Messages

151

FF7 Tools / Re: [REL] Omzy's .MAP -> .OBJ Converter

« on: 2010-09-18 17:38:31 »

Sure, I'll turn off the texture mapping for those 2 (they use an unknown mapping scheme) and post images. Ok, they are posted--see above.

Do you still need the LZS decompression code? I believe I still have this floating in my old code from examining FF7 somewhere. I believe it should be generic enough for your purposes. You might be able to use Q-gears code also. I'll have to check as I fell off the turnip truck on it a while ago. doesn't appear to have it.

Cyb

152

Archive / Re: FF7 PSX videos

« on: 2010-09-18 17:29:50 »

Sorry, poor choice of words. And yes i know what Team Avalanche is doing. I did kind of start it after all.

I know, I just thought it was kind of an odd 'huh moment too me.  Don't worry we aren't out to get you ... yet.

That 'polishing coprolites' article was interesting (they did misspell it however).  I didn't know people were obsessed about such strange things. Very useful however in archaeology to see what people were eating and how healthy they were (I bet you are not surprised). I just had a Conkers Bad Fur day vision (hehehe).

Erstwhile, for TA it would be interesting to render the same sequence using POV for it.  They finally made it SMPS functional etc so it can get beyond the 1000pps on some of the more intense scenes.  Compression of the data might prove to be interesting. However enough of this about that I guess.

As I said earlier AVISynth is an excellent video tool. It surpasses many commercial packages, it's most interesting ability is to be able to read almost ANY type of video. The Motion JPEGs on the PS1 are particularly nasty bits because of how the data is stored (and windows doesn't read ALL the data because it doesn't support Mode 2 type 1 data in the ISO it just supports CD audio <mode 0> data as it is).

That's the big problem with getting the video data out of the PlayStation files.  The audio (ADPCM) uses the full sector (2304  bytes) and the video uses the 2048 first bytes. So it is possible to get the video.

The thing about decoding and improving that video data is as I said earlier it's DCT data. Now DCT data is dimensionless (IE it's not constrained to pixel size per sea), increasing the resolution however is not a subject I understand well however. I know how it works etc. but adding data (think of an 8x8 block of pixels that had the DCT performed on them. the DCT is dimensionless data so the block size must be ASSUMED to be or have information that it 8x8), I suppose this is where quarter and sub pixel compression becomes handy for anti-aliasing purposes.  Another thing is simply moving from using integer DCT to a floating point based one can significantly improve the results. I believe the IDCT is a bit loss-y and has enough truncation error it creates other issues with the image data (namely it doesn't compress as well because of the noise it introduces).  To see what I am talking about just load an image in GIMP (just do a SHIFT-print screen then press SHIFT CTRL V) then go to save it as a JPEG. Select show preview in window and then look at the compressed size, then go to the advanced options and go to DCT methods select floating point and see what the new size is. It will be slightly smaller. On a less manufactured image (IE say a person) the difference is larger.

Anyhow I think it might be a better idea to use the TA video data when available (even if you just want enhanced movies and nothing else). The amount of work necessary to improve the original data will become close to the same as making all new data (as you people are doing). Geesh the number of things that go through ones mind.

Cyb

153

Archive / Re: FF7 PSX videos

« on: 2010-09-17 01:46:19 »

That is actually a fairly impressive redo of the video. I would imagine that is most likely the best we will get out of the source material.

A bit late on that, but that's not a redo it's a refilter and re encode. Redoing it would be what the people in Team Avalanch are doing.  I can't look at it in vdub at the moment but just looking at the video in MPC it is rather interesting to see how well it did on sharp lines such as the hair jaw and eye lashes of Areth. You can see though some of the DCT noise from the lossy compression of the motion JPEG codec. Makes for an interesting subject matter.

In any case I could go on and on about various 'stuff'.  Interesting what the filters managed to do I suppose deblocking and decoding the original data and adding the correct DCT noise/data one could 'add' more detail that was thrown out in the original. I'll have to look at the filters and see what they are up too.

By the way AVISYNTH is AWESOME for this kind of stuff. It has to be run in a batch mode but who cares. Does great stuff (especially if your video editor doesn't like the video format of a file it can act as a YUV/RGB video source for it and decode the video without even batting an eyelash).

Cyb

154

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2010-09-15 23:58:55 »

Hmmmm.....
perhaps I should stop making Hi-res renders.... 

Well actually there is no grass, it is moss.

in the original it is just a brown greenish something.

Remember it's just a hobby! (or something like that)
What modeler and data set type are you using? OBJ set (wavefront)?  I've just recently been abusing sketchup by exporting the data using SU2POV. Interesting stuff.

