Messages

51

Archive / FF8 Configurator

« on: 2001-10-23 20:58:00 »

Just wanted to say thanks!, feel free to label this the official version (rewrite the readme or whatever you want, just leave my name on the list of programmers and I'm happy).

If there is any questions about my code then please do ask, answering questions would be a good investment of my time (can't help you code though, exciting things happening in the Legacy world engine...)

And I don't think Delphi6 will give you any headaches, wasn't the problem was that Object Pascal was changed from D3 to D4 (dynamic arrays and overloads I think)?

52

General Discussion / Anyone tried this before?

« on: 2001-10-20 10:28:00 »

And I quote:

"UPDATE: "Regarding the way human vision perceives colors rendered on a digital raster display, 96-bit color depth is a complete non-sequitur. The (average?) human eye is not capable
of distinguishing 96 bits of color depth. This hack only substantially slows down video performance."

Still cool though (not that I have one of those cards...I think...)

53

General Discussion / XP silliness

« on: 2001-10-14 21:42:00 »

You all know what I'm about to say on Darkness' post but I like being unpredictable so I won't say it

At least the skins make the error messages much prettier to look at! Wonder what fancy stuff they did to the Blue Screen Of Death...someone please tell me as soon as you have had it running for a week and had had a chance to see it?

(Yeah I'm being prejudistic here, sorry. Actually my win2k runned for half a year without a blue screen, so I should know. Except from the fact that my win2k install has been around considerable longer than that time period and at this time the rate is pretty high....do windows detoriate over time so that the customers that doesn't know the magic of a reinstall run and buy the latest upgrade?)

See, I didn't use the L* word even once!

[EDIT: Disable stupid graphical smilies, if it can't be done on telex it's not worth doing...oh and I don't mind yours ]

[edited] 15 2001-10-14 22:45

54

General Discussion / Progress report on the new design

« on: 2001-10-12 17:25:00 »

Gzip is very widely accepted though as it was around as a unix tool around 1970 or so (no I didn't bother to check that) long long before Javascript or even the internet was thought of.

55

General Discussion / Don't you just HATE it...

« on: 2001-10-12 13:05:00 »

My big adventure in this area happened about a year ago...

I also lost my boot sector and partition table. Scared the sh*t out of me, but it turned out it was only a quick round in linux fdisk to fix the problem (I took care of not rebooting after knowing I had screwed up so Linux had the partition tables in memory, otherwise things would have been slightly worse).

For this not to be yet another of my usual Windows-bashing messages, let me add that I destroyed the boot sector in the first place by hacking it trying to improve the boot loader. Linux users around the world: When using "dd" on the boot sector, never go for the hunch and write "512" as the number of the bytes to overwrite, then you take the partition table with you... the size of only the boot sector is 428 or something like that, look it up in LILO readme.

[edited] 15 2001-10-12 14:08

56

General Discussion / Progress report on the new design

« on: 2001-10-12 12:59:00 »

Looks like it's connected with gzip. My guess is that it turns on zlib-compression of the output HTML pages. But I don't really have a clue...

57

General Discussion / An actual FF9 mod for FF8PC.......is anyone interested?

« on: 2001-10-11 21:40:00 »

About uploading soundfonts: Well, if time schedules serves me right (never does), I'll get time to put up my own server next week. Until then it's your own choice. Currently ffsf.cjb.net is linked to ProHosting but if anyone has the time then move it back to legacy (kinda of wasted as I will move it to my own server as soon as I get it up though).

You can upload the soundfont to anywhere you wish, I suggest you upload it to legacy and link to it from ProHosting.

After my server gets up, things will get in more order with this.

58

General Discussion / Sumimasen...

« on: 2001-10-09 20:56:00 »

What can I say? Nothing that would help from where I sit I think. There's always the cliches...time heals all wounds and so on. I firmly believe in that but right now you might very well get such statements stuck in your throat so I'll leave it at this.

Know this though: This board shouldn't add to your problems. I'm pretty sure that whoever raises a critical voice about your participation is going to get hit pretty heavily by the majority on this board. You already know this of course. (Though there are times when the need for stating the obvious becomes strong.)

Best of luck with sorting it all out.


BTW, the fall certainly doesn't help either, rainy and dark by seven in the evening (for people in more southern regions: This is nothing, in December it will be dark like...four...). I get more depresssed if I only look out the window even if I don't have any major problems of this kind now (and so does everyone else seem to get as well). Helps to take a walk should the sun come out from the skies though.

