Messages

101

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2011-08-28 16:01:20 »

Unfortunatley slower than expected. I'm finding hard to spend time programming anything outside the job ever since I started working. That coupled with the difficulties I had to start working with COLLADA DOM didn't make the project any good. But it will get done eventually.

102

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2011-08-27 19:14:02 »

Thanks for the support guys.

As for your whishlist StrayOff, I'm afraid Kimera will pretty much stay the way it is right now. Hope the COLLADA converter I'm working on will fill some of the gaps, though. Anyway, just a small clarification: the FF7 data file extensions can actually be associated with Kimera since v0.8, if I recall correctly.

103

Completely Unrelated / Re: Learning C++ - Is there no better way?

« on: 2011-08-27 19:01:36 »

No problem. And good luck. Learing to code can be very frustrating but, in the end, I think it pays.

104

Completely Unrelated / Re: Learning C++ - Is there no better way?

« on: 2011-08-27 18:01:49 »

If you don't know programming I advice you against trying to start with C++. There are languages way simplier and best fit for beginners. I'd suggest starting with Visual Basic or even C#/Java. Once you get at least understand the basics of those learning C++ will be way easier.

I'd also advice you against using videotutorials. Learing to program is a task that usually implies extensive copy/pastig code and then modifying it.

105

Releases / Re: [REL] Menu Overhaul Project

« on: 2011-08-02 23:03:39 »

NPOT stands for non-power of two. Some old Gfx cards (specially integrated ones) just don't support textures that aren't square and with a resolution that is a power of two. This seems to be your case WrathOcasteR. I guess you could open those textures with your favourite image editor and just scale them by yourself to some more fitting resolution.

106

FF7 Tools / Re: Image2Tex - 24bits textures for FF7

« on: 2011-08-02 20:39:17 »

Hello everyone. I've uploaded a new version of this program. I just added support for batch processing (as requested by DLBP). Just press the "Mass process" button and select all the files you want to get converted. Works in both directions.

107

Releases / Re: [REL] Final Fantasy VII FMV Restoration

« on: 2011-07-22 14:34:49 »

There are some videos that have no music. That's correct, because the game uses a midi there.

108

Troubleshooting / Re: Serious graphic issue... please help

« on: 2011-07-16 21:37:54 »

Are you using Aali's driver? Those glitched palletes look a lot like the kind of thing you could see with the original graphics engine. Remember running the setup and selecting there Aali's custom driver instead of the other options (software, d3d and OGL).

109

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2011-07-15 17:32:16 »

This needs to be elaborated on.  Please and thank you

Well Obesebear It's some old pending job actually. Nearly 2 years ago I said I'd do some kind of 3D Studio importer. Someone suggested using COLLADA so I took a look at it, but then I got bussy with other things and my idea remained frozen until now. My idea is to finally takle this task and let people have a decent way of making their own animations (or at least interpolating them to 60 FPS) and generaly simplify the pipeline for those working with a real 3D modeling package.

6 years ago... wow, where does time go.  Better late than never, and you are under no obligations to anyone.

Time sure flies DLPB... it's kind of depressing, but I guess it somehow shows we're still alive. Which is nice.

110

FF7 Tools / Re: Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2011-07-14 22:48:00 »

Well, well... sure it's been a while. I finally found some time to spend on Kimera and ironed a couple of bugs. Turns out the reason why 3ds files were untextured in-game was because I didn't pay enough attention to information kindly provided by Aali. Well, serves me right. The problem was with a flag on the render states (you can now edit them on the groups properties) that was telling the game to not draw any textures.

By the way, I encourage you to play with the render states and the blending modes. You can get pretty interesting results with some imagination.

Some will say this is too few too late. And probably they will be right. But I've been busy with real life and Kimera became quiet a chore. Besides, it looks like every VB6 program it's doomed when Windows 8 gets released, becasue MS has decided to cese any kind of support for it (I guess they have decided it's time to push VB.Net of once and for all). Don't expect any more updates (maybe some bugfix, but nothing major). This project is pretty much dead.

On the other hand, I'm working on something else that may interest you all.

See you around.

111

General Discussion / Re: FFVII and FFVIII are on steam but are not released!!!

« on: 2011-07-10 00:07:59 »

It worked for any video card in software renderer mode. There were games released back then that relied exclusively on Glide (such as the demo version of FF7, for example) and thus were out of reach for anyone with an ATI or NVIDIA card. The videos looked horrible, I give you that, and I can't really understand why they actually went for the true motion codec (though if memory serves me right, most videos back then had serious compresion artifacts). The minigames lacked frame limiter but so did many complete games. Vincent dancing like a ballerina was ilarious, but I bet most people haven't been fortunate enough to see that on they whole life. Mapping the default keys to the num pad was a strange decision, but I don't think the guys at Edios ever considered anyone would be playing the game on a lapotop (few people had them and using one of those to play videogames probably wasn't a very wise idea).

Don't get me wrong Covarr, I know they could have done far better. And hell, the game certainly deserved a better job. But I frankly think what we got wasn't very far from what you could expect from most PC games back on 1998.

112

General Discussion / Re: FFVII and FFVIII are on steam but are not released!!!

