Messages

1

Releases / Re: FFVII: Shinra Archaeology Cut

« on: 2025-09-11 15:41:04 »

Alrighty, here are 15-fps FMVs with SAC translations and beta/demo text crawls applied to SYW's latest and greatest upscales. (Link expires in 7 days.)

For the nonce, I'm planning on releasing the 30-fps versions of these FMVs and the SAC 60-fps fixes as a part of a compatibility-pack mod. They can be moved later if you decide you want them as part of SAC after all, or SYW or 60/30 Gameplay want those components as part of those mods.

2

Releases / Re: FFVII: Shinra Archaeology Cut

« on: 2025-09-10 15:26:54 »

Good news: I found a method for extracting the opening crawl text from your beta/demo opening FMVs so it can be overlaid onto SYW's latest and greatest upscales. Beta is already done. Demo will get done as soon as I find time. So you're going to get your upscaled 15-fps video set after all.

While I'm here, I've got two questions about the other FMVs:

• I'm assuming that the change to lowercase "promised land" is intentional, so I shouldn't capitalize it. Is that correct?
• Fonts. Do we want to approximate the fonts used in the original videos, or try for some sort of consistency?
  
  • It looks like the original jenova_e FMV uses the original menu/text font, which is a lightly bastardized Verdana.
  • It looks like the original ending_2 FMV uses a Franklin Gothic clone. (Very similar, but lowercase 'a' is a bit different.)
  • If we wanted to make all movies consistent with ESUI, it looks like ESUI is using Helvetica(/clone?).
  • If we wanted to make all movies consistent with the original menu/text (even though ending2 wasn't in the original game), Verdana is a close match.
  • Some other choice for consistency?
  • (If you leave it up to me, I'm going to match the fonts used in the original videos.)

3

Releases / Re: FFVII: Shinra Archaeology Cut

« on: 2025-09-08 06:31:12 »

Another update: SAC 60fps fixes files v3

I promise this is that last revision of the 60fps fixes until the new new blin70_2 is available.

It belatedly occurred to me to check whether FFNx is automatically doubling wait opcodes in field scripts. Indeed, it is. Which has a few consequences:

• I incorrectly doubled some waits in woa_1. woa_2, and woa_3, so I had to go back and undo that.
• The fix for the Shinra Mansion safe is not correct. We want the dial to move 1 number per 2 frames, but automatic doubling of the fix's waits results in 1 number per 3 frames. I was unable to find a hacky way to make a 1-frame wait and ultimately settled for increasing the time limit from 20sec to 30sec. I used Black Chocobo to hack a save file to test this. 20sec is just barely doable; 30sec is more reasonable.
• My fix for Nibel Reactor gears is not correct. We want them spinning at 30fps, but automatic doubling of the fix's waits results in 20fps. Unfortunately, without a real 1-frame wait operation available, I don't see a way to fix this without adding stutter. Oh well, it still looks better than 60fps. (Hmmm... would stuttering gears actually look... good?...)

4

Releases / Re: FFVII: Shinra Archaeology Cut

« on: 2025-09-07 16:19:36 »

Okay that's a lot to respond to.

Sorry. 

I've changed blin70_2 since the last update so that will need to be redone

OK. If you send me all four variants of the new blin70_2, I'll redo it.

maybe I could arrange for the rest of these to be added to the 60fps mod in a new SAC setting. There are also issues with Test 0 since the animations for it in 60fps are for the pyramid version.

Good news! Here is version 2 of 60-fps fixes for SAC. (Again with the lame file host because I can't do forum post attachments -- sorry!) Changed stuff:

• All it takes to fix Test0's 60-fps battle animations is to copy/paste/rename the guard dog's 60-fps animations. The renamed file is included. (Aside, I had to do a search to figure out what the heck Test0 even is.)
• After testing, I discovered that the 60 FPS mod's fixes for woa_2 and woa_3 aren't really complete. I've revised them, and added woa_1. These puzzles should now be completely correct at 60 fps. (However, you need FFNx with commit 3ab025d for stuff to continue working correctly after the scripted battle that happens if you fail.)
• I tested everything except the Shinra mansion safe (sinin2_1), and they all seem to be working correctly. I couldn't test sinin2_1 because I don't have a save file near that point. (Also, I only tested the cutcontent+controller variants, and I'm just assuming I didn't mess up applying the same edits to the other variants.)

Honestly if you're not doing my intros anyway, I don't want your upscales. It would just be inconsistent at that point.

I'll try to isolate and extract the beta subs from your intros, but I can't guarantee it will work.

