Messages

51

FF7 Tools / Re: [Relaese] Scene.bin Lookup Table updater

« on: 2007-10-19 20:36:31 »

Thanks M4v3R your a great guy.   Glad to see you back on this forum.  During my year or so of browsing this forum I didn't notice seeing you.

Well, that's probably because I weren't here for a while (a year and a half maybe) . You could still find my older posts, from 2003 - 2005 though.

As for the program - I'm aiming to learn how to develop a Windows.Forms app on Linux, and this will be my teaching project. So yes, this one will be with (pretty or not) GUI. Maybe after the weekend?

52

FF7 Tools / Re: [Relaese] Scene.bin Lookup Table updater

« on: 2007-10-19 18:43:33 »

ARMs: I have in plans making a generic program to export/import files from GZIP-Bin archives, so it'll do what you want. Stay tuned .

53

FF7 Tools / Re: [Release] FF7 SceneFix

« on: 2007-10-19 13:25:49 »

Maybe I didn't release it to the public, I don't recall now .

Anyway, as for SceneFix, just put it into main root directory which contains all directories and files. Like this:

Code: [Select]

.\
 |- BATTLE
 |  |- Scene.bin
 |  |- ...
 |- FIELD
 |  |- ...
 |- INIT
 |  |- Kernel.bin
 |  |- ...
 |- SceneFix.exe
 |- ICSharpCode[...].dll

54

FF7 Tools / Re: [Release] FF7 SceneFix

« on: 2007-10-19 13:01:34 »

Is it visible in game only, or is this bug visible in the Scene Edit itself?

Could you please test if the bug occurs with this version?

55

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7 sensible to Gzip wich version...

« on: 2007-10-19 09:22:09 »

"Pure" ZLib files aren't compatible with FF7. I've checked zlib when I was programming SceneFix, and it didn't produce files readable by game. You need files, that contain GZIP header at the beginning:

Code: [Select]

1F 8B 08 00

56

FF7 Tools / Re: [Release] FF7 SceneFix

« on: 2007-10-19 08:21:14 »

Ok, will do it in a while.

By the way - I've discontinued work in my SceneEdit program some time ago, because of lack of time, I've heard it was having a problem with editing items. Anyone know any details? I've successfully edited items in several scene files so I can't track down this one.

Edit: Done, version 1.1 uploaded, can locate both PC and PCX files now.

57

FF7 Tools / Re: [Release] FF7 SceneFix

« on: 2007-10-19 07:03:23 »

Oops, my bad . I've never really dived into PSX structure, I saw the Enemy directory there so I thought it's this way.

Anyway, my program would still not work on PSX because it looks in diffrent directories for kernel.bin and scene.bin file. I can adjust it though so it'll work on both. But not by patching ISO, only by working on directory structure. Anyone interested ?

58

FF7 Tools / Re: FieldTool: Mass field dialogue extractor/importer

« on: 2007-10-18 23:43:18 »

FieldTool v0.8.5 is out!

You missed one version because it was internal, with me and my fearless tester - kruci - ironing the bugs in it.
This release brings up two things:
- the usual bug cleaning
- import speed improvement - by about 70%!

I managed to do a small speed report:

Test machine:
- Intel M 1.6GHz
- 768 MB DDR2 RAM
- SATA 60 GB drive

Test results:
- Exporting all files from flevel.lgp: 35 secs
- Importing all files back to flevel: 7:15 min

I think these results are pretty good. Now the room for improvement is in output flevel.lgp size, right now after importing all files it is ~270 MB big, I'm not sure if FF7 will read it correctly (I'll check this tomorrow).

Anyway, links are, as always, in the first post.

59

FF7 Tools / Re: [Release] FF7 SceneFix

« on: 2007-10-18 23:33:38 »

There's no need for this tool on PSX, since scene files are separate there, not packed into sections like on PC version.

Misleading, see below.

60

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: About "Scream" type attack

« on: 2007-10-18 13:26:48 »

It's not tested, but I think it's possible. Look-up table in kernel.bin has many empty spaces. So there's a chance that if you run out of space and create another section file, it'll work. As long as you still have 256 files in there.

61

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: About "Scream" type attack

« on: 2007-10-18 12:42:49 »

Link: RebuildScene routine in Object Pascal

I wrote it long ago so the source isn't as friendly as for example my FieldTools's, I hope you don't mind .

62

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: About "Scream" type attack

« on: 2007-10-18 12:26:25 »

Yes, but you must do this recursively. For example, you have layout like this (this is simplified layout, not the real one):

- Section 1
 * File 1
 * File 2
 * File 3
 * File 4
- Section 2
 * File 1
 * File 2
 * File 3
- Section 3
 * File 1
 * File 2
 * File 3
 * File 4
- Section 4
 * File 1
 * File 2
 * File 3
 * File 4
 * File 5

You modify files in Section 1 and notice that it doesn't fit in the bank. So you take File 4 and write it at the beginning of Section 2. But now, probably Section 2 will be too big, so you take File 3 from it and place to Section 3 and so on, to the end of an archive.

I have sources for my Scene Reader program that does this, I can post them if you want.
Edit: They are a real mess in Object Pascal though, so I'm not sure you'll learn something from them .

