[7th Heaven 2.0, FFVII Steam] Couple of problems: Freezing and Controller.

[kirinelf]

Hi all, I tried to find some sort of answer to this dilemma everywhere I could, but I couldn't, hence this topic.

I want to preface this by saying that I greatly appreciate the work put into the 7th Heaven program and the ease of modding it allows. Much kudos... or kupos, if you will. I'm looking foward to seeing the catalog growing with whatever insane, beautiful mods you insane, beautiful modders come up with. I had hoped I'd be able to solve the problem without bothering ya'll, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.

On to the problems. I love multi tasking, and so I'm constantly clicking between windows. This has come to bite me, because upon launching the game through 7th Heaven 2.0 and then clicking outside the window when a movie such as the opening movie is playing, the window goes black and sound stops. Waiting doesn't change anything, so it's not like the movie is continuing to play in the background. This happens even when I launch the game without mods (the mods are still listed as activated in 7th Heaven, but I selected the Play Without Mods option in the dropdown next to the Play button).

I have tried launching the game through Steam as per usual, and the movies are simply paused until the window is back in focus, no freezing at all. To my understanding, the game is converted to the 1998 PC version when launching it through 7th Heaven in order for mods to work. Did losing focus cause the game to freeze in that version?

Here is a Pastebin of the log from the launch without mods: https://pastebin.com/tiqDXVfc

This is a Pastebin of my profile: https://pastebin.com/ZSx5Sdj6

This is a list of the mods I have installed: https://i.imgur.com/hM28nPp.png

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That is the main problem, but there's another problem. The game doesn't recognize my controller. I'm not entirely sure why given that when I launch it from Steam it works, and I selected the Steam KB + Std Gamepad option when I launched the game. I then modified the controls to one I was more familiar with and saved it as Keyboard, but the controller/gamepad/joystick/whatever simply doesn't work, hence why I saved it as Keyboard and not Keyboard + Controller.

***

Any ideas as to how these little niggling things could be solved? In truth, the game is perfectly playable as long as:

1) I don't Alt+Tab/click outside the window anytime there's a movie playing, and
2) I use a keyboard or a remapper to play the game.

I'd rather find a fix though, if I could.

P.S.: Would be nice if there was some way to allow the game to continue running in the background though.

[kirinelf]

Not sure what the board's rules on bumps are, but there've been some updates so kweh?

I bit the bullet and got a remapper, so the controller not working is effectively a non-issue now.

However, the major issue of the game just refusing to accept losing focus is still a thing. For the moment, it seems that it's stopped freezing: The screen goes black and I lose audio in the cutscene, but clicking back in the window and then hitting a key to "skip" the opening movie causes it to go to the title screen like normal.

Playing the introductory scene of the game, audio is also lost when clicking outside the window, but the movie continues playing and the screen doesn't go black. Audio is not regained upon clicking back inside the window, and all music stops (including the normal BGM) until you finish a battle, after which it resumes. I'm not sure how things would go further into the game.

Still hoping for someone to reach out with some advice and/or help! I'll try recording a video sometime to show what I mean. Could it be a sideeffect of how Aali's driver works?

[Flash0429]

ive had this happen when i tab out during the opening scenes usually if i tab back in abd press a button on the controller to skip to the menu it will come back for me no issue

[kirinelf]

Yeah, screen and audio goes out, but it's still technically running in the background and you can hit a button to skip to the main menu. But after I hit New Game and I'm going through the scene with Aerith and zooming out on Midgar and everything, if I Alt+Tab during that scene, I lose all audio for the movie. The BGM also cuts out, so when it goes to the part where Cloud jumps off the train and you get control, there's no no music, just sound effects from opening menus, selecting options, that kinda thing. When you run forward and get into battle with the guards, still no BGM. Sound effects for attacking and stuff, but no battle music. The BGM only comes back AFTER you beat the battle.

It's kinda strange to me.

[unab0mb]

This is expected behavior. The Aali driver has always had this problem with temporarily losing audio/video if you alt-tab out. That's just the way it is. Regarding the opening scene, etc., this is how the game is designed. The way everything starts on the beginning field is dependent on the movie playing properly (you'd also have weird audio/music problems in other areas of the game if you skip/alt-tab during movies depending on the situation). You skip it or alt-tab, it screws up everything past that.

When a field is loaded, that's where it tells the game to play music. So, since it doesn't load properly after the cut scene, you get no music, and when going into battle there's still no music or victory fanfare because the game isn't programmed to trigger playing the music again or to play a new track. It's only when the field changes or reloads after a battle that the field code then tells the game to play music again and is why it returns normally at that point. If for example, the game was designed to play the usual battle (or victory) theme instead of just continuing the bombing mission music, this wouldn't be a problem. But the developers were weird and kept the music the same for that first battle and decided not to play the victory music. Even the first boss doesn't play boss music, but goes back to the bombing mission music. It's wacky, no idea why they made those decisions. Maybe they felt it was an awesome track and wouldn't get enough "air time" if you just ran through to the mako reactor music scene in like a minute, never to hear from it again? Except maybe during the Midgar raid IIRC.