Messages

101

FF7Voice / Re: FF7 Voices - assessing interest

« on: 2014-07-08 06:45:34 »

I think you should just focus on main character voices first only and NPC's till last would be more manageable and efficient.. Not sure if my voice will go with any character and I think my phone mic is better than my webcams would need to use noise removal software

Ironically, it's probably easier to do a lot of the background NPCs, because they often just have a couple of lines and don't really interact with the party, so you can record them independently without having to make it sound right in response to / alongside the party's dialogue.

But nobody's really interested in downloading a project that voices a bunch of the random NPCs and not the main characters

But before casting main characters, we're back to the question of who can direct the project - because without that, the project goes nowhere; and really you have to give that person final say on casting anyway.

102

FF7Voice / FF7 Voices - assessing interest

« on: 2014-07-07 20:05:20 »

So as per this topic there's some interest in reviving the FF7 Voices project, and I've coded up basic tools necessary for the project. But there's no point continuing unless there's sufficient interest for the project to actually get anywhere.

So are people interested? Probably most important other than, you know, people to actually voice characters, is somebody with the time, skills and interest to actually direct/manage the project ... I don't mind handling the technical programming aspects, but I have no audio experience.

103

FF7Voice / Re: Thoughts about reviving the project

« on: 2014-07-07 17:37:54 »

Unless I'm particularly unlucky, none of the examples I've checked has followed that pattern - you usually see one line of dialogue 'introducing' the question - which could be either Cloud or an NPC asking a question - then as part of the same dialogue screen, you've got the options. Whichever option you pick, it goes straight to the NPCs response as the next dialogue line - you don't see Cloud actually 'say' the chosen option in a new window of dialogue.

That's not impossible to deal with, but you probably do want to deal with it somehow.

104

FF7Voice / Re: Thoughts about reviving the project

« on: 2014-07-07 15:41:17 »

Not sure why it was set like that, but that problem has been fixed.

Cool, thanks.

Isn't it possible to check the text ID of the field instead of the text?

I've got this working at my end, so pending testing that's ready. The only obvious thing left to do on the tool would be to implement choices properly - but I'm thinking there's no point doing that until there's some indication the project has sufficient interest/support to actually happen. I may post a topic in Audio Mods to judge interest?

105

Releases / [Beta release] Ultrasound - sound effect replacement/addition mod

« on: 2014-07-06 18:18:53 »

A new topic seems to make sense to me so I can update post 1 with download links as and when.

So, Ultrasound v0.42: http://www.ficedula.co.uk/voices/Ultrasound_0_42.zip

Changes since v0.41:
-Added 7H plugin support

Changes since v0.4:
-Support for voicing choices on popup/selection

Changes since v0.3:
-OpenAL output
-OGG support
-Support selecting audio files based on party members

Changes since v0.2:

-Lower latency on sound playback
-Fix a few crashes
-Add Pan and Volume properties to sounds
-Add Ambient sounds, optionally looping


How to use the options:

See audio\Ultrasound.xml in the download But to go into detail:

Ambient sounds are sounds that are triggered to play not because FF7 was playing a sound effect, but because some variable in the game (so far - FieldID or PPV) changed.
Currently only one ambient sound is playing at a time - whenever the FieldID/PPV changes, Ultrasound checks its list of ambient sounds, and finds the first one whose conditions match. It stops any sound that's already playing, and then plays the new sound (if any!).

(The only kind-of exception so that is that if the new sound filename is the same as the old one, it just updates the existing sound with a new pan/volume - it doesn't actually stop and then start the same sound playing.)

So, for example;

  <Ambient FieldIDs="195" Loop="true">ultrasound\rain-heavy.mp3</Ambient>
  <Ambient FieldIDs="202" Loop="true" Volume="0.5">ultrasound\rain-heavy.mp3</Ambient>

  ...if FieldID is 195, it plays the rain-heavy file (on loop). When you go into FieldID 202 (which is indoors), it carrys on playing the same sound, but at 50% volume.
  If you need to set a pan, an attribute called Pan sets the panning; 0 = Full left, 1 = Full right, 0.5=Middle (default). It won't have any effect on stereo files though!