5

Releases / Re: FFVII: Shinra Archaeology Cut

« on: 2025-09-05 05:03:13 »

SAC does not incorperate those fixes, no. frankly I'd rather the 60fps mod accomodate it with a SAC setting, which could also fix some of the other issues 60fps creates with it, but I'm not sure those guys are around anymore.

Fortunately, their readme does include detailed notes on how to apply the fixes to mods like SAC that alter the field scripts. Assuming I didn't botch anything, these chunk files are the 60 fps fixes applied on top of SAC v1.3291's chunk files. Plus one experimental fix of my own. None of them are tested yet. See the included readme for details. (Sorry for the external link; apparently I'm not allowed to attach files to posts here. Link expires in a week.)

[EDIT: Also, what "other issues"? My skills at field script editing are pretty limited, but I could give it a try.]

as long as they're still the original framerate

They're 30fps, but I can make a 15 fps set if you'd like. Shall I?

Our version of Jenova_E is already upscaled so I don't need that

It seems like SYW sourced his latest Jenova_E from some apocryphal source, since the quality is waaaay better than the usual PS1 upscales. And, more to the point, waaaaay better than yours.

but I wouldn't mind the opening variants

I didn't do that one. (Since I personally find the extra text hokey and meddlesome.) The only tool I have for masking baked subtitles that fade in like these do requires a clean copy of the same video as a reference. I'm not sure I've got a version similar enough to that video that it will work.

and ending variants... Also if you do want to give us them, please change it from "O, lady luck" to just "O lady luck" on Cid's line. That's an edit I've had in the docket for a while.

I can do that.

While I'm at it, I think "lady luck" should be capitalized "Lady Luck," because (a) the general rule is that anthropomorphic personifications of abstract concepts are capitalized (e.g., Lady Liberty, Death, Britannia, Uncle Sam, etc.), and (b) I can't recall ever seeing it elsewhere not capitalized. (Aside, I rather like this translation and would probably favor keeping it over whatever remake3 does.)

I can ask Turq but I think he has it where he wants it. [EDIT] Yeah he doesn't want to change it. Hope is that Remake 3 gives us an excuse to have a less literal translation anyway lol.

Honestly, I'd be really surprised if whatever remake3 does turns out to be an improvement. I guess we'll see.

6

General Discussion / Re: Newest Ninostyle Chibi Fixes & Additions Breaks Vincent 60fps Animations

« on: 2025-09-05 04:19:04 »

And it's fixed in v2.3.

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General Discussion / Re: Newest Ninostyle Chibi Fixes & Additions Breaks Vincent 60fps Animations

« on: 2025-09-02 14:29:46 »

Update: I think I figured out what's wrong. The directory Dynamic Weapons/Chibi/battle/ is used without any check that the chibi battle models mod is active. If you're using any other battle models mod, like ninostyle HD, this makes a mess. Deleting that directory seems to have fixed the issue. If anyone wants a short-term fix, try that.

8

Releases / Re: FFVII: Shinra Archaeology Cut

« on: 2025-09-02 05:18:28 »

FYI: The download for v1.3291 is corrupted.

Also, do you know how to contact htp314? The latest Ninostyle Fixes (v2.2) messes up Vincent's 60fps battle animations.

Edit: A couple more questions:

- 60/30 Gameplay has some field animation fixes, but cautions that they're likely not compatible with translation mods. Are these fixes incorporated into SAC? Is compatibility OK if SAC has higher priority than 60/30 Gameplay?

- I applied your retranslated subtitles to SYW's latest generation of upscaled videos. (With some help from Satsuki getting a clean enough copy of Jenova_E to remove the existing subs.) Would you be interested in using these?

- About that troublesome line in Ending2, how about "Yeah. Let's go meet there."? That preserves 会うwhile eliding its direct object by substituting an adverbial phrase, and sounds fairly natural.

9

Releases / Re: FFVII: Shinra Archaeology Cut

« on: 2025-09-02 05:15:08 »

Like?

As far as the materia growth thing, it's because SAC changes the text to say "Materia Growth" when the vanilla game just says "Growth". ESUI's rearranged menus doesn't account for this. It expects it to just say "Growth" like the regular game does and spaces it accordingly.

But I'm not aware of any other issues...

Bunches of text boxes are borked b/c Aavock's chunky font doesn't fit. The first two examples are Jessie's instructions on how to mount a ladder, and the item pickup on the screen after meeting Aerith for the first time. These are fine in stock ESUI; it's just Aavock that doesn't play well will SAC. I've just given up on Aavock entirely. Stock ESUI looks perfectly fine, and a better translation is much more important to me than a 1:1 UI remake.

