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Releases / Re: [REL] Omzy's FFVII Field Pack (dramatically improved backgrounds!)
« on: 2013-08-03 03:37:42 »No, and it's really disappointing. They purposely made the game moddable but left us no way to change the backgrounds without totally ripping their code apart. I did a collection of mods for unconverted STEAM but I must be honest I couldn't actually play that way, it's part of why testing that package is so difficult. There is really no reason to stay on the CLOUD unless you're a purist and it's a goal of some sort.
I gotta say, though. Troubleshooting reports for bootleg have dropped off. GameConverter9b handles STEAM like a ball of yarn now. If you were having trouble before with converting STEAM, this new version of GameConverter should take care of the dirty work. It's now possible to completely move your STEAM installed Final Fantasy VII folder and put it wherever you please outside of the Program Files area, and then convert it. Right now I have a converted version I play with, and a STEAM version I use to test both installed on my system. The only twist (if you could call it one) is that you need to manually type in the filepath for where you moved your STEAM FF7 folder during the conversion.
I asked Omzy personally about the idea of making a huge flevel.lgp file with upscaled backgrounds in it, and his answer was complicated enough to mean it wasn't going to happen. In theory, it's possible, in practice, it would be sort of a life's work. Bootleg has all kinds of mods, some of which are actually included in the HQModels for STEAM package. You can install it and then put Kaldarasha's models on top, which is really all that HQ STEAM package is, minus the things that are incompatible, like world map mods and menu mods.
In response to some PM activity I've received on this subject I'll let Omzy explain it in his own words, because this is out of my comfort zone. To be totally clear: I am personally not capable of doing all this would require, physically or mentally, not even for 1 scene. Hope its cool to post this PM, I am almost certain he would approve. Just goes to show how awesome the guy is. Seriously I wouldn't even make political criminals do this process and I certainly wouldn't ask Omzy to do it. If this is going to ever happen, it will have to come from some super talented person who can verify that the kernel headers will work after doing a test scene. And then, assuming they could make that scene work, changing aali's Palmer tool to accommodate the format needed for encoding into the lgp file. That would be a year's worth of toil, several hours a day I think, and the person would have to start out with knowledge few people alive possess. There's no guarantee that there wouldn't be massive problems we haven't considered somewhere along the process. If you want to see how totally bonkers this stuff turns out... just look at the actual .png files Omzy's Field Pack installs. They look like quilts from the 19th century.
This is the lighting scheme from the same scene as the screenshot couple posts above.
I have to try that version. The previous kept failing because the other program to convert the 2012 release somehow got detected isntead and moving those files into Steam just either didn't work or gave me missing disc 1 error. No interest in the features lost as I don't even use the cloud feature and the achievements I could always use SAM to get when they would normally appear.
[edit] I tried it out, and while it did detect Steam this time, it won't get pass the Eidos logo and has a small window in the middle of it during the playback. Tried downloading the custom driver, but it only caued a red triangle to appear afterwards. Oh well, I can live without the backgrounds upgrade I guess.