« on: 2011-07-09 23:11:38 »

I don't really understand why there is so much hate against the FFVII PC port. Sure it could have been better but calling it abysmal sounds pretty harash. There were LOTS of games back then that couldn't run at any higher resolution than 640x480 and MIDI wasn't that uncommmon either. Crashes? Sure there were some, but that's something common even nowadays (and back on the day, with Windows 95/98 running on the background, what else could you realistically expect?). Compatibility probelms? Hell yes, but that's also extremely common ever since Windows XP became mainstream (and it only gets worse with every new version). And with all the job done by the commutnity, it works just great even on Windows 7 x64, an OS that can't even handle games from 2003 such as Beyond Good and Evil (due to a friggin incompatibility with the installer). I'd be glad if the guys at Square realized it's stupid trying to fix a game that it's already completly fixed. Is it that hard for them to give proper credit to the people around here and just use their work?

All in all, I'd definitely get this on Steam if they released it. But yeah, doesn't look like it's gonna happen, ever.

113

Releases / Re: FF7Music Installer

« on: 2011-07-09 16:41:20 »

Thanks for taking the time to do create this installer Covarr, it worked great. Just would like to point out that the input/output Winamp plug-in paths are wrong by default. It seems to be looking for them at C:\FF7Music\ regardless the path where you actually installed FF7Music. But then again, that a very minor problem.

As for FinalFanTim's job with the music, very good job too. Sounds nice and has none of the problems other custom osts exhibit.

114

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2011-07-04 18:39:16 »

Actually there is something you could take a look at for us borde. We had experimented with interpolating battle models so we could run smooth at 60fps. I had modified kimera to do it. While it sometimes worked well some of the animations got screwed up. Unfortunately i do not have the source code to show you what I did. I remember obesebear mentioning something about quaternions a while back. Also ntfic1 had looked into the camdat files a little bit but we were not able to interpolate those entirely. Perhaps you would be able to give us a hand with this? Take a look at this thread to see what we are doing. http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=10474.0

I'll do my best.

115

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2011-07-03 16:02:27 »

This project is really impresive guys! Back on the day, when Aali released Palmer I guessed it would be used be only to apply some fancy filters to the backgrounds. Now I see all those screenshoots and still can't belive you took the time to actually redo the backgrounds from scratch. I guess expecting all the backgrounds to be redone some day is simply absurd, but even just having the bombing mssion in high resolution would kick ass. If there is something I can help you with (I don't think so but still...) just ask and I'll do what I can. Whish you a lot of luck!

Guilkwe, there is no way you can change the resolution of the backgrounds for the PSX version, so this is kind of thing really only makes sens on PC.

116

Graphical / Re: [WIP] FL's Battle-Scene/World-map Enhancement

« on: 2011-06-27 22:03:59 »

If I remember corretly Aali worked on that and found out that the format itself was way too restrictive and the map poly-count could only be improved by using some kind of overlay. Could have misunderstood him, though.

About Gold Saurce, I think it was stored in an independet P file (just like the rocket) and thus it could be changed easily.

117

FF7 Tools / Re: [WIP] Keystone v1.1

« on: 2011-06-24 22:18:17 »

Excelent Omzy. It's nice to see you found out the missing pieces of the format description. Good luck with the project.

118

FF7 Tools / Re: [WIP] Keystone v1.1

« on: 2011-06-23 18:38:01 »

Jejeje! Glad to see you still around too sl1982. Sure I've been away for a while...
But I see you guys have been working though all this time. Looks like I've got a lot to catch up with.

119

FF7 Tools / Re: [WIP] Keystone v1.1

« on: 2011-06-23 17:38:32 »

I recall there was a command-line LGP unpacker/packer (Highwind, created by Aali, if I remember correctly) and also a command-line LZS decompressor/compressor made by Qhimm ages ago. I'd suggest you using those. As for decoding tha background data, I must warn you I used that format desription long ago (I think it hasn't changed, but I could be wrong) and I didn't get too far. The resulting images had several artifacts and for some of them I couldn't even get anything recognizable. Palmer must use some way more complete format description. Maybe Aali decoded it himself? I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, whish you a lot of luck, because I think this could be quiet useful. I thought about doing something like this long ago. But so many things got in my way I never even started

120

FF7 Tools / Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2010-03-07 15:37:34 »

Thanks for the suggestion alloy. That could actually be rather easier. I'll give it a try.

121

FF7 Tools / Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2010-02-27 21:53:22 »

Well, to be fair I'm growing incresingly tired of Kimera, so I'm seriously thinking about doing some 3D Studio script to do the import/export job.

122

FF7 Tools / Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2010-02-22 22:37:13 »

Interesting... i'll see what i can do about that.

123

FF7 Tools / Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2010-01-12 20:54:52 »

Thanks a lot Grimmy. This information will be very useful.

124

FF7 Tools / Kimera: FF7 p model simple editor

« on: 2010-01-03 00:19:21 »

Thanks Grimmy. Let me know if you find anything wrong.

125

General Discussion / Re: Soldier library : a dotNET library for creating Final Fantasy 7 hacking tools

« on: 2010-01-03 00:02:47 »

You had a very good idea lasyan3. Not my field, but I'm sure someone around here will find these library useful. Thanks for your contribution.

Anyway, I think it would be a good idea to include an english version of the descriptions on your website. Some people may not bother looking at the docs thinking they are also in french.