Am I right in assuming you are using meshes and no finite solid primitives?

I've also been using GCAD3d for taking models and moving them too POV using PoseRay. Nifty stuff. Unfortunately it's not like I have a lot of time but might be interesting to see if I can do a few animations. That will have to wait

There doesn't appear to be any use of radiant light surfaces either so radiosity isn't in the picture likely either. Hmmmm.

Cyb - will speculations never cease LOL

155

Team Avalanche / Re: [TA-BM] -Cinematics FX- Mako Reactor Burnout

« on: 2010-08-24 23:39:50 »

The opening movie consists pf 3 parts:

• Particles (starry sky)
• fade to Aeris, with flowers, zoom out until (almost) all of Midgar is in view,show TA Logo (if there is one, otherwise use FF VII logo  ) zoom in to Midgar trainstation, otherwise known as NMSKIN
• Close up view of train, with sparks

Pretty much.. except the 'Starry sky' is a natural Mako fountain if you notice the 'spring' when they move out from Aeris in the video. So what you are actually looking at is the 'life stream' perhaps spewing out in Midgaar.

These are the parts needed for opening.

if pov has some form of scripting, or file-format , which can contain a camera, animation, mesh....
I think it should be possible, but I'm not quite at home with povray.

Having used POV since it was DKB yes you can do all sorts of stuff with POV it is a general purpose scripting language as well. There are a lot of features such as media radiosity etc. that are handy for Cinematic sequences.  Something for my Linux box to crunch through on as POV is recently added multiple processor support (beta only of course).

The big issue with POV is converting the DATA set you have to something it can process.  That has always been my biggest challenge. Although many things have been improved in that regard in the last several years.

Cyb

156

Team Avalanche / Re: [TA-BM] -Cinematics FX- Mako Reactor Burnout

« on: 2010-08-24 00:39:17 »

actually I was looking more at the opening movie, not the major explosion of the reactor....

WOOPS LOL I was thinking post mission LOL DUH

(click image to see animation)

Target:

• bottom left, reactor (frame from opening), reactor at the right side.
• Top Left, Tech demo PS3
• Reactor 01, just for reference
• NMKIN_4, the source of inspiration for looking for the right effect (raw mako?)

Oh, almost forgot, center, current state of effect...

Ok ... sort of a bluish version of a steam release seen from a conventional reactor cooling tower I guess.

I wonder if the animation information can be abused in something like POV.

Cyb

157

Team Avalanche / Re: [TA-BM] -Cinematics FX- Mako Reactor Burnout

« on: 2010-08-22 20:55:15 »

Here a little test rendering on the Mako Reactor (click image to see animation)

Please C & C.

Also testing a way to upload video, due to bad quality of imageshack.

Actually this is probably a good 'start' before the big BOOM. I'll have to watch the original to see what they did. Need to do a comparison

For video I always use YouTube. They are consistent and they allow HD up to 720p.

Anyhow from me watching the original boom it looks like they have an series of arcs across the reactor surface with the 'gang' visible and then a bigger boom seen over midgar with a shock wave.

Cyb

158

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2010-08-19 20:49:40 »

I'm not yet concerned about the actual textures, for now they're most temporary placements.

I think I'll replace everything with....
<image removed for sanity>
 

LEGO FF7 by LEGO-MY-SOFT

Actually that would be quite humorous to make a LEGO version of the FF7 models

Cyb

159

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2010-08-13 01:06:10 »

I would cautiously give an estimate of 70%. Texturing the field backgrounds is a lot of work.

Indeed it's not like you have a magical spray can to do this.

Side note:
Blender has some handy tools for doing this I've seen. Rather impressive but ... I doubt they are in a state just anyone can use them (IE the person showing them hadn't polished the tool up). One was a face painting tool. Another was an image projector (you could paint the textures based on a source image and continue the painting by using another angle quite interesting approach).

Cyb

160

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: [Xenogears] Level viewer in Python

« on: 2010-08-04 22:06:36 »

Seems transparency is not working fully

The textures contain transparency if you look at them in Gimp. Though I haven't found a way for Blender to pick that up, yet.

Btw, exported textures were all red before I've changed line 558 to
image = pygame.image.fromstring(t, (256, 256), "ARGB", True)
but I am on Linux, so this can be the case.

Probably because I'm on a big endian platform and you're using a little endian pc. Alpha is 255 for most of the pixel, which is red if you reverse the byte order. I'll see if I can fix that if I make another version.

Does python have an endianess check?
A quick glance suggests it does  in ctypes. I know this is a problem sometimes dealing with ARM based architectures as well.

