[FF7PC-98/Steam] FFNx - Next generation modding platform for FF7/FF8

[Juba]

You'll want to stay updated on FFNx.  At some point in the future it will support 60fps.   Until then, you'll need to use Reunion found at ff7.live if you want to use this mod.

FFNx already supports 60fps... it's the game engine and (especially) all the underlying animations that were created for 15/30 that need to be rewritten.

Any update on 60fps support or how to enable it in FFNx ?

[ff7maniac]

hello I would like to know. people who have a configuration similar to i5, windows 10, ssd disk and an nvidia gt 1030 card how does ffnx work with Cosmos Lighting shadows and advanced animations, are there problems or slowdowns or is it playable properly? thank you.

[LordUrQuan]

hello I would like to know. people who have a configuration similar to i5, windows 10, ssd disk and an nvidia gt 1030 card how does ffnx work with Cosmos Lighting shadows and advanced animations, are there problems or slowdowns or is it playable properly? thank you.

Lighting and animations don't work without recent FFNx.

[ff7maniac]

I know it, I ask if it works well enough with an nvidia gt 1030 card

[TrueOdin]

I know it, I ask if it works well enough with an nvidia gt 1030 card

You should be fine. Make sure to use the latest canary.

[ff7maniac]

are you sure ? satsuki told me at least a pc i5 windows 10 ssd and a gtx 1050

[Dekko]

Hello TrueOdin!

First of all, thank you for working on this!

I've been a fan of Final Fantasy 7-9 ever since they came out on Playstation back in the day and I've been a user on this forum for quite a while when I got into modding the original PC releases of these wonderful games to make them shine. Some amazing stuff has been made to happen in this forum for sure!

Have not been active here or logged in for a very long time so when I saw your project I got VERY excited.

My question to you though is, as I'm currently running the Original PC Release version of FF7 extensively modded, and with Aali's latest driver with the error messages patched out - would it be possible to use FFNx as a drop in replacement for the Aali driver without having to change anything in terms of the mods installed etc?

Running Windows 7 64-bit fully up to date with an Intel Core i7 6700k, 64 GB RAM and an ASUS GTX970 graphics card.

[TrueOdin]

Hello TrueOdin!

First of all, thank you for working on this!

I've been a fan of Final Fantasy 7-9 ever since they came out on Playstation back in the day and I've been a user on this forum for quite a while when I got into modding the original PC releases of these wonderful games to make them shine. Some amazing stuff has been made to happen in this forum for sure!

Have not been active here or logged in for a very long time so when I saw your project I got VERY excited.

My question to you though is, as I'm currently running the Original PC Release version of FF7 extensively modded, and with Aali's latest driver with the error messages patched out - would it be possible to use FFNx as a drop in replacement for the Aali driver without having to change anything in terms of the mods installed etc?

Running Windows 7 64-bit fully up to date with an Intel Core i7 6700k, 64 GB RAM and an ASUS GTX970 graphics card.

Thank you very much To briefly answer your question, yes it should work fine. Nevertheless, I'm not sure how you got them installed, so just make sure to properly backup files that will be replaced so you can then later revert back.

Nevertheless, FFNx is being integrated along multiple mod managers today, I suggest you making use of them as tons of mods have improved too and make use of those updated components.

Cheers!

are you sure ? satsuki told me at least a pc i5 windows 10 ssd and a gtx 1050

Feel free to try and report back. I'm not a Game Studio with a budget dedicated in replicating HW configurations being reported to me, so all I can do is wait for feedback and try to improve on top of them

[valius]

Are there any plans for FFNx to support the old battleswirl_framerate flag that was supported by Aali's driver?  I've used it on an old installation of FF& to essentially make the battle swirl go away, but it would be great if it could work with a newer modding platform.  Or is it already supported in FFNx?

EDIT: Based on conversation on the Tsunamods Discord, that flag will not be supported.

[icegoddesslexra]

Hi I have a question: Since downloading this mod for FFVIII my controls for the game have been fucked. I set my controls (in the FF8 launcher) to be vanilla to what the PS1 version controls were, I'm using a PS4 controller. I had no issues with my controller inputs before installing the music mod.

But now, even though I have Select/Confirm set to 'X', Cancel to 'O' they're incorrect when I boot the game. X is now cancel, Square is Confirm, and O just makes me walk. Pause is now my R2, despite being set to my controller's pause button.

In my FFNx.toml file under the controllers section it was originally set to: steam_game_userdata = "". I've since added in my userfile so it reads: steam_game_userdata = 'user_4075028'. And there was no change to how the game views my control schematics. Is there a setting in the file I'm missing that's messing with my button schematics?

I'm suddenly stuck with confirm being Square, Cancel being X, and all the other incorrect inputs. It seems the only buttons mapped correctly still are Triangle for the Menu and R1 being Squall's gunblade trigger. Analog and the D-pad inputs also work correctly.