  You can set Volume on replacement sound effects, but Pan won't work - Ultrasound uses whatever pan FF7 has set on the sound instead.

106

Support / Re: [FF7] More than 750 sound effects?

« on: 2014-07-05 18:37:14 »

Ah, interesting - so separately from replacing sounds the game was playing, you'd also like to be able to trigger background sounds based on FieldID/PPV?

I'll see if I can add that in to the next version; pan and volume should certainly be in as well.

107

Support / Re: [FF7] More than 750 sound effects?

« on: 2014-07-05 09:33:46 »

Lol, does someone else played savegame piano? 

I have forgotten to mention that I need to set the sound direction and its volume.
I make some test later these day and will give you feedback.

FF7 does set a pan value against each sound; the program picks it up, just doesn't actually use it at the moment ... do you need to set a pan value yourself separately from whatever the game does?

By the way, if things go this way more and more, then we will need an Autostarter.exe which starts all the exe's for the game (I currently have 7th Heaven, DLPB's Launcher, Ultrasound and BorderlessWindow.exe).

Longer term this shouldn't be a massive issue; you can drop the DLL into the appropriate folder to have it autoload, and the DLL can launch the Ultrasound program if it's needed and not already running. I've just got it working manually at the moment because it's easier for me developing it.

108

Support / Re: [FF7] More than 750 sound effects?

« on: 2014-07-04 17:30:08 »

So, I'll hijack this topic as it is relevant.

http://www.ficedula.co.uk/voices/Ultrasound_0_20.zip

Same procedure as before: download, unzip, edit .config file to set up paths, go.

The audio\Ultrasound.xml file controls replacement sounds. If you list a sound ID in here, it's replaced; if you don't, FF7 plays it as per normal. As the file shows, you can list multiple files to replace an ID with, and then set what method the program uses to choose between them:

• Sequential: Cycles through the list in order (first time that ID is played, uses file 1, next time, uses file 2, ...
• Random: Picks a file at random each time
• Shuffle: Like random, but will play every file once before repeating a file (like shuffling a playlist)

I've coded the ability to restrict sounds based on FieldID and PPV, but that's not tested yet. This is definitely a beta that's not ready for wide use: the latency is bad, I suspect it only supports 44100Hz audio files (although should work with both MP3 & WAV), and so on. But it's ready for modders to try it and tell me what additional options it needs, I guess?

(Right now it intercepts most sounds in the game: sounds in the field, menu, and battle all seem to get captured. A few don't - like the battle swirl sound? I'm not sure why, that must get handled differently by FF7.)

Cheers


EDIT: FieldID and PPV filters seem to work; the syntax is;

    <Sound FieldIDs="194,195,196" PPVs="0,191">ultrasound\blip1.mp3</Sound>

If set, the file only triggers when the FieldID and/or PPV value matches those listed.

109

FF7Voice / Re: Thoughts about reviving the project

« on: 2014-07-04 10:26:46 »

Yeah, it's currently going by the text, but I've included the dialog IDs in the XML so I can switch over to using them once I've got that part working ... should be possible.

EDIT: And I've only just realised that - unlike some of the other project forums ; the FF7Voice forum is private, so it's not visible globally. Is it worth throwing an open topic onto one of the other forums to gather support / interest?

110

FF7Voice / Re: Thoughts about reviving the project

« on: 2014-07-04 06:31:22 »

I want a solution without doing to much edits to the flevel (I already have done this). The problem with it is that we don't have a tool to patch the flevel.lgp and every huge overhaul tends to use its own flevel. A program which works in the background looks for me as the best solution for it. I also think it is easier to set up as the partial broken sound system. As I have mentioned there are channels which kill other active channels (the alarm after you set the bomb disappear after the battle swirl sound). It looks like that they have accidental swapped the channel set (the first set of the channels kills all other active channels and the second set plays all channels fine along side. If this makes an sense to you).
The random sound is more interesting for the battle module, because there it is the only possibility to edit the battle script, for which we have neither a good tool nor do we understand it entirely (also NFITC1 is presumably the only one who could do it).