63

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: About "Scream" type attack

« on: 2007-10-18 11:49:01 »

1) From one enemy you can win/steal only one item. If all chances are max, It'll always be the first. That's why often chances are 8/64 for each item, so you can get each one of them.

2) When you repack scene.bin file, sometimes gzipped file won't fit into the bank it was before. You have then rewrite all banks until there is enough space. Of course *you* can still read until FF's and know location of each file, but FF7 reads the look-up table and if it doesn't find file in specified section, you'll end up with weird results.

Edit: kruci beat me to it.

64

FF7 Tools / [FF7] FF7 SceneFix

« on: 2007-10-18 09:57:43 »

Update: Version 1.1 with PSX support is out!

This little proggy will update kernel.bin file when you edit scene.bin archive. More technical details why it's needed is on the wiki.

I know that similiar program was released a few days ago, but it involved using ff7dec and gunzip, while this is all in one package. Just extract the exe and dll files to your FF7 Game directory and run it. That's it - you're done!

Requires .NET Framework version 1.1.
Tested in-game and working, should it contain any bugs - please report here.

Credits go to kruci who created original FF7StoK program, and to those who found look-up table location.

Link: SceneFix v1.1
Link: SceneFix v1.1 C# source

65

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: About Battle Setup 1 format in scene.bin file

« on: 2007-10-17 21:48:21 »

Corrected bug in wiki.

Also, I'm in proccess of updating information for Section 3 of Kernel.bin file, because it was incorrect. Any help appreciated .

66

Archive / Re: [Release - Cutscenes Fixed] Origional Field Model Sephiroth Patch

« on: 2007-10-17 18:14:49 »

Hey, you could try to use my FieldTool program for text changes. You can just pack txt files with changed dialogues and distribute them with this program (and maybe a small .bat file to install it).

You can try it now, but don't expect that it'll be bug-free, it's a rather fresh project. If you find some bugs, please tell me .

67

Troubleshooting / Re: ff7.exe still runs after quitting

« on: 2007-10-17 11:03:37 »

I can confirm that this problem exist on my computer when compatibility mode (95 or 98) is enabled.

68

FF7 Tools / Re: FieldTool: Mass field dialogue extractor/importer

« on: 2007-10-17 09:06:31 »

FieldTool v0.8.2 (a.k.a. "Finally working") is out!

Again, this is a bugfix release. With it I was able to change dialogues in few locations and play the game with no problems. Maybe some other levels will be problematic, but that's left to find.

Edit: I have successfully edited and played both a couple of blin files (66, 68 floor), and frcyo (Chocobo Farm) files. I also played through the beginning of game 'till meeting Aerith. It looks that everything's working fine .

Edit2: Another bugfix release - v0.8.3 - is out. It seems that previous version wasn't able to import dialogues to field files without AKAO sections, and that's fixed now.

69

FF7 Tools / Re: FieldTool: Mass field dialogue extractor/importer

« on: 2007-10-16 21:52:29 »

FieldTool v0.8.1 is out!

This is mainly a bugfix release. I forgot a few things while writing LGP file structure, also LZSS encode algo was a bit buggy (wrote control bytes at the end of file even though there wasn't any more output). Links are as previous - in first post.

PS. Working on improving LZSS Encode algorithm, now the ratio is ~60% (original compression has ratio at ~55%), so I'm really close .

Edit: There are still a few quirks, please wait for v0.8.2 before using it for importing.

70

FF7 Tools / Re: FieldTool: Mass field dialogue extractor/importer

« on: 2007-10-16 14:07:37 »

I recall that it could be ~150MB and game didn't complain, but I don't know how it'll behave if the file is bigger. Oh well, I'm working on the algorithm right now to make it more efficient, it looks like that Qhimm didn't implement negative offsets and repeated runs in his LZSS code, I'll try to do this myself.

71

FF7 Tools / Re: FieldTool: Mass field dialogue extractor/importer

« on: 2007-10-16 12:18:56 »

Well, I didn't knew that. Do you know how big LGP file can be for the game not to crash?

72

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: About "Scream" type attack

« on: 2007-10-15 22:21:51 »

According to:

Battle Mechanics by Terrence F.

A couple of monster have this type of attack. It's called "Shout" there, as Vehek pointed.

PS. I don't recall a program named 'Hojo' was written before .

73

FF7 Tools / Re: FieldTool: Another tool for FF7 Dialogues

« on: 2007-10-15 22:04:06 »

FieldTool v0.8 is out!

Now supports importing txt files back to LGP archive! Links and release notes are in the first post.
Please test the program if you can and post your comments here, thanks!

74

FF7 Tools / Re: FieldTool: Another tool for FF7 Dialogues

« on: 2007-10-15 11:07:28 »

Well, what do You know, the activation email eventually arrived. So I can use my old account now! . The previous one is now unneccessary, but I don't know what'll happen to this thread then [/offtopic]

As for programming language, I think I'll stick with .NET nevertheless. If .NET is a part of automatic updates that's even better.
Right now I'm writing import function, when done I'll post it here.

75

Archive / Scene.Bin editing

« on: 2005-09-18 08:57:44 »

Elentor made a mirror of it, search the "Compilation of Programs" thread.