Enhancing backgrounds: is it possible ?

[Salk]

Hello people!

After applying with some success fitlers to the low resolution ingame movies, I was just thinking that now FF VII PC version is in even greater need of making the static background look less pixelated and rough.

I have extracted the background files (flevel.lgp) using LGP tools but the files - uncompressed by the same program - come with no file extension.

Is it possible to open such files in some way and retouch them and then compress them back into a new flevel.lgp ?

Before you say "Gast" let me tell you that it crashes as I try opening any of those files...  

Thanks for reading this!  

[Wuz]

i don't know about the static backgrounds but i'm interested in your success of making the movies look better. Before you tell me what you did can you show some before and after screenshots?

I'm going to go have a fiddle now...

[Borde]

Nop, it's not possible to enhace backgrounds (yet, at least) . Even if you could re-insert the backgrounds after making the resolution higher, they would overflow the screen in-game (and thus you would only see a fraction of the background).
Maybe it will be possible one day, but as I said, not yet.

[Salk]

Borde,

my idea would not be to reinsert them with an higher resolution. Just to apply, if possible, filters like HQ2X to the image and then recompress them into flevel.lgp

Do you think this could be possible ? And do you perhaps know how I can open and edit those files without extensions that can be read so far only by Gast (too buggy) ? Thanks!

WeZMoT,

I have simply applied a couple of filters to the .avi files. Nothing fancy. There is a small improvement over the original but I won't upload screenshots here as the single screenshots don't give a realistic idea.

[Borde]

Well, the problem is that aplying HQ2X filter without making the resolution higher it would just destroy detail without enhacing them at all. You can try it. Get a background, apply HQ2X, reduce the image to it's original size and compare it to the original image.
Anayway, if you simply want to do it, there is no program yet to reinsert the backgrounds after modiffying them. The format is already mostly decrypted (if it wasn't we wouldn't even be able to display them), but no-one has bothered making a program to reencode BMPs into level files (probably because right now is completly useless).

[Chrisu]

I think the_saint managed some filtering...
look in his first post in high res patch