OK, that makes sense ... and yes, I definitely intend to implement it as a background process - it makes it easier to program, and if it also saves having to modify flevel (along with every other mod that wants to modify it...) that's a bonus.

So;

1) Allow replacing standard game sounds with an external version (possibly higher quality), and allow more than one replacement sound so the tool will select between them randomly.

2) Monitor certain variables (FieldID, PPV) and when particular variables are matched, start/stop playing a background sound effect.

Should be possible. I'll probably split it out from the Voices program though - it's not really related.

111

FF7Voice / Re: Thoughts about reviving the project

« on: 2014-07-03 18:41:21 »

Initial test version;

http://www.ficedula.co.uk/voices/Voices_0_10.zip

Download, unzip, edit the .config file and set the three paths appropriately (path to FF7.exe, path to the VoiceHook.dll included, path to the Voices folder included). Then run the program and click 'Go'. If you don't have the latest version of .NET installed, you may need to grab that from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=397703

I've included a few test files for mrkt2 (Wall Market) - the boy by the cat statue & the hawker at the inn. Hopefully they'll play...? The format of the files in the Voices folder should make it fairly obvious how things are set up.


EDIT: I've hacked around a bit with the sound playback code and I think I should be able to override the game's sound playback to allow for playing any number of sound effects [and in higher quality too - aren't the standard ones 4-bit ADPCM?]. The question is - what extra sound effects were people wanting to load in, and how were they expecting them to be triggered...?

112

FF7Voice / Re: Thoughts about reviving the project

« on: 2014-07-02 20:02:10 »

The ideal perfect solution would be a combination of scripting and expanding the game to allow more sound effects, without the need for an external tool. Unfortunately, as easy as this would be for developing a new game, I'm not even sure it's possible to make the game itself allow infinite sounds without more modding than its worth.

Doing it from an external tool probably wouldn't be massively difficult, to be honest. Not to say it's trivial, but I'm fairly sure it could be done. Not really related to the voices project at all, though, except that digging around in the assembly to implement the voice hooks will give me a bit of a headstart making any other changes.

Anyway, I've got the hooks into the dialogue working more or less properly now;

http://www.ficedula.co.uk/voices/test.jpg

...so I'll begin working on a nice way of configuring which sound files to play.

Is anybody interested in actually managing this project? I'm happy to do the technical work of coding up the tool(s) involved, but someone will need to do the work of compiling all the audio files, naming them appropriately, and so on.

113

FF7Voice / Re: Thoughts about reviving the project

« on: 2014-07-02 17:29:06 »

Yeah, it became obvious fairly quickly that the 2012 version was causing me grief, so I've reverted to the 1998 version.

I have a basic tool running that captures the dialogue display fine; next will be adding a way to trigger sound output.

114

FF7Voice / Re: Thoughts about reviving the project

« on: 2014-07-02 08:18:22 »

There is some truth to that. The original founders of this project have a tool for injecting voice clips over the dialogue, and without that (or a new tool by someone else to achieve the same result) no amount of recordings can revive this project.

Morning all.

I knocked up a proof of concept tool for the original FF7Voice project, although I don't think it was my tool they went on to use for their work; it shouldn't be difficult to get something working again, if people are interested.

I only have the 2012 version to hand (I still have the original 1998 CDs - but none of my PCs have optical drives!) so I'd have to get it working on that version first, but I'm fairly sure the differences between the two aren't gigantic, right?

Cheers.

115

Graphical / Re: Question about NVIDIA Driver

« on: 2013-06-17 09:44:16 »

FWIW, I've had Aali's driver working fine with onboard Intel graphics; on a HD3000, at least. I have a feeling that the older Intel GMA graphics adaptors aren't going to work so well though.