[edited] 15 2001-10-09 22:02

59

General Discussion / I feel like some of my hard drive space has been cheated awa

« on: 2001-10-08 10:53:00 »

The only real way to fix this problem is converting to a better filesystem than the sh*t microsoft made for Win9x and 3... I guess you must use Windows so then you should upgrade to Win2K or WinXP an format your drive as a NTSF system to get back all of your space.

Other operating systems than windows don't have this problem.

The problem is that in FAT32, a file always take up an even number of bytes....for instance, if you have an empty file it can use up to 32 kb on itself, while a file of 31 kb will use the same 32 kb. The loss is greater on small files, so zipping all the files you don't use regularly would help the problem (and also the zip would make the smaller of course). With 5 GB of disk space I guess you'd be using it all regularly though...

60

General Discussion / NOTICE -- NEW FORUMS

« on: 2001-10-02 17:05:00 »

Of course 56k modem is the slowest alternative still available without buying second-hand (well, not quite, but getting there quickly)

Side note: Is noone outside of Norway and Germany using ISDN?

[edited] 15 2001-10-02 18:06

61

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Where can I find a program to force interlace?

« on: 2001-08-08 16:39:00 »

Program?!? On your monitor?

I have the same problem, it's annoying but one does get used to it...

62

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / back from london, with C problems!

« on: 2001-07-10 23:32:00 »

iostream is a C++ header file. It follows ALL C++ compilers, there's not a chance you haven't got it. For C programs, use stdio.h, there is no such thing as iostream in C.

For C++ programs you might want to follow the standard and use "iostream" (without .h) and either add "using namespace std;" below it, or type "std::" in front of all the classes and variables in it (std::cout, std::cin, std: :oops:stream).

Make sure you use brackets when including... rather than "iostream.h".

If you still can't get things to work, get yourself a new C++ compiler. You don't have the whole package if you don't have iostream. Free compilers: GCC in Linux (follows the system), DJGPP (basically gcc in DOS, search google and you'll find it at once), Borland C++ (www.borland.com, don't confuse it with C++Builder which is not free).

Non-free compilers would be...ehmm...Visual C++, but that actually performs much much worse than the free ones and only support some parts of the C++ standard. Then there's C++Builder but that one is the same as the free compiler only with a non-commandline interface (you pay for the IDE).

63

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Cast your votes!!!

« on: 2001-06-20 21:31:00 »

Actually, Win2K's notepad allows for unlimited sizes. It's still a crappy reader of course. BUT, I still think it is better than DOS edit as edit doesn't allow for line-breaking (ficedula's doc would have been very tiresome to read in dos edit).

I'm surprised this problem shows up, isn't the internet protocols supposed to handle things like this? Is there a wrong configuration in Apache so that it transmits the file as binary instead of text?

BTW, WordPad works fine with all text files. It's still crap, but at least it's better.

[This message has been edited by dagsverre (edited June 20, 2001).]

64

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / .p, Battle Files 'n Milkshape 3D

« on: 2001-08-04 14:49:00 »

Depends on what you want to do. If you don't need a windows interface for the program I think it shouldn't take that much time to learn the basics. Problem is that you probably do...

I'd say go for Delphi. It's not as powerful as C++ but it goes a long way and is almost as user-friendly as VB. There's not all that much new between Delphi 2 and Delphi 6 (6 was just released), but I know you can pick up free demos of the newer versions from magazine cover CDs and the like. There's also a trial over at borland.com, it's the same program but it might be time limited (not sure, just know that you can create programs with it).

Of course, since you have already started programming in VB I guess you should stay there until you start on a new program...

65

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / .p, Battle Files 'n Milkshape 3D

« on: 2001-08-04 00:58:00 »

Visual Basic is evil. It's breaking every single programming rule in existance (well, many of them) and when working in it is is very very hard to think of it as something else than a toy. Just do yourself a favor and stay away from the crap...

(At least now you have my opinion...not that it was asked for...)

66

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / .p, Battle Files 'n Milkshape 3D

« on: 2001-06-06 22:12:00 »

Ah...C++ vs. C debates. Have to say at least *something*...

First on the "hello world" example: Actually both are allowed. The standard form of doing it is actually returning an int, "int main()", the return value is given to the OS on program exit, 0 means success (this return value is frequently checked in shell scripts).

