Final Fantasy 7 > Releases
FF7 Crisis Core Upscale Project
eqprog:
After a couple of months of work, I'm finally ready to present to you all the first beta for my (much bigger than imagined) quarantine project.
Here's some screenshots:
A big thank you is necessary to Devina and KaosuReido of this very forum, whose work in upscaling the FF7CC UI inspired me to start working on this project.
Downloads:
Download FF7CCUP on Github.
Please note: This modification requires the US Version of the game ONLY (GameID ULUS10336).
For the best experience, I suggest using Github Desktop.
Windows installation instructions:
* Install PPSSPP.
* Open PPSSPP and run FF7CC
* While the game is running, press ESC then open SETTINGS
* Go to TOOLS then DEVELOPER TOOLS
* Uncheck "Save new textures"
* Check "Replace textures"
* Click "Create/Open textures.ini file for current game" (This will make sure you have the required folders set up for the rest of the installation if for whatever reason they don't exist already). On the text file that opens, go to "file>save as" and see which directory it is in. This is your Game Directory
* Exit the game or close PPSSPP. (PPSSPP will not reload the textures.ini file until you exit to the main menu)
* Download and install Github Desktop.
* Go to the FF7CCUP Github Repository and press the green "Code" button, then "Open with Github Desktop."
If you would prefer not to use Github Desktop, download the zip and extract the contents into the Game Directory.
* Clone the repository to the PPSSPP documents folder:
* Default directory: C:\Users\[username]\Documents\PPSSPP\PSP\TEXTURES\ULUS10336\
* Retroarch: [retroarch directory]\saves\PSP\TEXTURES\ULUS10336\
* Let the repository download. Grab a coffee or whatever. Relax.
* Open PPSSPP and enjoy the game.
Devina:
HOW TO INSTALL AND BEST SETTINGS
As the instructions say, everyone can download it by clicking Clone (green button) > Download zip.
Put everything inside the FF7CCUP-master folder into the ULUS10336 folder. It will be 3GB worth.
For those who wish to see the differences between the original and our project in real time, go into PPSSPP's Options > Controls > Control mapping. Scroll down to Texture replacement and assign a keyboard shortcut to it, so you can easily compare before/after.
Anyway, some technical tips:
- Rendering resolution is best at 4x for clarity
- Screen scaling filter: Linear
- Rendering backend should be OpenGL for accuracy (other backends caused a camera error in Angeal's house)
- Rendering mode should be Buffed rendering (non-buffed can cause disappearing Midgar streets)
- While visiting Banora, enable Retain changed textures to fix slowdown in Angeal's house, then remember to disable after leaving Banora to prevent blinking animation errors
- See also: Low Performance / Troubleshooting section near bottom on Github
ABOUT OUR VERSION
Some people may be wondering how this project compares to vierock's. Our version is incompatible with theirs who seems to have left the forum and abandoned their project, so don't try installing both of them. Our version currently is a basic upscale of essentially everything whereas vierock's misses a lot, and we re-do certain textures and HDify them while trying to be faithful to the original where it counts.
Me and eqprog plan on being active so this project won't be abandoned and will have constant updates. Our project is open source so all texture artists are welcome. Anyone can work on anything. If you'd like to join, tell us in this thread.
Unfortunately, we can not not replace FMVs with AI upscaled versions. This is a common question we receive. Apparently players can only filter FMVs so the pixels become blurred using PPSSPP, but I've never got FMV filtering to work myself. Crisis Core does not have more than 30 minutes of FMVs so my advice is to just suck it up, sadly.
Also, as far as I know, all 60 FPS hacks I've seen for this game are wonky: they make it so DMWs activate twice as much, which breaks the game's intended difficulty and becomes intrusive as your gameplay will be constantly interrupted. I've never seen stable 60 FPS hacks for Crisis Core. If anyone claims to have a 60 FPS hack which works and is completely stable, let me know in the topic.
ARE WE DONE?
For the most part, yes, but like many texture projects, there is no "set date" on when it is complete. I am about 95% satisfied with our work, and you can download it now and expect a pretty complete version. My main reasoning for my lack of satisfaction is that some character models and certain textures could look better. If you really want to play Crisis Core, then just play it. Don't wait years for us to do more work on textures, it's not worth waiting. Our project is playable.
I made an update about the upcoming Crisis Core remake and how it will affect our project here:
https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=20208.msg287671#msg287671
HOW ACCURATE IS THIS TO THE ORIGINAL?
For the most part, our project is very accurate to the original, especially where it counts. We are fans of Final Fantasy 7 and Crisis Core and Zack Fair and whatnot. You don't need to worry about us going wild with artistic changes like many fan projects do, and everything we change has an understandable reason. You can have confidence in us, whether you're a first time player or a returning player.