116

Releases / Re: Battles playing at 60fps

« on: 2012-07-13 13:28:53 »

As far as the field, I don't think we have anything that lists which animation is used by whom.   Though we could manually make a spreadsheet with each animation listed, then use Makou Reactor to go through each scene to find out which .hrcs are using which animations.

If you download Ifalna, there's a file in there (ifalna.filter) that lists for each HRC file, what field animations it thinks are associated with it.

It was generated based on parsing the field files, and this was done over 10 years ago when the format wasn't understood so well, so no guarantees it's totally accurate; but, it shouldn't be too far off.

117

Archive / Re: FF7Music + Xpadder incompatible together?

« on: 2012-06-27 18:31:28 »

Hi,

FF7Music doesn't filter the message queue; it monitors the debug output from the FF7 exe. FF7 logs some of the messages it's processing - among a variety of other stuff - and so that's why you're seeing various messages appear in the output. Since it's not filtering messages, though, I'm not sure why it would stop your input remapper from working.

One thing perhaps worth trying; I don't believe you actually have to run FF7 from the launcher to have FF7music work; you should be able to run FF7Music, then run FF7.exe yourself. If that works, then ... it's something weird to do with the way the launcher is loading FF7, but at least you'll have a workaround. Also make sure you don't have FF7 set to run in any sort of compatibility mode? On my machine, running it in compatibility mode isn't necessary with Aali's driver, and turning compatibility on actually causes some weird problems. Of course, YMMV with whether compatibility mode is needed or not...

118

General Discussion / Re: Square Enix files for domain “finalfantasyviipc.com”

« on: 2012-06-22 20:38:01 »

A bunch of fairly misleading stuff

</delurk>

....are you serious?

Firstly, to the extent that there even is such a thing as 'international copyright law', that isn't it. What you're quoting is the DMCA.

Secondly, the exemptions you're quoting aren't exemptions that exempt you from having to obey copyright. They're exemptions from being sued for bypassing a copyright protection system. Since FF7 doesn't contain any DRM or similar, that's pretty irrelevant; the exemptions specifically state you're still subject to the normal restrictions of copyright.

Thirdly, the majority of the mods here are absolutely violations of Square's copyright. (The factual information about how the game works or the file formats are structured, possibly not; those are - in some countries at least - the sort of thing that isn't prohibited by copyright.) So while it would be a copyright violation for Square to take those mods and distribute them without the author's permission, are you really going to sue them for it? Knowing that they could probably sue you for violating their copyright in the first place?

That said, a major corporation isn't likely to be intentionally taking fan-made material and incorporating it into one of their official games. The Chocobo patch was very likely a community manager at Eidos just linking to something they'd found rather than something that had been Officially Approved all the way to the top.

119

Releases / Re: FF7Music Installer

« on: 2012-06-13 18:29:45 »

I'm well aware of this.

I have a better solution than Rapidshare/Dropbox in mind, but it's waiting until after the fifteenth, when I get my next paycheck.

Covarr: I have ~200GB/month of bandwidth on a webserver going spare, if that's useful.

I don't know how much bandwidth the OSTs consume over the course of a month...

120

FF7 Tools / Re: [WIP] Final Fantasy VII importer script for Blender 2.6x

« on: 2012-04-07 18:03:25 »

You say you 'read' the rotation values in ZXY order ... hopefully you mean that's the order you're applying them in? Because you should be reading them from the FF7 files in XYZ order - but then actually applying them in ZXY order.

I don't know what format the Blender file requires rotations to be specified in (quaternions? actual axis rotations?); but be aware that different libraries can have different conventions for how you specify the order of rotations. For example, [at least some versions of] OpenTK specifies matrix multiplication the opposite way around to OpenGL, so when translating code from one to the other, you have to reverse the order matrices get multiplied in. If you're using a library to convert the rotations into the format Blender wants, be careful which order you're doing the multiplications in. May be worth just swapping things around to see if it helps...