Arguments for using C++ instead: The thing that bothers me mest about C is that you can't make your own types. Many people consider operator overloading bad, personally I would prefer C++ just because I get to write:

string s = "Hello ";
s += "world!";

instead of the hideously ugly strcpy you C folks have to deal with.

The second thing is polymorphism. Things like widget libraries simply can't get done in a decent, extensible way without using polymorphism. Polymorphism is possible in C, but it's very messy, ugly, and slower at run-time.

In my experience, people who prefer C often don't get what polymorphism means. Comments like "the difference between a.DoSomething() and DoSomething(a) is pretty damn academic to me" (seen on Slashdot) reveals that these people clearly don't have a first clue what OOP is really about. You don't have to actually use C++, but at least learn yourself what the "virtual" keyword means (polymorphism = virtual member functions).

About Microsoft: That was code for writing a windows program. Microsoft is well known for creating horrible, illogical APIs. From what you say, I'm pretty convinced that a plain C version of the program would be the same length, the difference is that C++ users have a better chance of escaping that.

[EDIT: Typo]

[This message has been edited by dagsverre (edited June 06, 2001).]

67

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Squaresoft looking on XBox

« on: 2001-04-11 22:40:00 »

I really should stop replying to you Joey but here goes:

1) No matter what you think about the PSX2 vs. XBox discussion, PSX2 isn't outdated now? And what does outdated mean? That it isn't the best? No, it means that you can't run the games you want, there's very few using money just to brag about their system specs, they want to play games as well you know.

So, as long as FFX is released on the PSX2, it will not exceed the PSX2's system specs and so, PSX2 is never going to be outdated. If you want to play FFI, the NES isn't outdated, right?

2) By the time the XBox is released most people will probably have played through FFX (or not be too long from it), if that happens PSX2 will be the best console on the market at the time anyway. Who cares what happens later?

3) The XBox don't have a chance in the japanese market, exactly because the RPG giants like Squaresoft doesn't support it! The XBox could the a hundred times better techincally, people still wouldn't buy it because FFX is released on the PSX2. When it comes to Japan and Final Fantasy, it is the console makers that must dance to the game companies' tune, not the other way around. Outside of Japan things are different but Final Fantasy was a success long before the outside world even knew about it. And the same holds true there as well, most Final Fantasy players are fans and many would buy a PSX2 to play that game alone.

I wish it wasn't this way though, because I would love to play FFX on my PC. Now I'm not sure at all what to do, I don't think I'm going to spend the money on a PSX2 myself. Oh well, there are other things to do than playing Final Fantasy.

68

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Squaresoft looking on XBox

« on: 2001-04-03 02:14:00 »

Who is even awake at that time sunday morning?

No such customs here at least. And, the net is international after all, when I posted it I'm pretty sure it was before 12 PM somewhere in the pacific.

69

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Squaresoft looking on XBox

« on: 2001-04-02 03:35:00 »

Happy april!

You should all see Slashdot http://slashdot.org" TARGET=_blank>Slashdot  and  http://www.psxemu.com/" TARGET=_blank>PsxEMU  today...

(And if I really wanted to boost my counter I could have edited my counter.dat file. Just had to put in something so that not too many would believe in the crap, and putting up the link to what most slashdot trolls do wouldn't have been nice...)

70

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Squaresoft looking on XBox

« on: 2001-04-01 23:02:00 »

It turns out that Squaresoft are looking towards supporting the XBox platform in a joint iniative with Microsoft. Microsoft badly wants into the japanese console market, and they realize that that is going to be much easier with square's support than without.

As the XBox is using DirectX, this also means that us PC users will very probably benefit from this.

Squaresoft also announces that in their well-known money sucking style (well, this wasn't their exact words) they are going to first release a new version of Final Fantasy 7 for XBox. Using an existing product will lower the risks of trying out the platform, as well as giving their developers good training on a non-critical product. Microsoft will let them borrow their rendering farm for rerendering all the background graphics, as well as designing some new high-poly in-game 3D models (having the FF7 original graphics in a XBox version wouldn't be good for microsoft you know). Let's hope they rerender the cinematics in a higher resolution as well.

Imagine playing FF7 with high-res videos/backgrounds and high-poly 3D models...I can't wait...

Read more on  http://ffsf.cjb.net" TARGET=_blank>Squaresofts webpage ...

