Messages

51

Completely Unrelated / Re: We have an official Pirate Party! Arrrr, matey!

« on: 2009-09-01 03:24:32 »

Both good points, I never understood the issues with YouTube myself. The quality is low enough that nobody is seriously going to want to convert the audio to MP3 most likely anyways, there's absolutely no comparison between the video and the real McCoy. Mods should be allowed entry into fair usage in my opinion. There's a few rare cases of crap changing ratings or whatever, but for the most part mods extend the life of games and build communities. One need only look at Morrowind and Oblivion to know this. Copyright has crept into that, even. One of the biggest breakthroughs was quickly shutdown by Bethesda: A program that essentially imported Morrowind into the Oblivion engine. Nevermind the fact it would have increased sales for Morrowind by effectively turning it into a retro expansion for Oblivion, IT'S BREAKING TEH COPYRIGHT LAWS!!! 

Porting content from one game to another of the same company and still breaking the law... sound familiar to anyone here? 

52

Completely Unrelated / Re: We have an official Pirate Party! Arrrr, matey!

« on: 2009-09-01 01:05:27 »

On a more serious level, it's hard to make a decision one way or another about the pirate parties. On one hand, I agree that copyright crushes innovation, but on the other hand, it also breeds higher quality efforts. Look what this forum could do without the Final Fantasy VII copyright. On the other hand, would there even be a Final Fantasy VII without copyright to protect the efforts invested in it? Probably not.

The current system is a reward system. You work your ass off, you get paid money. It works. How many companies would still be pumping out games today if they had to make them for free? People need to eat. Or even worse, imagine games with advertisements periodically breaking the momentum. Sponsored gaming companies. I don't see that working out well.


In conclusion, yeah copyright is a crap concept, but it's the lesser of two evils in my opinion. sh*t rolls downhill. We can argue all day that it's only the top CEOs or whatever who are being hurt by piracy, but they're going to keep their money no matter what. They don't take smaller cuts because you steal from them, they'd rather just start firing people to save costs.

On the flipside, picture a world without copyright. Basically, take every A-list game and toss it. Only play indie games. Yeah, it'd be like that. People would have no income from developing and thus have to hold a job. Holding a job takes time, and leaves want for spare time. All this is less time to develop a game. Teams wouldn't come together like they would with the lure of money.

And mind you, this is only concerning games. It's not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to copyright. Our ENTIRE CIVILIZATION is based on a community, reward-based system. You put up with crap 8 hours a day so that in the end, you are given more luxury and better products that can only come from a massive team effort. Sure, you can get rid of that, but then you'd have to kiss so many modern conveniences goodbye.

Copyright sucks, but it could be a hell of a lot worse. Maybe there's a solution out there, but it's not abolishing copyright completely. There still needs to be that reward.

53

Archive / Re: New Materia

« on: 2009-08-31 23:17:41 »

Yeah, we'd definitely need to expand the menu to hold more spells. Right now it's configured to hold the existing ones and nothing more. This, on top of the spell ID debacle as you pointed out.

More or less just agreeing with you here.

54

FF7Voice / Re: Regarding Ficedula's Custom music...

« on: 2009-08-31 23:14:07 »

As of the last time I worked alongside the project, this was not the case. I had custom MP3 soundtrack and the voices playing just fine. Hope this eases your concern, somewhat.

55

General Discussion / Re: Texture Artist

« on: 2009-08-31 23:12:45 »

Thanks for the heads-up, I was confused there for a bit.

56

General Discussion / Re: Texture Artist

« on: 2009-08-31 23:08:54 »

I already know it's impossible/extremely difficult to attempt, but I was thinking the other day how cool it would be to have particle effects in the menu, like when you equip materia it glows a little and sparkles around it then dies down, you know what I mean? Little touches like that really make my day.

Unfortunately, it would seem the only way to accomplish such a task would be to use some complicated injection method, unless the menu supports animated textures like the field does (thinking about materia shining). Even then you'd have to find a way to stop the animation after it's over.

Or rewrite the game from scratch. 

57

Archive / Re: New Materia

« on: 2009-08-31 23:00:29 »

Yeah that's what I was thinking/worried about, since the movie IDs are in there as well. I think exe hacks are best avoided, but there might not be a better solution. In addition, it's out of my realm of things I can do. 

58

Archive / Re: New Materia

« on: 2009-08-31 22:46:51 »

Oh man, it's been awhile I don't even remember. I went through several trying to get different results, but no dice. Several were in the 100s series, and I think I tried the few scattered ones in the double digits that weren't being used. I think you can substitute the choco/mog attack for a magic attack, but then you can't place that elsewhere - because I remember trying to swap that attack around to buy an extra magic attack ID, but there weren't any open summon slots to place the choco attack back into after I had done so.

I wonder if the IDs are stored in the menu.lgp, seeing how they fit perfectly into the magic menu at a predetermined location, and those IDs are called upon and given a title by kernel.bin afterwards. But it's a wild guess, at best.