10

General Discussion / Re: 7th Heaven on Linux

« on: 2025-08-30 15:04:55 »

Sorry for very tardy reply. Try installing d3dcompiler_43 and d3dcompiler_47 via winetricks/protontricks.

11

General Discussion / Newest Ninostyle Chibi Fixes & Additions Breaks Vincent 60fps Animations

« on: 2025-08-30 14:50:13 »

Looks like the newest "Ninostyle Chibi Fixes & Additions" broke Vincent's animations, at least for 60 fps. Does anyone know how to contact htp314 to tell them about it?

12

General Discussion / Re: Shinra Arch vs Echo S 7 comparisons

« on: 2025-08-30 14:48:04 »

You want Shinra Archeology.

Echo S takes a lot of very self-indulgent liberties.

13

Releases / Re: [FF7PC] [7H] Enhanced Stock UI (2.0)

« on: 2025-08-08 02:18:13 »

Small bug with Shinra Archaeology Cut: The text in the pop-up window for the "limit" > "set" menu is misaligned.

Unrelated: I made a button set for SNES-style xinput controllers, like 8bitdo's SN30pro. Would you be interested in adding it?

14

Releases / Re: FFVII: Shinra Archaeology Cut

« on: 2025-08-05 02:44:54 »

[EDIT: Nevermind. Shinra Archaeology Cut and Aavock UI just don't mix. There are so many visual issues that it's not even worth trying. It looks fine in ESUI.]

Hi there. I'm seeing a small issue with Shinra Archaeology Cut + ESUI (+ Aavock UI):

When looking at the preview for buying a weapon/armor in a shop, the second line is supposed to say, for instance, "Materia Growth Normal." However, "Materia Growth" is so long that "Normal" appears over the top of it.

So... one possibility is to change the text to something shorter, like "Mat. Growth," "Growth Rate," "Growth," etc.

Another possibility is to change the x coord for where the value displays.

I'm not sure how feasible changing the x coord is. If it's shared with the first line, it might not be possible to move the start far enough right without having the slot graphics an 8-slot item  run past the right edge of the window.

I also don't know which file contains this x coord, but I have a bad feeling it's probably something that gets clobbered by both ESUI and Aavock UI...

15

Releases / Re: Aavock UI 1:1Remastered

« on: 2025-08-05 02:21:22 »

Hi there. I've noticed one small problem with this masterpiece: The "slot link" graphic used for the preview when buying items in a shop is misaligned.

Also, this sorta-related issue with Shinra Archeology might require a fix at the ESUI and/or Aavock levels.

16

Releases / Re: [FF7PC][FF7_SYW_Unified] 1.15 (2025/04/09) - PC installer + Steam deck + iros

« on: 2025-07-30 05:55:59 »

I'm having two problems:

1. I'm trying to run this through Wine (no Steam, no Lutris, just straight-up wine staging 10.12 with DXVK) on a desktop PC (not a Steamdeck) and I'm getting a whole bunch of "window class name is not valid" errors. I can click through the errors and the parts of the UI that do get drawn work. I just can't see or do anything related to those windows.

If someone has this fully working on Linux (desktop, steamdeck, or otherwise), please kindly let me know exactly what you library overrides are.

2. If you launch the game via ff7.exe, as recommended in the steamdeck instructions, the trainer doesn't launch. So no dynamic weapons, etc. What's the proper launch order -- trainer first, or FF7 first? (FYI: It should be possible to launch the trainer inside Steam by using a bat file that launches both ff7 and the trainer.)

17

Releases / Re: [FF7PC][FF7_SYW_Unified] 1.15 (2025/04/09) - PC installer + Steam deck + iros

« on: 2025-07-16 12:33:04 »

When you say that this new round of FMV have "more accurate colors," what exactly do you mean?

Did you locate better sources? Use a different method to extract the videos? Use a different upscaler that better preserves color? Made a color adjustment in your avisynth scripts?

In that last case, please share an example script so I know exactly what you did.

(I ask because I'm again working on colorimetry updates for FFNx, and I want to make sure to get these perfect.)

18

Releases / Re: [FF7PC]AxlRose Battle Scenes (Color Overhaul)

« on: 2023-06-14 05:21:10 »

I think you should know that FFNx will soon be able to automatically adjust colors to approximate the brighter and more vibrant color gamut of the 1990s Japanese television sets that FF7 and FF8 were designed for. (Preview here.) This will probably accomplish the same goals as your manual color corrections.