121

Archive / Re: STICKY: FF7 Music

« on: 2008-06-12 09:29:44 »

Logically any new version of FF7Music might be done in conjunction with the Voices project; since, after all, they're both to do with making audio play in conjunction with the game engine (and I'm not too shocked to find out that FF7Music doesn't play nice with the Voices test application, so some work would need to be done anyway to make both mods work together).

So, yeah, that's possible; if and when a new version gets written.

122

FF7Voice / Re: Has a FFVII Voice-Over Project ever been attempted?

« on: 2008-06-06 21:01:43 »

Ficedula, how will voice-overs be programmed into some of the battle sequences? Be it at the beginning or during the victory fanfare. Some of the battles will need to have voice-overs, and if we're throwing voice-overs into the battle, I'm thinking we could implement voice-overs at the beginning of specific battles, or when a Boss begins to cast a specifc, powerful spell, or randomly in occasional battles during specific victory fanfares.

Unsure. All of those things are probably possible to some extent, given enough time to hook the right parts of the engine.

Best way to proceed is probably simply to deal with each particular requirement as it occurs ... when you find a battle that needs voicing, get a savegame as close to the battle as possible, let me know what you'd like to happen (ideally) and what you could use (in the worst case) and I'll investigate what can be done next time I get a moment...

123

FF7Voice / Re: Has a FFVII Voice-Over Project ever been attempted?

« on: 2008-05-31 14:53:17 »

So, here, have another proof of concept;

http://www.sylphds.net/f2k3/voices.rar

How to use;

Download, decompress into your FF7 folder. Run FF7. Alt-tab out (it seems to work OK with the windowed mode patch too) and run Voices. Click the 'start' button. If you don't see any errors messages then (hopefully) that means everything is working.

The window will display any dialogue it intercepts; there's some sample dialogue for the Highwind bridge I recorded in there as well (WARNING: rubbish recordings!). Easiest way to hear that would be to download this savegame:

http://www.sylphds.net/f2k3/save03.ff7

...and load the Highwind save, go to the bridge, then talk to Barret/Cid/one of the engineers.

Feedback welcomed. Preferably of the sort 'it works 100%!' but other feedback would be OK too, I guess...

124

FF7Voice / Re: Has a FFVII Voice-Over Project ever been attempted?

« on: 2008-05-31 09:56:25 »

PlaySound can play MP3s provided they're stored in a WAV container. It'll basically play any WAV file - assuming the right codec has been installed. MP3 is of course a pretty safe codec to rely on, it's been shipping with Windows & Media Player for years...

If we needed to use a more unusual codec, then yes - ideally you wouldn't want the user to have to download anything themselves, if it could just be a DLL that sits alongside the other files we can redistribute that would be best.

125

FF7Voice / Re: Has a FFVII Voice-Over Project ever been attempted?

« on: 2008-05-31 09:07:32 »

Running out of process would be my preference - mainly so if the code does crash, it doesn't affect FF7 at all, you just lose the voicing. Obviously there'd be a small code stub in-process transmitting the relevant messages out to the main program (that's how my test app worked...) although I didn't use OutputDebugString because I've sort of gone off that as a way for IPC.

For playing sounds then to be honest for anything beyond the capabilities PlaySound gives you, I'd be tempted to use an external library just for ease of use. With that said PlaySound might actually just work, it's pretty primitive but it's not like this project needs anything too advanced...

Ficedula : Wouldn't the text match way create a lot of overhead if the program has to look into a big heavy text file to match the clip before sending the sound out ?  Wouldn't the ID way be more responsive ?

Not particularly, to be honest. If you're in location NIV_W, say, then the first thing the program needs to look up is all the dialogue for that location - and any one location isn't going to have that much dialogue. It won't have to even consider dialogue for other locations, if we don't want it to.

As a further optimisation, in most cases we'd also know who was speaking (Aeris, Cloud, etc.) and we'd only have to look at dialogue for that character, too.

If you wanted to go on and search some 'general' bank of dialogue that might be applicable to all locations that might be slightly slower, but again you'd only search dialogue relevant to that specific character.

Running out of process also has the advantage that this is all happening in the background without affecting the main game too much.