71

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / FF7 in 32 bit?

« on: 2001-04-09 22:57:00 »

Whoops...never thought about b). Stupid...it is of course the obvious solution...doesn't require 100+ hours of programming either...

72

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / FF7 in 32 bit?

« on: 2001-04-09 14:25:00 »

Looping MIDIs is perhaps possible...consider where FF7 gets it's looping information from. Probably the MIDI files themselves, I'm pretty sure from the LGP files. So, to make a song restart, simply edit the LGP archive after the battle to make the song start at the right place.

Of course it is anything but simple. Perhaps FF7 caches the LGP header, which would make it impossible. Perhaps FF7 caches many MIDI files at the time, which would make it impossible. And, editing the entire LGP file each time a battle is fought is close to impossible...so what to do? OK, remember that I am only schetching a technical possibility here, it would be an insane waste of time to start programming on it, it's just interesting...

What you do is to code a layer between FF7 and the LGP files. The Windows API file read/write functions can be replaced with your own versions (I think all Windows Apps use the FileRead function for file reading) which can return anything it wishes. When that is done it is of course just to start assembling new MIDI-files each time a certain midi-file is requested...

I know it is a lame idea, only wanted to say how I imagine it could work in practice. People, please don't ask Ficedula to do this, because it is an insane amount of work simply to do something as useless as avoiding restart of midifiles.

73

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Linux FF7/port page is up

« on: 2001-03-25 13:53:00 »

Skillster: It will probably be compatible with Win32 all the time, never worry. Most Linux applications runs on Windows almost with no tweaking as the people programming in Linux usually aren't as braindead as Windows programmers and try to *think ahead* sometimes.

Halkun: About C++ wrappers...hehe, you think I use C++ for the syntax? I have been using SDL for half a year now, and I never ever even tried searching for a C++ wrapper. What would be the point of such a wrapper? Isn't...

surface2->BlitTo(surface1, rect1, rect2);

...just the same as:

SDL_BlitSurface(surface1, rect1, surface2, rect2);

...they say exactly the same thing! There's no drawback with the C syntax, C++ wrappers are the most pointless thing ever made in most cases, only in a few cases where they extend a lot of the original functionality (like GTK-- does with it's signal system) it makes any sense.

If you think I like C++ for object.do(); rather than do(object);, then you are very mistaken. I *only* use C++ because of:

a) strong typing, constness, exceptions
b) templates
c) most importantly, polymorphism

If there was a better way doing that last point, polymorphism, in C, I would have used C, I don't care about syntax. Polymorphism in C can be extremely tedious though, so I stay with C++.

(Polymorphism is "virtual member functions", if you don't know what they can do then you should find out, because they are the only reason C++ exist, though C zealots like to think otherwise (like if having the a.b() rather than b(a) syntax has anything to say))

74

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Linux FF7/port page is up

« on: 2001-03-25 01:12:00 »

Noticing you write about using Allegro as a 2D lib.

I think you should seriously consider using SDL instead. I haven't used Allegro but SDL has to be the greatest thing out there:

- All in open source, standard C (no C++)
- Supports Windows (DirectX), Unix (X, SVGAlib, framebuffer), MacOS, BeOS, with easy extensions to new platforms
- Is made to be as thin as possible and consume as little CPU as at all possible, while still giving you device independent features (can emulate color depth, but won't if you pick the right one)
- Contains 2D graphics support (blits), GLUT replacement for OpenGL (initializes the buffer but you must do drawing directly with the GL library), threads, timers, input, etc.
- The authors is Loki, the famous Linux game creators (ported Unreal Tournament, Descent, Quake, Railroad Tycoon 2 etc. to Linux).
- A very extensive support of addon libraries supporting it, such as MPEG2 decoders, music and sound, etc etc.

You can find SDL at http://www.libsdl.org" TARGET=_blank>www.libsdl.org

Also remember the Legacy project (www.legacy-ovwp.org), cooperation would be great epsecially in the music field, where you will need MIDI support. Legacy is strictly C++ but can it hurt that bad? At least we can share our discoveries.

It looks like a great project, too bad I have my hands full with Legacy. I'll help out as much as I can from there though, see if we come up with anything that can help you (or vice versa).

75

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Remaking FF7

« on: 2001-03-25 01:18:00 »

If you ask JP he might well be able to find some space for you...