Perhaps a basic visualization of how accurate we are is represented in the poster above. The essentials of the posters are the same, even if the font is slightly different. It's not like we changed it into something completely different, because the original texture is salvagable enough to know the basic intent.
We've had to create flavor text sometimes because the original text is unreadable, but we ensure what we add is essentially canon or harmless. For example, changing a unreadable sign in an inn to a "thank you" message.
(It is simply impossible to HDify the game without making some artistic choices)
If you're curious about what the original version of something looks like, you can always simply do the shortcut I mentioned above to see the difference in real time.
(Is the sign on the left supposed to be selling... a ripped map with a Pepsi logo on it...?
Who knows, so it's now a LOVELESS poster).
Unfortunately, in some very, very, very rare instances, we've had to transform something completely in order for it to make sense because there's very little to salvage about the original texture, like the poster above. This is not the norm for this project and we try to avoid this as much as we reasonably can.
I myself am not a purist. Even Crisis Core has a reputation of being "shunned" by fans of the original PS1 game. To some players, Crisis Core is a worthy part of the Compilation of FF7, while to others, it's notorious for adding the controversial character Genesis. I know other players do care about an accurate experience, so I keep this in mind while working on the project.
(Some artistic liberties were taken with the exhibit room for a more immersive experience. Things like this are one of the few exceptions.)
I took a few liberties with the exhibit room in order to make the room feel more interesting like an actual museum with text you can read. I feel like it adds to the experience and makes it enjoyable for players to learn more about the world and its lore. I also added a Midgar design to the rather strange and empty giant glass case in the room to help with the worldbuilding as seen above.
At times, we have even made things *more* canon than the original textures, and closer to what the developers intended. For example, Zack's shoulder pads are intended to be brown (as shown in his art and the FMVs), so we changed it from black to brown. The dumbapples are another example of this. They're intended to look like indigo apples, but for some reason, look like blue blobs in the original so we changed this: https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=20208.msg280580#msg280580 I also changed a "Mibelheim" to "Nibelheim", fixing a typo the original texture artists left behind because the former isn't a real town in the game. Some original art has also been added closer to what the original devs intended, such as the guys on the save screen and various blurry Shinra logos are now crisp.
If you are unsatisfied about something we change, you can tell us in this thread.
For example, I once accidentally broke a story canon plot point with a texture change so I fixed my error immediately.
THINGS YOU CAN LOOKOUT FOR WHILE PLAYING
I encourage people to be on the lookout for certain texture issues, because some stuff may go unnoticed (but like eqprog said, if it's as blatant as an obvious ugly Shinra logo or something, then we probably already know about it). This includes:
-Offensively bad textures which you think may go unnoticed because it may be somewhat hidden away
-Textures which look too inaccurate to the original or lose important detail when upscaled
-Texture seam issues, example: https://i.imgur.com/PU6Vyes.png
-Animation errors which are likely to occur when the low-poly models are on-screen, example: https://i.imgur.com/A29mW9U.gif
THINGS WE PLAN TO IMPROVE
Shinra Building:
-Directory says Shinra Building is located in Sector 8 instead of 0
Character models/animation errors:
-Models look pretty good atm, but Aerith's dress needs to be HDified
-NPCs phase quality
----
My save files pack (14 save files for various areas throughout the game): https://www.mediafire.com/file/urdzwzoopobxpoq/SAVEDATA.rar/file
MODS
There are various mods in the mod folder people may want to use.
They're in the mods folder that come with the download with instructions how to install.
For example, you can learn about three of them here:
https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=20208.msg282566#msg282566
SHAMELESS PLUG
I am also helping an open-source Before Crisis remake called Before Crisis: Cissnei.
We have currently released a demo for it (download on page 4 of the linked topic).
Players can play it before Crisis Core, as it sort of acts as a little prequel to Crisis Core, introducing Cissnei.
You can learn more about it here: https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=19983.0
A trailer for the game is here: https://youtu.be/3PQhBEjjDGY
Support for the project and those who know RPG Maker MV are appreciated.
NOTE: IMAGES FROM POSTS BELOW THIS ONE ARE OUTDATED AND DO NOT ALWAYS REFLECT THE CURRENT MOD.