I wish I had known about your mod earlier. Since this might save you a lot of work, I feel badly for not telling you sooner.

19

Graphical / Preview of NTSC-J Mode for FFNx

« on: 2023-06-14 03:14:25 »

"NTSC-J mode" is a forthcoming feature for FFNx. If NTSC-J mode is enabled, FFNx performs a conversion to simulate the color gamut of the 1990s Japanese television sets that FF7 and FF8 were originally designed for. The resulting colors are more faithful to the original artistic intent, and generally brighter and more vivid.
This mode is appropriate for:

• Vanilla FF7/FF8.
• Mod assets that are upscales of the original assets.
• Mod assets made from scratch where the modder used the original assets as a color reference without doing a gamut conversion.

This mode is not appropriate for mod assets made from scratch that truly use the sRGB color gamut. Such assets can be made suitable for this mode using this converter program.

If you would like to try out a preview of NTSC-J mode:

• Make a backup of your FFNx files!
• Download this preview build and extract to your FF7/FF8 directory, overwriting files.
• Make sure that FFNx.toml includes enable_ntscj_gamut_mode = true

Some notes on mod compatibility:

• As expected, SYW's upscales look great in NTSC-J mode.
• Ninostyle models also look good. These hew closely enough to the original palette that I'd say NTSC-J mode is more "right" for them than sRGB mode.
• ESUI and Finishing Touch don't look good. These were made from scratch in the sRGB gamut. So I've made some unofficial versions using inverse conversions that should look like the sRGB originals when used in NTSC-J mode.
• (That link also has a "compatibility pack" mod that forces some mods to work together in the way I want them to, includes color range and banding fixes for SYW's videos, a new "buster" screen, SNES-style button icons, and misc stuff.)
• Avalanche Arisen is a mixed bag. Uprisen increased brightness and saturation in many places, which is sometimes too much for NTSC-J mode, and sometimes too little for sRGB mode. I'm preparing an inverse conversion to see what that looks like.

   
Github-inclined people can review the pull request including NTSC-J mode here.

20

General Discussion / Re: [FF7PC-98/Steam] Multiple mods and Modding Framework-The Reunion [R06e]

« on: 2020-04-21 13:18:53 »

Still to-do

8. Look into a way of dealing with the save location and sharing of save files between 1998 version/The Reunion and Steam.

I have some thoughts on this. Though first a couple disclaimers:

• I'm not sure I fully understand the problem. From your post here, I gather that Steam is wantonly deleting files if it doesn't like their checksum. I'm assuming that you don't mean the checksum internal to the save file itself but rather the checksum for the save file noted in Steam's metadata.xml file. If I'm incorrect about that, then everything I'm about to say should probably be ignored.
• I'm not in a position to test any of this because I don't have the Steam version (still have my discs from 1998) or Windows 10 (I use Linux).

Anywho, I think the following would work:

