FF8 - What's the deal with the textures?

[DLPB_]

I don't come to this section often... but what's with the boxes around the textures?  Those should not be visible. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B43luAxFZKC-alNyMGUtclBqams/view?usp=sharing

[Mcindus]

I don't come to this section often... but what's with the boxes around the textures?  Those should not be visible. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B43luAxFZKC-alNyMGUtclBqams/view?usp=sharing

It has something to do with the way alpha channels are handled in the attacks/magics... some kind of weird 'blue' glow where the atlas tile is being cut out from the master atlas texture.  I saw this a lot as I compiled all of the spell textures for the game.  Does this also happen with Aali's driver?

[DLPB_]

No idea.  But it does with Steam...

[Mcindus]

No idea.  But it does with Steam...

Well, what would help you dissect this problem?  Anything I can do to help?

[DLPB_]

I can't fix it   Graphics not my thing.  I guess this is mostly for someone like Aali to deal with.

[Mcindus]

I can't fix it   Graphics not my thing.  I guess this is mostly for someone like Aali to deal with.

Damnit.  Well I guess until we mod it, it will stay like that.  For some reason, the game is applying the 'bloom' effect or whatever it's using for the attacks to the entire texture, regardless of alpha information. someone wasn't very diligent in their porting.

[Kaldarasha]

I think that FF7 has the same issue. It's probably because of the way how they solved it to display transparency on psx which isn't easy to takeover to PC. It pretty much looks like as if they used the brightness of the pixels to calculate the opacity of them, instead to use the texture/pallet with transparency information.

[DLPB_]

The transparency should just be "black = transparent" I think?  0 colour = transparent.  But like everything else, ff7 ports for ff7 and 8 were slap dash and half assed.

[Maki]

The transparency should just be "black = transparent" I think?  0 colour = transparent.

Yes.

Did you try disabling filtering and testing it afterward? This might be related to their rendering enchantments.

[Mcindus]

I think that FF7 has the same issue. It's probably because of the way how they solved it to display transparency on psx which isn't easy to takeover to PC. It pretty much looks like as if they used the brightness of the pixels to calculate the opacity of them, instead to use the texture/pallet with transparency information.

If this is the case, then a tonberry mod should definitely fix the problem.  good thing i've been working on one... with fated courage

[Kaldarasha]

This might be not entirely correct, but as I said I think that the Gears engine does use an extra texture to define where the model is transparent and were not. Take a look at this:
Of course this is from FFX a PS2 game, but it shows exactly what I mean.

Because the real transparency texture isn't used and only a transparency by brightness is used instead, we see these strange box like effects. So far I can tell that even the remastered FFX version has this issue, but I can only see that is an issue for the hair so far.

[Mcindus]

This might be not entirely correct, but as I said I think that the Gears engine does use an extra texture to define where the model is transparent and were not. Take a look at this:
Of course this is from FFX a PS2 game, but it shows exactly what I mean.

Because the real transparency texture isn't used and only a transparency by brightness is used instead, we see these strange box like effects. So far I can tell that even the remastered FFX version has this issue, but I can only see that is an issue for the hair so far.

Tonberry dumps the VRAM files as bmps with a tranparency layer.  For some reason, the transparency layer is only 50% greyscale/black instead of 100% white/black alpha, but I think the game converts the 127 (grey) value into 255, much like how games only use the blue channel for the Z information in a normal map, which is 'blue' by nature, because 128-255 is positive Z info, and 0-127 is negative (most games don't use negative z information in normal maps).  For some reason, the PC version isn't assigning a 'pure' alpha black to the magic textures. It could be that the 'bloom' or whatever is added as a post processing effect is making it 'glow' because of that fact, but I think Tonberry can cirumvent that.  I'll post screenshots that demonstrate what I mean, and see if i can 'whip up' a quick fix demonstration using Tonberry.