Edit: Nevermind, just a bunch of textures in there.

59

Archive / Re: New Materia

« on: 2009-08-30 22:53:01 »

It's easy until you actually try to add completely new materia with completely new magic spells. The problem is that somewhere, attacks are identified as being a certain type. Even though there are lots of dummied attack IDs, trying to turn them into spells and make them appear (much less function...) is a pain in the ass task.

Summary:


Possible:
New materia with pre-existing spell sets
New materia with new spells, having overwritten previous ones

Not Possible (at least not without pioneering):
New materia with completely new spells

Awhile back I was working on the last one as part of a project I'm working on, which I ran into a wall with and haven't really attempted to break ground there since that's low priority. Still, it would be nice to be able to do and would bring materia mods away from being just a novelty and into a full blown aspect of modding.

60

Archive / Re: NEW RULES! About Ripping Models/Transplanting Models from other games (Ports

« on: 2009-08-01 20:43:08 »

Guys, nobody is stopping you from porting. Nobody. You just can't talk or post about it here. I think maybe two people agree with Halkun, I don't myself (since as I've stated pretty much anything you mod can get you a C&D), but it's a forum. We've already had a couple cases of people being shelled C&Ds for porting KH material into FF7, and Halkun probably just doesn't want to deal with it.
Yes, it sucks. Sucks big time, half the forum's motivation probably just took a shit (so long FF7 remake). But the conditions of using this forum include following the rules. If you still want to port, that's cool, you just can't here. The internet is huge. Hint hint.

That is all.

61

Archive / Re: Ultima espio and neocloudstrife Crisis core model project

« on: 2009-08-01 16:02:27 »

This is true, although that's also a lot of work, and if you did that'd be @*%&^ awesome but if you don't I think everyone would understand. Best of luck regardless of what you guys decide.

62

Archive / Re: Ultima espio and neocloudstrife Crisis core model project

« on: 2009-08-01 15:38:29 »

Why is everyone down about it? He just said he wasn't going to release anything. APZFreak's KH Cloud deja vu, anyone?

63

Archive / Re: NEW RULES! About Ripping Models/Transplanting Models from other games (Ports

« on: 2009-08-01 15:31:29 »

Bottom line here is, Square considers any tearing apart of their games illegal, whether it actually is or not. It doesn't matter if content is ported or made from scratch. The best anyone can do is not do something too blatantly terrible like porting half the game into FF7. Regardless, this rule is a forum rule and not a legal rule and must be followed (at least if you plan on staying here at Qhimm)

Does anymore need to be said, really? This topic ought to be locked.

64

Archive / Re: Succesfully converted Cloud from Crisis Core

« on: 2009-07-30 22:29:32 »

What's funny is that the meshes used in the original models seem almost superior than those used in Crisis Core. Overall though the Crisis Core ones just plain look better thanks to better texturing.

I agree though that the custom made models are way better by far. Sucks to see the porting issue still stands here. I can practically hear the gears grinding as they shift back down now.

65

Archive / Re: [Release] Otokoshi's Videos

« on: 2009-07-29 00:00:30 »

@TS
does this have the exact frame rate as the original movie file? 

As far as timing goes, there's no noticeable difference - it's a drop-in component. I know he mentioned in his old topic that he had to change the frame rate a little to make the video timing correct, but whether this change was from the original movie file or after processing his own... don't know. I'm sure he'll give you an answer. In either case, it fits in perfectly but if you want it for other purposes you should just go off the original movie.


Otokoshi, good to see someone else rolled up their sleeves and opened up Meteor. It's a fairly easy program to use, it just takes forever to learn the opcodes since the Qhimm Wiki's information - while totally correct - seems REALLY hard to decipher. Certain tasks, like getting an NPC to move how you want it, it also incredibly tedious but that's another topic altogether and irrelevant to movies.

66

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: Kernel2.bin Size Restriction

« on: 2009-07-28 23:51:52 »

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try when I'm back at my usual machine.

67

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Kernel2.bin Size Restriction

« on: 2009-07-27 01:29:32 »

Why the limit? Can it be changed? "Not feasible" doesn't matter, I just want to know where the restriction is and how it might be hypothetically removed.

68

Archive / Re: [Release] Otokoshi's Videos

« on: 2009-07-26 02:12:44 »

This video does not work with FF7, so I was going to redo these videos and release new Hi-res ones which work with Aali's custom driver.  That is if there are less assholes on this forum such as titeguy3 

Just remember that all projects should be more because YOU want to see it and not because you think anybody else wants to. You're only going to make so many people happy and there's always going to be a critic.

Also, I never understood people getting uptight about necroposting. It's comical, really.

On to something more useful;

So from the other topic Otokoshi, I gather you've sorted out how to change the frame count in the field script?

