 »

Silly question why did you not compile to a binary instead of a managed executable?  You can last I checked and this does make a BIG binary file but I really don't find having to install the insepid .NET framework and library files particularly .. fun.  I did it once. That's why I have changed all my programs to compile without run time libraries instead of 30 different DLL's and support libraries.

Cyb

It's a native program, not managed at all. and you don't need the framework to run it, only The VC++ runtime libraries (microsoft made the libs incompatible for some reason).

I could have built it using static libraries, but as you said, the executable is too big, and the vc runtime is only a small (<3mb) download you only do once.

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Q-Gears / Re: Battle Environments

« on: 2007-05-29 17:33:06 »

Ah sorry you need the vs2005 sp1 runtimes

some site with links:
http://blogs.msdn.com/nikolad/archive/2007/04/23/vs2005-sp1-version-of-visual-c-redistributable-package-is-available-for-download.aspx

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Q-Gears / Re: PS1ISO Utility <-- find those pesky files!

« on: 2007-05-28 23:28:03 »

That hosting site doesn't allow exes, so he changes the extension of the setup from exe to jpg, then rared it. You only need to extract that "jpg" andchange the extension to .exe
If you can't see the extension, change the folder options to show extensions for known file types.

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Q-Gears / Re: Battle Environments

« on: 2007-05-28 20:50:51 »

Okay, it was hard-ish, but I managed to build the scene viewer with vs2005 and glut32... the biggest problem was the open() call needed O_BINARY.
And also my card seems to have problems with single-buffer drawing, so I had to chagne it to double-buffered. :p

So in case anyone wants it: http://www.uploading.com/files/6YH8EF4Y/StageView.rar.html

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Q-Gears / Re: Q-Gears 0.13 Windows Installer is here!

« on: 2007-05-28 18:08:43 »

z=back/cancel
x=ok

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Q-Gears / Re: Q-Gears 0.13 Windows Installer is here!

« on: 2007-05-25 18:48:52 »

If the system file copies over, but the .mov copy fails that means that the disk is an original.

How does that make it an original? The disc "protection" in the PSX discs is a region code that can't be read or written in a pc drive (I don't know the exact way it works), so you can't use that to check if it's an original disc. The 'problem' with the movies is only they use a special sector format, andthat format CAN be copied perfectly (else you wouldn't be able to create VideoCDs with your burner!).
We simply can't detect if a disc is original or not... we can't even detect if it's a real disc or a raw image mounted in a virtual drive... so we can just add the restriction to the usage license that only original discs (or legal backups of originals) can be used with it, and trust no one uses it illegally.

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Q-Gears / Re: Q-Gears 0.13 Windows Installer is here!

« on: 2007-05-24 08:19:31 »

I tried the installer in my pc (WinXP SP2) and it installed and uninstalled fine., and I could play through the implemented script right. So I suppose that means it works. :p

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Q-Gears / Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)

« on: 2007-05-23 22:54:15 »

Actually it IS a standard cdrom. FF7, just like VideoCD movies and other multimedia cdrom-based formats, uses Mode2 Form2 sectors to story non-critical data (movie frames) that won't break the game if they get corrupted. Mode2 sectors were introduced with the CDROM/XA specification.

The problem is, normal cdrom parsers just assume all the sectors use the same format, and get confused when they see a mode2 form2 sector. So you need a program (and file format for image dumps) that supports raw sectors.

While copying the movies to the disk will be faster and probably more compatible, there's always the option to link with cdr plugins for ps1 emulators, or use opensource code from one (or more) of them.

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Q-Gears / Re: Compiling with Visual Studio 2005

« on: 2007-04-04 08:57:42 »

Nice... I have been too busy/lazy to maintain them lately.

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Q-Gears / Re: Q-Gears 0.12

« on: 2007-03-30 21:38:59 »

macosx has a gcc port... not sure about the autotools