Cyb

161

Team Avalanche / Re: Bombing Mission Cinematics

« on: 2010-08-04 21:37:49 »

The primary problem is the frame to frame jitter not the frame rate correct?
15fps is not great and itself 'jittery' but I believe solving one problem at a time is the best approach.
What I noticed is that the update of the object positions does not seem to be in sync with the camera.
It appeared the camera moved first then the walk mesh was translated. Since the frames are 'close' it isn't noticeable at a distance or when close, it's quite noticeable during the last bit of the pan into the train station.
This may be a bug in the FF7 engine more than anything however. The sequence appears to be, video frame, camera then 3d data.   It would seem to me it should be just the camera moving (but watching everything else update after the video frame then the camera seems to indicate this is not the case).

Just my observation, I could be wrong (wouldn't be the first time LOL).

Cyb

162

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2010-07-27 22:00:54 »

Good point Halkun

I'm too obsessive at stitching every little piece together tbh..

heh if that's the worst thing you do count yourself blessed

Erstwhile each facet on the crystal is similarly shaped triangles you can form the 4 long and short facets into a single rhomboid shape one for short and one for long as an example (that's what I would attempt).
The advantage is that you have more area dedicated to the actual texture. There are lots of other things one can do (repeating patterns in the flame for example) and layering.  I would suggest experimenting. That's how one learns things (by making mistakes or getting feedback from others).

Cyb

163

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2010-07-25 22:47:27 »

Tbh though comfortability for the texture artist > texel density in most cases imo. I personally hate mirroring and overlapping :p

Also, you wouldn't have had to UV it jeff, it had a perfectly fine (if not wasteful) uv map already

Back in the day you didn't have the luxuries you have today. However you might need to be very careful about abusing the UV mapped data in FF7's engine. It's quite dated and it's DB system is likely fairly limited as well. The models are they way they are for a reason. They didn't just color the polygons vertices because "it was cool". They probably had an early data budget. It appears they blew the budget on the CGI movies though as they have 3 sets of data (disks) in the original game.

For save points you probably can stick with colored vertices just as easily as doing UV mapped polygons. They scale very nicely (have you looked at the game in a PS1 emulator at 1600x1200 it looks perfectly fine despite the low poly count models) namely because they aren't saddled with bitmap resolution (resolution independent) for there appearance. If you increase the save point poly count I doubt that would be a problem however once you stick a bitmap on something scaling resolution becomes an issue.

That all said the basic engine may work fine I would be most concerned with making the database too large for the engine to handle (IE indexes out of range). My guess is you should stick under 2gigs (should be able to do that if you don't go UV map crazy).  They made games the way they did for a reason (especially UV maps) as bitmaps eat huge amounts of space (even compressed).

Halkun how big is the data for FF7 in the PC excluding movies?

Cyb

164

Team Avalanche / Re: Verdana Font

« on: 2010-07-19 21:31:27 »

Are you talking about the AC avatars? They're optional, but it is a little odd that avatars based on AC would be part of the project. We'd be better off with higher resolution versions of the normal avatars (which are available already, I believe).

I concur, I do not like the AC bitmaps I've seen floating about, and quite frankly too much 'artistic' license can spoil what was.  I think there is some old saying that says "put new stuff in new stuff and old stuff in old stuff" (the stuff was alcohol in containers but I digress).  Redoing the game using 'yet another persons idea of how they should look' is going to lead to much controversy.  Besides I liked much of the original graphics, there was nothing wrong with them just low resolution by today's standards.  It's too bad all the original artwork is gone from FF7 (much of which was hand drawn) I believe the images were scanned and then pixel edited to improve the image.

Cyb

165

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2010-07-10 20:20:50 »

OMG Cyb! I thought you were dead! (Again)

Cyb has been busy building high power motor controllers and busy with his job (Yes I WORK it's shocking).

My demise has been prematurely speculated I guess?

Erstwhile

In the mean time a play through video demo, hmmm you might go with a 'motion' capture of the game use a toy like 3dx ripper or oglrip to grab the information being passed to the graphics rendering system. You can do some database analysis on it then run it through a 3d pipeline (again) and render the final output in whatever resolution you want. (IE play through in say 640x480 to make it easy then rerender at 720p letter boxed with commentary on the side or what have you). However this stuff might be a bit complex. You also might be able to make a small hack of the FF7 binary to send the frame to a video pin and pipe that through an FFDshow coder then you can select pretty much any output you want MTS (mpeg 2 transport stream)  mpeg 4 such as Divx H.264 xvid etc. Whatever you do, do not use WM9 format (WMV). Biggest abomination on the planet and a royal pain for people.

Most of the 'screen to video' programs are problematic I've found.