69

Releases / Replacement FMVs for FFVII

« on: 2009-07-24 00:09:00 »

This is exactly the kind of questions I PM'd you about a while ago Tsetra.  As I've seen your expertise with Meteor. 

I apologize, I completely forgot about that until just now.You really gotta bug me with PMs or I'll forget as I'm not on here much anymore - demanding summer job. It sounds like you've tinkered with Meteor enough to do what was needed yourself? That's great, if so!

70

Releases / Replacement FMVs for FFVII

« on: 2009-07-23 05:46:42 »

It's more of a length constraint, seeing how you have to time everything just perfectly in order to make all field events happen as intended. Eventually, you're either raising the FPS to ridiculous amounts to squeeze it into a smaller time window or stretching it out to 10 to make it longer. As far as I know the engine itself can handle any FPS you feed it, but the field files count the frames in a movie and use that to determine it's length, in turn using that to dictate when the next events in the field script take place.

Edit - Well, technically it sets the amount of frames which can be changed in the field files to accommodate a smaller or larger movie. In this case, you'd probably want to extend the frames so the movie could be longer and at a much smoother 30 FPS. The results of too long of a movie are that field events take place earlier than they ought to. This is actually something I want to take advantage of for the intro, timing where the movie hangs to match up with where AVALANCHE comes out and knocks out the guards. This would have the effect of making the movie the background until after Cloud jumps down from the train, completely eliminating the transition from movie to background until a point it can be done much smoother.

71

Releases / Replacement FMVs for FFVII

« on: 2009-07-23 04:50:44 »

Is anyone interested in really going all out for the intro? Now that we can play higher quality videos, I'm kinda excited about this. I'm fairly good with Meteor and can do away with the frame rate issue. I was thinking of having the intro play out like this:

PS3 demo intro with the new logo COMPLETELY up to when the train enters the station. No transition. The movie then hangs at the same frame where the train is completely stopped and the characters come out and knock the guards down. Barret comes out, waves to Cloud, and the movie cuts to PS3 demo Cloud jumping down off the train, swinging his sword, and the movie ends with his smirk and fades, leaving the player looking behind Cloud and ready to begin controlling him.

Alternatively, PS3 demo could go up until it stops at the reactor and fade away, leaving the background intact. Avalanche could come out and do their thing, wave to Cloud, and using one of the two unused movie codes, a completely new movie could be added showing Cloud jumping off the train.

I think the first method would look cleaner, even if it weren't as technically of a cool feat as the second. Besides, using the second method would free up the second extra movie so that, if wanted, yet another movie could be added to depict a cutscene in the game.



Another movie I intended on doing was the scene where Cloud escapes from the guards after the mission. When he jumps off the train, the movie could cut to Cloud jumping off the train from the PS3 demo, show the shot of him landing on the ground, but only enough so that you can't really discern the background, then cutting to the Crisis Core ending movie where Cloud is in a similar position kneeling on the train with his sword in front of him (making it look like he jumped onto the train and landed in this position). Cut to Cloud standing up on the train as it rides off into the distance, finally cutting back to the train wrapping around the pillars, where it ends.


I would do these things myself but I seem to have no luck editing videos and getting them to work properly. However, I'd be more than glad to help out anyone willing to really do the opening sequence justice.

72

Releases / Millenia's custom models

« on: 2009-07-23 04:14:47 »

Kudos finding the original kanji for the hardedge, halkun! I'm studying japanese and I couldn't make out what the pic said, either.

The butterfly sword looks nice, but isn't it missing a materia slot..?

I  second this!

lol... It looks wrong to me..... sorry.
I needs the second materia slot.. if its going to be to the original..........

Hard Edge is also missing it's slots on the side of the hand guard as well. I guess it's just a matter of accepting what's been given.

73

Releases / Millenia's custom models

« on: 2009-07-22 14:36:23 »

Yeah I didn't have a side reference picture in Max, I just looked at pics and roughly estimated the proportions etc so everything might not be exactly in place, sorry D:

No worries, I was just curious. It's a pretty common mistake I see in a lot of mods, in fact I did the same thing the first time I drew it since I drew it completely from memory.
New swords are looking crisp, good stuff. I'm interested to see your take on Ultima Weapon now. 

74

Releases / Millenia's custom models

« on: 2009-07-22 01:00:28 »

I hate to have this be my first post in the topic and sound like a douche, but my curiosity is getting the better of me. Are the holes in the buster sword intended to be off-center for some reason? The buster sword is supposed to have them directly in the middle of the blade, right above the handle. This is otherwise the definitive model IMO as it stays true to the original instead of the Crisis Core/PS3 Demo remodel. Kudos for going that route, I agree 100% - the nuts-and-bolts style of the original is superior to the newer stuff.

75

Archive / Re: FF7 Hi-Res Patch

« on: 2009-05-04 15:42:00 »

Make sure you are using the version 1.02 patch for Final Fantasy VII and don't install any other patches before the high-resolution one. It should then pass the CRC32 check.