Author Topic: [FF7] World Map to .Obj Converter and back! (Download Missing)  (Read 28566 times)

Aali

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This is a little something I have been working on these last few days, basically it reads the entire worldmap and spits out an obj file which can then be opened in, for example, blender. From there it can be exported into obj again which can be fed into another tool which in turn generates a new set of .map and .bot files. It's pretty rough at the moment and engine limitations put some harsh restraints on what you can actually do so don't get your hopes up just yet.
What you can do for sure is adjust UV maps, which could some day lead to a much improved WMRP :)

I wanted to make some cool "proof of concept" screenshots but since I am completely and utterly unable to do anything productive in blender I opted for destructive instead. Bye bye Corel bridge!



What now?!  ???


Expect a release as soon as I get the time to polish the edges and make it a bit more user friendly.
« Last Edit: 2014-07-17 20:40:22 by Covarr »

Aeris

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #1 on: 2010-10-25 07:24:31 »
wow, nice work yet  again Aali! i can't wait to see what all we can do with this... and i can imagine the evil in some hardcore mods lol.

Mako

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #2 on: 2010-10-25 07:28:52 »
Aali you are god arn't you? Don't lie to me you are, I was just asking Halkun about this 3 weeks ago. You have continually proved to be the most valuable asset to FF7 PC ever!. Props and congratulations!. I am shaking with excitement!
« Last Edit: 2010-10-25 07:39:44 by Mako »

Costa07

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #3 on: 2010-10-25 08:54:18 »
Wow great job cant wait to be able to do some work and see what i can whip up with that thing. Cant wait for the release.

obesebear

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #4 on: 2010-10-25 14:19:07 »
What can't you do?  Seriously

Aali

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #5 on: 2010-10-25 14:54:25 »
I've also taken the time to add the relevant information about the worldmap format to the wiki, just in case anyone else is interested in the details.

Timber

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #6 on: 2010-10-25 15:14:46 »
Wow awesome work! So this will the the underwater / snow maps too?

Aali

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #7 on: 2010-10-25 15:26:09 »
Not at the moment. Its not particularly difficult to implement but I didn't think anyone cared about those anyway :P

Costa07

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #8 on: 2010-10-25 17:54:51 »
So will this let you fix the towns and better the textures or just the world map?

BlitzNCS

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #9 on: 2010-10-25 18:10:10 »
Wow, you complete legend, Aali! Thank you very much!

pyrozen

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #10 on: 2010-10-25 19:18:15 »
So will this let you fix the towns and better the textures or just the world map?
most of the towns are built from worldmap geometry, so in theory we can finally redo the towns properly.

Thank you Aali! I just wish i had more time to play with this new tool, too damned busy ATM.

lee

ZL325

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #11 on: 2010-10-25 21:13:03 »
Aali are you a PROGRAMMING GURU?

Nice work, if only you could maybe spare a few minutes of your time as to teach me the wonders of your programming skills and how you go about doing the programming? :)

Costa07

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #12 on: 2010-10-26 04:18:21 »
I was going through some old thread and found this and thought it was kinda funny

I don't think anyone will make an overworld editor, and if they do I don't see anyone taking the time to model all of that...  But if they do that would be INSANE! 

Anyways, I keep my original preference of Gaia, but Lifestream seems like a good one too.

Also I was just wondering if you where gonna name your new tool after Gaia?

pyrozen

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #13 on: 2010-10-27 02:36:31 »
how does your new tool pull the texture data? Does it require the LGPs unpacked(i assume it does to render in blender), or are they extracted when you export the .map data? Just curious, i could polish off the "old" WRMP very quickly if i could create textures and instantly see the changes on the world map, instead of endless cycles of loading FF7, quit, make a small tweak, reload FF7, repeat 10x times and one texture is finished.

Just wondering, i cant wait to get my hands on this one ;)

Lee

sl1982

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #14 on: 2010-10-27 02:50:11 »
From what i understand is this map can be re uv'd in blender to get rid of the horrendous tiling issues. Correct me if i am wrong aali.

Aali

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #15 on: 2010-10-27 03:32:18 »
You supply the textures yourself. The tool makes no attempt to extract them from FF7. I didn't bother with that because the textures aren't strictly necessary, everything still works if you dont have them, they will just not show up in blender.

Costa07

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #16 on: 2010-10-28 01:24:57 »
sweet any idea when a release will be?

Tenko Kuugen

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #17 on: 2010-10-28 02:18:45 »
The first step for a custom worldmap.
Someone open an Aali fanclub. I want to fill an application.

pyrozen

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #18 on: 2010-10-28 03:29:57 »
im more looking towards larger UV maps that span continents, that way textures can seamlessly blend across all terrain types, and new imperfections can be added and such. But i need to try the tool itself out first :)

lee

Aali

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #19 on: 2010-10-28 04:14:52 »
Be aware that texture coordinates are stored in one byte though. If you slap a 4096x4096 texture on there you will only be able to adjust it in steps of 16 pixels. Blender doesn't know about this of course, so it will just look crappy ingame. Anyway I dont think this will be useful for any major modifications, its better suited to fixing annoying corner cases.

The only thing holding back a release right now is that I dont know what to do with normals. Blender doesn't load normals, it likes to compute its own. This looks terrible when imported into FF7, the lighting is way too sensitive and some things that really shouldn't be affected by it are. But since world map lighting is broken in the PC version anyway I dont know if its really worth fixing or if I should just set all normals to point straight up, effectively disabling lighting.

BlitzNCS

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #20 on: 2010-10-28 18:34:02 »
Will this tool be able to create new walkmeshes and gateway flags (for like new areas etc)? Would be cool to really test the world map to it's limits.

Aali

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #21 on: 2010-10-28 20:32:55 »
The worldmap is its own walkmesh and yes, that information can be modified with this tool. Everything else is stored in other files and probably operates on a combination of attributes from the map such as location (Midgar Area, Junon Area etc) and walkability, atleast thats how random battles work.
« Last Edit: 2011-03-30 15:21:07 by Aali »

pyrozen

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #22 on: 2010-10-29 02:47:55 »
so entirely new land masses could be crafted in the massive ocean i assume?
This probably is not covered, but what about assigning enemies to a particular area?

lee

Aali

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #23 on: 2010-10-29 02:55:42 »
New areas can be created, you can have up to 128 unique locations (in practice that might require some modding of the .exe though). Random encounters are defined in enc_w which is in the LGP. The format is quite simple, I plan to write a wiki page on it when I get the time to work out all the little details. Basically its just a table of N possible encounters per walkmap type per location.

Tenko Kuugen

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Re: World Map to .Obj Converter (and back!)
« Reply #24 on: 2010-10-29 06:05:57 »
128 unique locations? are there even half that many in the current game? ( assuming you mean location as in area ( like midgar area ) and not locations as in towns/dungeons/etc )
That makes room for some awesome stuff to be done.