Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v.1-.7.6]

[DLPB_]

Too bad your driver doesn't work with no cd versions. It's kind of lame to write a tool that works only with legit copy while the tool itself is 100% illegal... same goes for modding this game.

it is lame to write things for ungrateful arse holes.  You go and make it.

[obesebear]

Hey Aali, I haven't quite got my game back up and running yet.   I'm still trying to get all the patches I'll need / want, and I came across grimmy307's FMV replacements. So on to my question.

With your new driver, is it possible that he could make movies at a higher resolution than 320x240 (or whatever it is) and your driver allow it to play properly?  I know you can add support for other movie formats... but what about resolution?

[Aurenasek116]

it is lame to write things for ungrateful arse holes.  You go and make it.

No thanks, however I'd like to see you do anything in 3D then

[Aali]

Hey Aali, I haven't quite got my game back up and running yet.   I'm still trying to get all the patches I'll need / want, and I came across grimmy307's FMV replacements. So on to my question.

With your new driver, is it possible that he could make movies at a higher resolution than 320x240 (or whatever it is) and your driver allow it to play properly?  I know you can add support for other movie formats... but what about resolution?

It can play any resolution correctly already, as long as the aspect is the same as the original movie it'll work just fine.

[Aali]

Too bad your driver doesn't work with no cd versions. It's kind of lame to write a tool that works only with legit copy while the tool itself is 100% illegal... same goes for modding this game.

There is nothing illegal about this driver. Distributing and using it shouldn't be illegal anywhere (it does not contain anything Squeenix or Eidos could claim as their own), there's no EULA and my country doesn't have any insane laws about reverse engineering.

You shouldn't talk about this at all on this forum (because it has been done to death and you wont change our minds) and you know it.

[G3nius]

However there are legal precedents when the reverse-engineering is aimed at interoperability of file formats and protocols.[1][2] In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act grants a safe harbor to reverse engineer software for the purposes of interoperability with other software.[3][4] In addition, many countries specifically permit a program to be copied for the purposes of reverse engineering.

1. Sega vs Accolade, 1992
2. Sony vs Connectix, 2000
3. 17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201(f).
4. WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act

(This text was written about Skype protocol in wiki, but I think it could be used in this case)

[Terid__K]

Really, it doesn't work with No-CDs? Because I'm not using the patch by The Saint for this very reason. I still have my original copy from the 90's, and there's no way in hell I'll play a game in the PC with a CD in 2009. I'm doing the same thing with FF8, bought the game back in the 90's and playing with No-CD nowadays. The FF8 laucher DOES work with the No-CD version though...

Guess I'll have to stick with standard resolution then.

[Aali]

It doesn't work with No-CD cracks because I don't want to support those modified exe's.

Either way, FF7's cdcheck is very forgiving and you certainly don't need the actual CDs in a real CD-ROM drive to play, so I don't see the problem.

[Aurenasek116]

Thankfully my friend seemed to have ff7 on cds so I borrewed it from him, however new problem arises. When I try launching the game (1.02 original exe, patched with lessdebug for FF7 music and yamp patches - transparent windows, minigames, limitbreaking) but the game crashes right after starting, all I get to see is black screen for like 1-2 seconds and then it crashes to desktop. I don't know what the reason could be but is it possible that it's because of my laptop? It doesn't really have a graphic card, it uses Intel GMA945 (A graphic accelerator, which doesn't even have pixel shader 2.0)

Here are 2 screenshots that I took:
http://i373.photobucket.com/albums/oo176/xxSchrodingerxx/pic1.jpg
http://i373.photobucket.com/albums/oo176/xxSchrodingerxx/pic2.jpg

[DLPB_]

Aali....

is it possible to make the game pan more smooth?

I have noticed that when the game is panning side to side (in the field, not on world map or movies), that it jitters.  I do not think this is anything to do with my setup, it seems tpo be a limitation of the game...?

and it did it without ur drivers too....

[Red46]

I didn't notice that, the game runs smooth as silk, it feels way smoother than in d3d. Kudos to aali for that. Perhaps a small bug, if in my control panel at the voice "v-sync" I select "always on unless the application specifies otherwise" and I select true both on the vsync and the minigame fps limiter in the driver configuration, in the minigames there won't be any v-sync.