Many of them are early beta versions so screenshots from pages 1, 2, 3, etc of this topic do not show the recent versions. Please don't judge our project based on them. For some samples of more final comparisons that represent the project, here's some below:
Environment
https://i.imgur.com/oFpQWuu.png (Sign in Nibelheim)
https://i.imgur.com/4p6GnUG.png (unpixelated tree)
https://i.imgur.com/w3r0KJH.png (Cafe, before) https://i.imgur.com/PDWLvJS.png (Cafe, after)
https://i.imgur.com/dQlx4yY.png (Debris, before) https://i.imgur.com/MQjQrNx.png (Debris, after)
https://i.imgur.com/uMI8eVQ.png (Rubble)
https://i.imgur.com/Y4KgZfr.png (Aerith's church, before) https://i.imgur.com/RhewN33.png (Aerith's church, after - stained glass is changed to be consistent with FF7make)
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/wB4V2XRuRUXXNkt5vJS5RN-1056-80.png (Flowers, before) https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/M52KKKGiHM9GbGx7N46T4P-1056-80.png
https://i.imgur.com/8M7gjXD.png (Train, before) https://i.imgur.com/L2HbttR.png (Train, after)
https://i.imgur.com/K6ivr1j.png (Electrical box)
https://i.imgur.com/hYbVXU8.png (Cans)
https://i.imgur.com/36oKrSM.png (Shinra door)
https://i.imgur.com/45PsgWS.png (Shinra entrance)
https://i.imgur.com/8ElbxPV.png (Shinra window)
Characters
https://i.imgur.com/GR0Fg6L.png (Zack)
https://i.imgur.com/jiYXUcX.png (Zack and stained glass, before) https://i.imgur.com/eMlcr7g.png (after)
https://i.imgur.com/XAu2onr.gif (Zack gif comparison)
https://i.imgur.com/e2qtFhB.jpeg (Aerith, different hair tone for consistency with artwork and remake)
https://i.imgur.com/mnZ3azC.jpeg (Cissnei: left is original, ignore middle, right is final)
https://i.imgur.com/qPpTVcz.png (Jenova)
https://i.imgur.com/l4pUtlz.png (Sephiroth)
https://i.imgur.com/FP5Ubr0.png (SOLDIER)
https://i.imgur.com/13WSQtY.png (Cloud)
https://i.imgur.com/xYgHYSX.png (Buster sword, modified to be consistent with how it looks in FMVs)
https://i.imgur.com/3TYrwxI.png (Another view of the sword)
https://i.imgur.com/UtJpV5v.png (Tifa - ignore the middle, right is final)
Artwork and UI
https://i.ibb.co/HGFKhCq/1.png (the Nibelheim photo)
https://i.imgur.com/GQNtRsn.png (HD screenshots now appear during DMW)
https://i.imgur.com/Di4Ue5E.png (DMW portraits have been repainted to look less pixelated)
https://i.imgur.com/SUn2j6Q.png (...plus Genesis)
https://i.imgur.com/hjDRF4Q.png (DMW compare)
https://i.imgur.com/uqXu8ar.png (Airship artwork, before) https://i.imgur.com/3IVNhq5.png
eqprog:
Devina, I edited your idea a little bit. I tried to put the psd file on git but apparently it was too big.
Otherwise, some work done on the backend stuff for the texture gallery/viewer. Eventually I'd like to develop it as a more flexible tool so that other people making similar projects will be able to utilize it. I've got two more days in a row off from my day job so hopefully I'll be able to implement all the features in that time.
For those wondering what I'm talking about:
If you run "eval_img.py" (python required - instructions on github) you can use this program to compare the original texture vs the upscaled texture, as well as open up both files in your favorite editor/viewer. Hopefully I will get some updates done soon which will let users apply filters to easily find the texture that they want to edit.
Devina:
That computer screen is defo an improvement. :)
I just noticed that a lot of textures have a bit of a chromatic abberation applied which sucks a bit, some worse than others. Ideally, we should try to remove it. For grey/black textures (like Zack's hair), it's easy to remove it via Photoshop via desaturation. I doubt you want to go through the whole game game, but you have the masterdumps folder, so you could always locate the bad ones.
Do you think you can fix some issues?
-Missing glass on the big windows near debriefing room
-While wearing Zack's black outfit, if you idle a bit, one of the animations wasn't done
-In the Loveless alley, the floor texture near the sewers holes is off. Also, just the floor in general looks poor
I plan on doing these textures so you don't have to worry about them:
-Lvl 49 Soldier floor texture
-Shinra logo elevator
-Logo on blue car in exhibit room
-Shinra sign and door in exhibit room
-Shinra signs in main lobby
-License plate in Loveless alley
I find specific textures using this method:
-Save state at the scene
-Drag textures folder out of memstick folder
-Dump textures
-Drag textures back
-Look in the "new" folder to get the filename
Copy the file name and look for it in the textures folder.
Dark_Ansem:
Holy cow Zack never looked this good - except when his swimwear
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