[sithlord48]

I'm pretty sure that the steam info is only used when generating metadata for cloud syncing. I've never used steam to launch but have you tried customizing the controls from the in game menu?

[SunDragonXiii]

I have the same issue with the controls on FF8... All the face buttons on the controller right hand side were mapped to the next button clockwise even though it was set to default in the settings (I'm using a Dualshock 3 controller).

To fix it I had to go in settings and map every button to the next button anti-clockwise... just to get it to be the normal button. I still have L2 and R2 mapped to start and select buttons which I haven't figured out how to fix but at least it's playable now.

Also I still haven't figured out how to get texture mods to work with this installed, I had them working before with Tonberry fine but Tonberry doesn't seem to work with this installed and I haven't figured out how to make them work without it.

[TrueOdin]

Also I still haven't figured out how to get texture mods to work with this installed, I had them working before with Tonberry fine but Tonberry doesn't seem to work with this installed and I haven't figured out how to make them work without it.

Tonberry and FFNx are not compatible, because the former is used to hook the native game DirectX APIs and hash literally the texture binary data in memory and try to create a map for each one of them.
FFNx instead rebuilds from scratch the rendering engine and uses an undocumented feature for both FF7/FF8 that allows to use a custom driver to render the game ( this is how Aali started his project ). Because of that we have to implement our own custom way to handle this scenario. Unfortunately in FF8 hashing every texture doesn't lead to a different file ( sometimes it seems different textures hash the very same way ), therefore there's no possibility ( yet ) to replace textures in FF8.

Nevertheless, I did try to approach dotEmu in a friendly way to ask how did they manage to do it for FF8R ( as internally they use the Aali driver anyway... ) but they never bothered to reply. Perhaps if we ask en-masse we might have a reply one day, or ideally a PR on FFNx code implementing that functionality.

If anyone from dotEmu reads this, be aware any help on the topic is welcome and appreciated.

[SunDragonXiii]

Thanks for explaining, that's a real shame. Despite it's problems FFNx seems to be the best way to play with the original music in FF8 for now and it really needs that music fix! Extra things like the analogue controls are nice as well.

Kind of annoying though, as much as I appreciate the hard work modders put in, they're not good at explaining things to us regular people who just want to play our favourite games in the best way possible. Like how this is in the "Basically Mandatory" category... Why is it basically mandatory if most mods aren't compatible with it? As a non-modder i'm just left scratching my head trying to figure out why texture mods aren't working and messing about with the config file because there's no documentation saying they don't work... only to find out weeks later through a forum that they don't work in the first place 

[TrueOdin]

Why is it basically mandatory if most mods aren't compatible with it? As a non-modder i'm just left scratching my head trying to figure out why texture mods aren't working and messing about with the config file because there's no documentation saying they don't work... only to find out weeks later through a forum that they don't work in the first place 

You're right on that side. The forum organization maybe is not clear enough, but at the current state for FF7 is the only active mod platform supported on Qhimm ( which doesn't mean is the only one existing that mods FF7 ), and which also exposes a set of features which make it really unique compared to other mod solutions.

About FF8 though in fact there are different mods available, each one of them doing different things ( but not all of them combined ). FF8_Demastered for eg. is the known mod solution for FF8R, Tonberry is the only solution known to replace textures on FF8 2000/2013 releases, and FFNx is a complete mod platform which reimplements the graphic pipeline ( so it's not depending on the core game engine, unlike Tonberry ) and introduces new unique features never seen before.

Now, as an author and crew member of FFNx as you can see, the project is not only developed by me but there are contributors bringing new patch codes introducing new features ( see https://github.com/julianxhokaxhiu/FFNx/graphs/contributors ) and because of this it's difficult to document really everything, considering the fact people might forget it but we're all doing this in our own spare time. No one of us is paid, receiveing donations nor asking for them. All we do is bring our passion for the game to the code, trying to find new ways to enable then modders to bring their magic in. Sometimes we manage to do so, sometimes we fail But that's the beauty of it.

Speaking therefore about texture replacement, I'll never get tired repeating this: I wish we could have it on FFNx, but unfortunately the code to allow this is much more difficult than FF7 in terms of Reverse Engineering, nor Square-Enix and dotEmu are helping on this case sharing knowledge with us on how they did. If this will one day happen, rest assured we will be happy to explore that path and add support, but for now it's really difficult to understand the game code and rewire everything.

[forkst]

Keep up the great work with this mod

[TrueOdin]

Keep up the great work with this mod

Thank you Hope you're enjoying it

[javisanchez1234567]

Hi, is it possible to get save anywhere to work in the Steam version of FFNx? In the 98 version it worked perfectly, but on Steam I can't save wherever I want.