• Add two fields to Reunion's config file:
  • LinkSavesWithSteam (bool, default: false)
  • SteamUserID (string, default: this_is_not_a_valid_steam_id)
• Add the following behavior to the installer:
  • Check if %userprofile%\My Documents\Square Enix\FINAL FANTASY VII Steam\ exists. If not, stop.
  • Ask the user if they want to link their Reunion saves with their Steam saves. If so, set the LinkSavesWithSteam option in Reunion's config file. If not, stop.
  • Enumerate the immediate child subdirectories of %userprofile%\My Documents\Square Enix\FINAL FANTASY VII Steam\. If none, stop. If one, select that. If more than one, ask the user to select one.
  • Save the name of selected subdirectory to the SteamUserID field of Reunion's config file.
  • Check if the selected Steam save directory contains any save files. Also check if the '98-edition save directory contains any conflicting save files. As appropriate, ask if the user wants to keep all, none, or only the non-conflicting Steam save files.
  • Move the indicated Steam save files to the '98-edition save directory.
  • Perform the same steps as the modified launcher behavior, described below.
• Add the following behavior to the launcher, to be performed AFTER ff7.exe returns:
  • Check LinkSavesWithSteam in the Reunion config file. If false, stop.
  • Check if %userprofile%\My Documents\Square Enix\FINAL FANTASY VII Steam\ exists and contains an immediate child directory matching the SteamUserID stored in the Reunion config file. If not, stop.
  • Iterate over the save files in the '98-edition save directory. For each file, create a symlink in the Steam save directory to that file, overwriting if necessary.
    • NOTE: It's important to symlink each individual file rather than to symlink the containing directory in order to make sure Steam can't muck with the real save files. A process with access to a directory symlink can delete files within the target directory, but a process with access to a file symlink can't delete the target file. (At least that's the way things work in operating systems that properly implement symlinks. I've heard rumors that in certain circumstances Win10 will allow you to delete a target from the link, but I haven't cared enough to look into them.)
  • Rewrite Steam's metadata.xml file. How? It looks like this source file from Black Chocobo contains most of the answers we need:
    • Crib the overall xml structure from an existing file. Looks simple.
    • Timestamps are actually quite a pain. We're going to have to keep a persistent memo file on the side to figure out which slots have changed.
      • Ignoring the first 9 bytes, chop the save file up into 15 chunks of 4,340 bytes representing the individual slots. (Those numbers came from here.) For each chunk:
        • Check if the first two bytes equal 0x4D1D. If so, the slot is empty, so the timestamp should be blank.
        • Otherwise, hash the chunk (using whatever hash algorithm you like) and compare against the prior hash from the memo file.
        • If the hash is unchanged, use the prior timestamp from the memo file.
        • Otherwise, the new timestamp is the file's last modified date (accessible via system call) expressed as milliseconds since the Unix epoch.
      • Now go rewrite the memo file with the updated hashes and timestamps for next time.
      • (I'm not really sure how to deal with the initial case when we don't have a memo file yet. I guess for files moved from the Steam save directory, we'll need to preserve whatever the original metadata.xml said; and for files originating in the '98-edition save directory, just timestamp all the nonblank slots with the file's last modified date and live with whatever errors that creates. (I guess you could get fancy and parse the game time out of each slot to invent believable in-order timestamps...))
      • (Since this is such a pain, I'd be tempted to experiment with what Steam does when the timestamps are wrong. If the consequences aren't that bad, I'd put less effort into getting them right.)
    • To calculate the "signature," start with the file content, append the Steam user ID encoded as ASCII (or ISO 8859-1, same difference for numerals), take the md5 hash of that, and express the hash output as lowercase hex.

21

Troubleshooting / Re: Tool for Converting FF7 PC Menu Textures?

« on: 2020-03-04 12:02:51 »

To partially answer my own question:

The problem with the conversion software is caused by the fact that these files have multiple palettes. So I need to find (or write) conversion software that can handle multi-palette .tex files. Can anyone point me to something?

I was wrong about Reunion R06 ignoring some .png textures. What's really going on is that the Enhanced Stock UI mod I was borrowing from doesn't have .png textures for the menu font because it uses hext files to make the menu use the field font. Unfortunately, that hext isn't fully compatible with Reunion R06, so I'm going to have to make new font textures. But at least it can be done with .png and I don't need to convert back to .tex.

Which is great because, as per this thread, it's not possible to upscale the font .tex files because sometimes the .exe grabs rectangles from them using fixed integer offsets and dimensions (rather than offsets and dimensions expressed as fractions of the texture dimensions).

22

Troubleshooting / Tool for Converting FF7 PC Menu Textures?

« on: 2020-03-01 08:25:06 »

Is there a tool for converting the menu .tex files for FF7 PC to a readily-editable format, then back again? I've tried the following:

• TexTool -- produces png output with wrong colors.
• FF7 Tex Image Tool -- crashes
• img2tex -- crashes

(This issue seems to be limited to the menu textures. I tried TexTool to extract seffect1 and it seems to have worked perfectly.)

Some context:
My ultimate goal is to get a smooth font into Reunion R06+. I started out by plopping in the .png textures from Enhanced Stock UI, and quickly ran into two problems:

• The text in the dialogs looks like it was kerned by a madman. Probably because FF7 has no kerning functionality and the widths of the replacement font's glyphs aren't in proportion with the widths on the original glyphs.
  • The solution for this is obvious, if tedious: Extract and convert the original textures, vector trace them in fontforge, make up a .png using the traced glyphs. The problem is that I don't have a tool that can properly convert the original textures.
• It looks like Reunion R06 is ignoring the supplied .png textures in the \CUSTOM\ folder in favor of some .tex files in \BASE\New-Translation\. I'm guessing everything run through FF7's menu module is doing this.
  • It seems that the solution would be to convert Reunion's .tex files to see what changes were made, incorporate those changes into my .png files, then convert my .png files into .tex and replace Reunion's files. The problem, again, is that I don't have a tool for converting to .tex. (At least, if it can't get the conversion right the other way, I don't trust it to get this way right.)