Cyb

166

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2010-07-10 17:07:24 »

LOL, I should have quoted halkun (his suggestion to have a demo version).

Have fun creating the video. I never really checked does the opening video have an audio track or is that SEQ PSX data (midi with samples)?  If you are redoing the video, I suggest redoing the audio as well, as the quality can be improved (24bit 48Ksps stereo for example) to enhance the dynamic range. It always seemed a bit shallow on the PS1 audio so I suspect it was 31.25ksps ADPCM stereo (so limited frequency range and the dynamic range was 96db MAX and more likely close to 80db) typical PC sound system (cheap ones) now is 90db with good ones close to 120db. These are noticeably better than the original audio to a untrained ear (and to a professional it's blatantly obvious).  The sound of the SEQ based audio is significantly better than the streamed audio because one can improve the quality independently of the original content.

Cyb

167

Team Avalanche / Re: New Project: Bombing Mission!

« on: 2010-07-10 15:25:35 »

Well let's look at it from a system approach.

The bombing mission demo data could/would be a seperate chunk of data (think field files etc.), not a replacement.
Replacing the data is likely to lead to problems (IE people could loose there data if something goes wrong).
You can take the original bombing mission script and modify it for the new demo set, or create your own (either way).

The last change would be the start up menu with 'demo' added instead of just "new" and continue.

It will likely be necessary to have different battle layout templates (since the demo had 1 to 6 enemies instead).  All in all the amount of script work would be the biggest trouble. 

The replacement 'option' is as I said dangerous. You must have an automatic installation script set up to do all this irregardless of how you get the demo working.

The safe thing to do is copy the files modified into a separate directory then add the new content. I'm not sure how this will affect the FF7 data for the PC (as it's stored in a different manner than the PSX).

Stephen

168

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: Doeas anyone know the answer?(Battle-Scene Models?)

« on: 2010-06-25 21:48:12 »

As you are all aware. I have been messing with the battle-scenes. Since retexturing my first scene, Ive shifted my work into learning exactly how they work and into cataloging the associations for textures with scenes and also converting every texture to psd.

In doing all this research, I cant help but to wonder...Is the 3d hemisphere that the game lays the sky background on a 3d model? It seems it may be so from how it looks when new tex's are applied...
The reason Im wondering is because if we can not create a higher poly'd hemisphere, any texture changes are only going to look so good. I swear that hemisphere looks to have only 2 polys on screen at a time..

Again, I could be wrong, But to me it looks like 2 off-triangles hooked together lol,(keep in mind thats all I can see at once w/o the camera moving, so its higher poly'd than 2 if it IS  a model..) If it isnt a 3d model is there any way we can make it more complex so that it looks much more realistic during movement of the camera?

You may have to inspect the playstation data being sent to the screen. My guess is they are using 2 polygons with gurad shading. I don't recall them having sunsets etc. in the scenes.

Cyb

169

Team Avalanche / Re: New Field backgrounds/CG Cutscenes thread

« on: 2010-02-28 00:00:06 »

I dont know UV mapping. And from the way you make it sound im not sure if i want to learn lol

Well, I've never succesfully unwrapped a models UV's either, but I'm still gonna give it a go. You don't learn unless you try 

You are using Maya correct?
This is one thing I dislike about most modelers is the need to use texture maps instead of generated maps.
By a generated map I mean such as you would use in POV ray ...
example need a grainy stone texture? You can make it in POV.  The nice thing is you can apply it over a huge area and randomize the texture per brick for example. Then you can define your walls using a simple macro (IE you have a brick wall macro) and add the base matrix of data. Add window treatment information to insert at proper locations. IT sounds tedious but if you compare it to manipulating a UV map to stick onto a surface it's childs play by comparison. Mostly because it's just programming once you have the base set of macros done everything almost completely self generates based on that.

I've hated UV mapping since Quake (1 that is Doom didn't have UV mapping on models).

Although POVray supports UV mapping very few people use it because it's tedious and difficult.  It's much easier to spontaneously create the surface color affects for objects than to paste them on. In addition you can tweak the way light reflects off surfaces with relative ease (randomly or what have you).

The big problem with such an approach admittedly is no one uses things like POV for such things, still you can get with a very simple scene extremely impressive results without a huge effort.

The biggest drawback I've noticed is you have to understand PROGRAMMING to use POV effectively.

That I have no problem with but other people I am certain would. I may take a look at Shinra mansion. Is there a particular output format you gents/ladies using?

Cyb

170

Team Avalanche / Re: New Field backgrounds/CG Cutscenes thread

« on: 2010-02-26 23:40:14 »

Model formats arn't much an issue, if anything it'll bt getting the lighting and textures to match between artists.