[Snake2208]

Hello! Didn't know if putting this here or on general FF7 troubleshooting or github...

First of all, I can't thank enough this community for all the hard work put into this since Aali, Tidusguy, FinalFanTim, EQ2Alyza, Cosmos, Chrysalis, strife98, TrueOdin, unaBomb, Satsuki, Tsunamods team and countless others, truly you are the best.

I am writing this to submit a bug since 7H 2.3+ that I think is from the FFNx driver itself that would not allow me to play in any way, making a really long story short last year I had 2.2.3.522 with no problems, after that I downloaded 2.3.3.0 and the game just completely crash with H7 along with it, after some trial and error I found out that a mod "mouth replacer by Sega" was the culprit (that one is a 7H bug me thinks), but after that I couldn't play with FFNx with any render (DX9,11,12,OGL,VLK) giving me different types of problems where H7 is not affected or closes, updating with the latest canary did not help (1.10.1.156 I think).

So I wiped my PC this year, since 2017 haven't done that so I can start everything fresh, so I installed both canaries (7H 2.3.3.20 and FFNx 1.10.1.252) and no mods with no avail, DX12 just opens and leaves me with a black screen and closes, Vulkan crashes on menu or certain places (field) giving me a driver timeout (AMD Radeon drivers 22.1.1, 22.2.1 and 22.2.3), DX11 works but with heavy graphical glitches all the time, DX9 crashes, OpenGL.... actually worked fine for a bit, closed it, reopened it and now it does not work (well it sounds that it works but black screen everywhere), today I used FFNx 1.10.1.254 with same results, tried 1.10.1.0 just for fun and a few different changes but overall the same (DX9 actually kinda works, medium to moderate glitches and crashes after a few minutes).

Anyway I'm not here just to say "there, minimum amount of info, fix it", I'd like to help troubleshoot it, I just deleted the whole thing, fresh FF7 steam download to try and test anything you need, use any 7H and FFNx, give logs, videos of the issues, etc. I'm a MD so not really a programmer but I know a little thanks to my father , should I report it to github? I'll try to help and be as useful as I can be

by the way: AMD Ryzen 1700, 32GB dual channel DDR4 @2400, Gigabyte RX 470 4GB, 260GB PCIe SSD + HDD 4TB (current install), ASUS Crosshair Hero VI x370 WiFi

edit: If this belongs to another section I`ll gladly move it

[Bonez]

Troubleshooting will be a lot easier and faster using our discord. It's also way more active than the forums with more people willing to help basically 24/7 between Qhimm and Tsuna discords.

[Snake2208]

Thank you, I'll join both

edit: Done, entered Quimm via strife98 post and Tsunamods, the invite from the main website -> support -> Discord is dead, used DuckDuckGo and found it Keep on rocking!

[arhumSearcher]

Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask this but, will FFNx add support for 60fps (battle) menus? Since complete 60fps is already a feature. I was looking forward to be able to play FF7 like PSX where the battles and overworld function in their respective framerates but menus in and out of battle are always 60fps.

I know that Reunion allows for this to be possible but I wanted to play the game without any conversions/heavy modifications and be able to earn achievements through Steam like FFNx allows.

Thanks for your hard work and dedication, keep it coming!

[Bonkers]

Just a shot in the dark, would it be possible with this engine for example to replace the standard exploration scenes that are Pre-rendered 2D backdrops (With a 3D walk mesh) with an entirely real time rendered scene? With the direction FFVIIR is taking, the lack of a modern looking version of the original game has bothered me.

Think of what Diablo 2's recent re-release did by replacing the pre rendered graphics with real time ones.  We'd perhaps simply use the walkmesh as the basis for rebuilding the scene in 3D and match the original camera coordinates to keep the final look 1:1.
I don't know if this would end up speeding up or making it easier to try and match the original pre-rendered look in real time rather than having to try and recreate all of the images and then have to render them offline and cut them up to match the original engine.

[Question]

I checked the documentation but im confused, what does this do exactly, and does it work for the FF8 remaster?

[Landarma]

Just a shot in the dark, would it be possible with this engine for example to replace the standard exploration scenes that are Pre-rendered 2D backdrops (With a 3D walk mesh) with an entirely real time rendered scene? With the direction FFVIIR is taking, the lack of a modern looking version of the original game has bothered me.

Think of what Diablo 2's recent re-release did by replacing the pre rendered graphics with real time ones.  We'd perhaps simply use the walkmesh as the basis for rebuilding the scene in 3D and match the original camera coordinates to keep the final look 1:1.
I don't know if this would end up speeding up or making it easier to try and match the original pre-rendered look in real time rather than having to try and recreate all of the images and then have to render them offline and cut them up to match the original engine.

Months late reply: This would require making entire new game engine as well as assets.  It may take many years, and if SE notice the project, they can send C&D to devs.