Some questions regarding battle-scenes.

[hian]

Well, first's first I guess:
Hullo, I'm new here. Cheers

Secondly:
Thanks to everybody in this community for being awesome in givng FF7 fans new ways of
re-experiencing one of their fondest memories.

Thirdly:
Now, I've just dusted off my old copy of FF7 for the PC, after having lurked on this site for a while trying to figure out how I could make the best possible nostalgia trip out of my FF7 replay.
I've greedily snabbed both the overhauled music, background graphics, FMVs and the menu/interface stuff, and it's working to great effect. Much kudos to everybody who played a part in making that possible.

However, I'm at a standstill when it comes to considering what I'm going to do with the 3d aspects of the game - namely because I'm pretty conservative, and want to stick as closely to the original art as possible, only with a slight facelift if possible.

That being said, I can pretty much live with the blocky characters and the original battle models(they have their charm).
The only thing that really hurt my eyes though, is the battle-scenes.

I know you guys are working on overhauling the battle-scenes, but personally, what I've seen doesn't fall to my taste. The colouring etc, doesn't blend well with the original style IMO(although great texture work in its own right).

Which brings me to my main question:
I have absolutely no experience with texturing, nor FF7 modding(appart from applying your hard work*guuuilty*), but if I could contribute in some way, I'd like to.

What I was wondering, considering the great job that has been done upscaling and reworking the 2d backgrounds - is there a possibility for applying the same technique on the original textures applied in the battle-scenes?
I'm aware that it might look like shit, but honestly, in terms of graphics, I'm simply after the original scenes in a slightly smoother(maybe a cell-shade-ish, or at least just smoother, effect like the one you can achieve through the ePSXe emu), less jarring format.

Considering how facepalmer was used to resize all the original background textures,  could it be used as a quicker way of giving a slight facelift to the textures of the battle-scenes as well?

As it is, I'm trying to read up on how I might do this, using this forum, but still having some trouble with the tutorials(or possibly lack of) - probably due to my lack of experience in these sort of things. In any case, I thought it might be more efficient to ask, and possibly be shot down, before investing more time into a project that isn't doable to begin with.

Again, much thanks for making FF7 an even better experience than it originally was!

[hian]

Sorry to bump my own thread - But I've looked around some, and can't seem to find any good answer(or maybe I just suck at using the search function):

Is there some way of extracting each individual battle scene texture files and converting them to pngs?
I'm looking around and it looks to me like I could use the unlgp for getting into the battle file, but this is sorta heavy and new to me. I might be getting everything wrong here.

Any feedback at all, would be welcome. I got my hands on one of the original textures, from one of the other battlescene threads, and played around with it - I'm fairly satisfied with the results, so if I could do the same to the rest of the textures, I'm pretty confident things would look to my liking.

[hian]

And once again, bumping my own thread.

I figured it out. Much searching and I'm finally able to extract, edit and reinplant the textures for the battle scenes, and developed a method for doing it all fairly quick and efficiently. I'll post some result later, after I've played some more around with the textures and found a result I'm happy with.

[Vegadawg2]

I'll be curious to see what  you come up with...

[hian]

Well, it's hardly revolutionairy. In terms of texture quality etc, the stuff I'm working on now is still sh*t compared to those working on the actual battle-scene overhauls.

I'm having a new problem though:
(borrowed picture from another thread)


See the black stuff in the background - Well, I'm having issues with this too, and I can't seem to find any help on how to make this work.

There is supposed to be transparency in the texture(STAGE09_T03_00), but it seems that the moment I make it a 24bit png, the transparency is lost. Now, I did however try to "put it back in", but upon saving the file, and putting it in the battle folder, it seems that the game reads the transparent parts of the file as being white, rather than transparent I.E it ends up looking like it does it the picture, just white instead of black.

[PitBrat]

Change the color to true black.
The FF7 engine interprets solid black as transparent.

[Tekkie.X]

Save as 32bit, that's what the Team Avalanche files are saved as, see if that makes any difference.

[PitBrat]

I believe the correct format for these textures is 8bit rgb.

EDIT:
I made the background transparent and cut out the black areas.
Then I saved it as an 8bit rgb PNG.
It worked just fine in the game with transparency.

[hian]

Change the color to true black.
The FF7 engine interprets solid black as transparent.

True black? Would that be, standard black as the black you start out with when opening a new document?
I always use that colour, but it doesn't work very well.

Save as 32bit, that's what the Team Avalanche files are saved as, see if that makes any difference.

I'll try this. But all battle scene PNG's I've seen so far, tend to be 24 bit. Oh well...

I believe the correct format for these textures is 8bit rgb.

EDIT:
I made the background transparent and cut out the black areas.
Then I saved it as an 8bit rgb PNG.
It worked just fine in the game with transparency.

Yeah, I thought that to be the problem. The only problem is, that when I made it 8bit, it simply wasn't read by the game at all, and it reverted to the original texture.

When you put a 24 bit png, in the mod battle folder, a reference file is made in the mod cache folder.
When I made an 8 bit png, nothing even appeared in the cache, so I'm guessing there is something with aalis driver(or very possibly something else) that stops it from responding to any 8 bit pngs in the battle folder.

If you somehow made that work, I'd be very interested in knowing more details about the format of that file.

[hian]

I figured it out. The best way was to cut out the black areas and save as 32bit. I'm on my way again. Thanks a lot.

[PitBrat]

I was unclear.
Yes, 8 bit images don't work very well.  Nvidia cards don't like 8 bit at all.
What I meant was a true color image with 8bits per channel.
I apologize for adding to the confusion, but I do it so well! 

I was wrong about black (0,0,0) showing as transparent in battle textures.
It works for field and model textures, but not for battle.

I'm glad it's working for you now!
I hope to see your textures in my Bootlegged game soon!