[Aali]

Thankfully my friend seemed to have ff7 on cds so I borrewed it from him, however new problem arises. When I try launching the game (1.02 original exe, patched with lessdebug for FF7 music and yamp patches - transparent windows, minigames, limitbreaking) but the game crashes right after starting, all I get to see is black screen for like 1-2 seconds and then it crashes to desktop. I don't know what the reason could be but is it possible that it's because of my laptop? It doesn't really have a graphic card, it uses Intel GMA945 (A graphic accelerator, which doesn't even have pixel shader 2.0)

Here are 2 screenshots that I took:
http://i373.photobucket.com/albums/oo176/xxSchrodingerxx/pic1.jpg
http://i373.photobucket.com/albums/oo176/xxSchrodingerxx/pic2.jpg

Check APP.LOG for more information, either version detection failed or you're missing some required OpenGL feature.
You need OpenGL 2.0 (not to be confused with shader model 2.0, which is a d3d thing) to run 0.4b, but this requirement will be gone with 0.5b since I've implemented an OpenGL 1.1 backend. (That one does all the shader stuff on the CPU though, so it'll be slower, perhaps even slower than the original d3d driver)

[Aali]

Seifer Almasy: I haven't noticed that either, but I do know that vsync behaves badly if you can't keep up with the refresh rate (because on a 60hz display it will drop to 30fps and "fight" with FF7s own framelimiter)

Red46: How vsync is handled is very much driver specific, the specs don't require the driver to honor any requests made by the application, so they can basically do whatever they want. (Your driver probably locks the swap interval to 1 and ignores any attempts to change it instead of just disallowing 0)

[Aurenasek116]

Yep, I checked in APP.log, no OpenGL2.0. Too bad my PSU in PC has gone up in flames recently, I wouldn't need to worry about OpenGL problem now.
But I'm not surprised, my laptop is kind of prehistoric now. Hopefully you will be able to release 0.5 soon

[Grimmy]

Aali
So I'm wondering about adding videos of any resolution. I had to use 340x224 to match my vids to original resolution, but I experimented with larger multiples and all that displayed was the top left 340x224 pixels. However if I understand you correctly the larger multiples will be shown full screen. If that's true I've got work to do.

[Aali]

Aali
So I'm wondering about adding videos of any resolution. I had to use 340x224 to match my vids to original resolution, but I experimented with larger multiples and all that displayed was the top left 340x224 pixels. However if I understand you correctly the larger multiples will be shown full screen. If that's true I've got work to do.

0.4b only supports the TM2.0 codec, but movies of *any* resolution should still play fullscreen (with black bar at the bottom to keep 4:3 aspect ratio).
0.5b will support just about every codec you can think of (and then some), the screenshot I posted in the FMV replacement thread was done with a completely unmodified TV rip of Futurama (xvid/mp3, 576x432).


On another note, I just added support for fullscreen post-processing filters, it's a bit slow at the moment and I haven't adapted or written any good filters yet, but here's a screenshot made with a fake bloom filter (originally for Pete's PSX GPU plugin):


That's a pretty bad filter for FF7 though, that was the only scene I could find where it really made a difference, and then it's waay too much instead.

[Grimmy]

Great news and I'll start up again this coming weekend. If I finish editing higher qualities(1280x960) before 0.5 I'll try and do'em using TM2.0. Either way add as may codecs as possible.

[Red46]

I started replaying the game and actually I have to say that playing the game in 640x480, without using the software filter, really makes them look waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay nicer than they used to, I never saw ff7 movies on pc look that good. Graet job again aali.

[Aurenasek116]

(That one does all the shader stuff on the CPU though, so it'll be slower, perhaps even slower than the original d3d driver)

Now that made me think, my laptop has 1.6Ghz core2duo CPU and that brings me a question: Will 0.5 support multi-core CPUs? Or will it utilize only single core out of multicore CPUs?

[Hellbringer616]

(That one does all the shader stuff on the CPU though, so it'll be slower, perhaps even slower than the original d3d driver)

Now that made me think, my laptop has 1.6Ghz core2duo CPU and that brings me a question: Will 0.5 support multi-core CPUs? Or will it utilize only single core out of multicore CPUs?

Thats something i'd like to see, Although i am wondering if there is much of a point to it, Anything on today's market and run FF7 amazingly well. So much so, that we need patches to LIMIT our PC's haha

[Aali]

Multi-threading is not worth the effort. At all. If your CPU has more than one core, it will be able to run FF7 at full speed, even with the relatively slow OpenGL 1.1 backend.

[magixts]

I noticed while trying to run FF7 on my laptop using the driver that there are artifacts in the backgrounds and menus when using a custom resolution like 1280x800. Turning on FSAA in the driver makes the artifacts more apparent while running the game in 640x480 works great even with FSAA enabled.

Would be nice it if you could look into this small issue for a future release.

[Aali]

I've been thinking about implementing a system (part of the postprocessing stuff I'm doing now) that renders at the closest higher "320x240-compatible" resolution internally and then downscales it before displaying, that should look much better.

[Grimmy]

Aali: Can you let me know what program you used to convert that Futurama video to use the TM2.0 codec. I've checked all my software and nothing encodes with that.

[Aali]

Obviously I made that screenshot with the newer version, so I didn't have to convert anything.