Have you considered a 'style' method? IE each artist has a section of the game and uses a particular style for all objects within that part?

I think the Shinra Mansion would be a lot of fun to work on for example.
However tempus fugit I have car motors to control


Cyb

171

Team Avalanche / Re: New Field backgrounds/CG Cutscenes thread

« on: 2010-02-26 23:34:33 »

Fun stuff looks like, a question however, I assume these are all custom models? IE basic scene made up from the scene with each building and object uniquely defined?

Just curious because that is a lot of work. Not to say there is an 'easy better way'. Just thinking about it makes me twitch a bit.

I assume you are all using different modelers? Do you have a unified output? (IE a single output format for the models).

Also have any of you seen this image?



Cyb

172

Archive / Re: FF7 PSX videos

« on: 2010-02-20 00:17:17 »

If the FMV's have characters in them then finding the location of things is easier (as they have a sort of walk mesh)

The background images ALL have walk meshes, I suggest working from that perspective. It is entirely feasible to create 3d content that is rendered to the FF7 data format for backgrounds for each scene. It might be slow and complex but you can then make the output content on any scale. I use POV for a lot of stuff like that. I gave up using Open GL because I would get caught up in the OpenGL idiosyncrasis instead of working on creating the 3d data sets to be viewed. The later is what I wanted to do not learn open GL. However OpenGL turned out to be too much fun (go figure). Erstwhile reality is I just need to extract data to mesh data for POV. 

Back to the Avalanche project, good fortune.

Redoing the movies is possible, if you have the background scene for the first background in the game done in 3d then you have a good portion of the opening movie done.
Things you would need to make are the Shinra building (needed for a bunch of backgrounds) the reactors (you need those for a few of your backgrounds anyhow). Bascially as you make data sets and styles they can be reused in animated parts just as easily. Hand drawn although potentially easier is not scalable like 3d data.

if you aren't sure what I'm talking about try povray.org. Lots of good stuff you can do with it.

Cyb

173

Archive / Re: FF7 PSX videos

« on: 2010-02-17 23:44:47 »

PS1 videos are at different framerates. The video data is encoded into the files on the PS1 disk. The key part that many miss is that the PS1 video files cannot be read directly using windows from the original CD. You have to extract the original data from the ISO image. After that you have to parse the video/audio data. The video data is actually designed on 2K sector sizes but the audio data uses 2304 sector sizes. They used the CDI standard (Mode 2) for the interleaving of the data basically. You can split the data streams if you know that much.

What to do with the video streams would be the next 'issue'. As essentially you need to decode the video (which has a specific matrix to transform the motion JPEG DCT data) and then the audio is ADPCM (standard PS1 stereo fortunately). Once you have 'real' raw data. THEN You can do something with it.

I suggest looking around for AVI synth filters (if you can find then) and use AVI synth instead of those clunky GUI based tools.  AVI synth allows you to do some extremely complex filtering without fiddling with YAGI (Yet Another GUI Interface).  However AVI synth is not easy stuff, then again redoing the entire video sequence is not something you can do easily either.

Now if you wanted to go insane you could use the video information as key data points and reproduce the base data used to generate the original video. Even more complex and difficult work. SOME of the video's have mixed in character animation, that can give information on surface locations etc, as the characters are moving on a 3d surface.  In any case no matter what you do to render new video won't be an easy task.

If you have blender skills you could look at blender as your CGI tool for redone video I suppose.

Cyb

174

Archive / Re: FF7 PSX videos

« on: 2010-02-13 23:15:19 »

Yes and no. I am currently very pressed for time at the moment, and my good video editing computer is down at the moment. I am also looking for better mastering software, But with no luck...

If you wish you can have somewhat higher quality videos by taking your PSX disc of FF7 (if you have one) and rip the videos from there.

Combine AVI synh and Virtual Dub and you have some of the most functional editing software on the internet.  First you need to decode the video obviously into something AVI synth will like (YUV12?) and then have AVI synth apply the image processing algorythm you use. AVI synth is purely a cli program just to warn you. STill it is extremely powerful and you can create quite sophisticated filter systems with it (as well as add hard subtitles to video etc.)

175

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: Final Fantasy IX editing battle data?

« on: 2010-02-13 22:56:05 »

I suggest you read the Final Fantasy 9 data in the wiki qhimm has.

If you are editing an ISO image you should be aware that the sectors are 2304 bytes each. If you are copying the image file in windows that won't work either because some of the data contained in the image file is in 2304 sectors and some is 2048 sectors.  Unless you know about the ISO disk format this won't make sense.

Cyb