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1

Graphical / Preview of NTSC-J Mode for FFNx

« on: 2023-06-14 03:14:25 »

"NTSC-J mode" is a forthcoming feature for FFNx. If NTSC-J mode is enabled, FFNx performs a conversion to simulate the color gamut of the 1990s Japanese television sets that FF7 and FF8 were originally designed for. The resulting colors are more faithful to the original artistic intent, and generally brighter and more vivid.
This mode is appropriate for:

• Vanilla FF7/FF8.
• Mod assets that are upscales of the original assets.
• Mod assets made from scratch where the modder used the original assets as a color reference without doing a gamut conversion.

This mode is not appropriate for mod assets made from scratch that truly use the sRGB color gamut. Such assets can be made suitable for this mode using this converter program.

If you would like to try out a preview of NTSC-J mode:

• Make a backup of your FFNx files!
• Download this preview build and extract to your FF7/FF8 directory, overwriting files.
• Make sure that FFNx.toml includes enable_ntscj_gamut_mode = true

Some notes on mod compatibility:

• As expected, SYW's upscales look great in NTSC-J mode.
• Ninostyle models also look good. These hew closely enough to the original palette that I'd say NTSC-J mode is more "right" for them than sRGB mode.
• ESUI and Finishing Touch don't look good. These were made from scratch in the sRGB gamut. So I've made some unofficial versions using inverse conversions that should look like the sRGB originals when used in NTSC-J mode.
• (That link also has a "compatibility pack" mod that forces some mods to work together in the way I want them to, includes color range and banding fixes for SYW's videos, a new "buster" screen, SNES-style button icons, and misc stuff.)
• Avalanche Arisen is a mixed bag. Uprisen increased brightness and saturation in many places, which is sometimes too much for NTSC-J mode, and sometimes too little for sRGB mode. I'm preparing an inverse conversion to see what that looks like.

   
Github-inclined people can review the pull request including NTSC-J mode here.

2

Troubleshooting / Tool for Converting FF7 PC Menu Textures?

« on: 2020-03-01 08:25:06 »

Is there a tool for converting the menu .tex files for FF7 PC to a readily-editable format, then back again? I've tried the following:

• TexTool -- produces png output with wrong colors.
• FF7 Tex Image Tool -- crashes
• img2tex -- crashes

(This issue seems to be limited to the menu textures. I tried TexTool to extract seffect1 and it seems to have worked perfectly.)

Some context:
My ultimate goal is to get a smooth font into Reunion R06+. I started out by plopping in the .png textures from Enhanced Stock UI, and quickly ran into two problems:

• The text in the dialogs looks like it was kerned by a madman. Probably because FF7 has no kerning functionality and the widths of the replacement font's glyphs aren't in proportion with the widths on the original glyphs.
  • The solution for this is obvious, if tedious: Extract and convert the original textures, vector trace them in fontforge, make up a .png using the traced glyphs. The problem is that I don't have a tool that can properly convert the original textures.
• It looks like Reunion R06 is ignoring the supplied .png textures in the \CUSTOM\ folder in favor of some .tex files in \BASE\New-Translation\. I'm guessing everything run through FF7's menu module is doing this.
  • It seems that the solution would be to convert Reunion's .tex files to see what changes were made, incorporate those changes into my .png files, then convert my .png files into .tex and replace Reunion's files. The problem, again, is that I don't have a tool for converting to .tex. (At least, if it can't get the conversion right the other way, I don't trust it to get this way right.)