Author Topic: FF7 Crisis Core Upscale Project (Read 157606 times)

eqprog · « **on:** 2020-06-26 05:46:35 »

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 · « **Reply #1 on:** 2020-06-26 08:07:06 »

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:

eqprog · « **Reply #2 on:** 2020-06-30 03:36:03 »

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 · « **Reply #3 on:** 2020-06-30 10:50:24 »

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 · « **Reply #4 on:** 2020-06-30 18:20:08 »

Holy cow Zack never looked this good - except when his swimwear

eqprog · « **Reply #5 on:** 2020-07-01 01:43:13 »

Yeah, the way the emulator dumps the textures really works against us. I wish there were a better way to distinguish what we were dealing with.

I spent waaaay too long today fiddling with this. I guess you could say the whole thing is a learning experience! Whatever my next project is will hopefully go smoother.

Anyways, I got the evaluator able to filter by the available categories. It could be implemented a little better but I think I'm almost at the point where it works for what we need it for and I won't be really improving it much. Tomorrow I will add a search field so that you can search by filename.
Honestly its too difficult to go search for specific textures so what I'm doing is just getting myself into a category and working at it one by one.

Chrysalis · « **Reply #6 on:** 2020-07-01 15:20:54 »

amazing work, thanks.

Devina · « **Reply #7 on:** 2020-07-01 21:26:47 »

I would actually recommend doing it by chapter, not by folders, because that's how people will experience the game.
I think that way, it'd be better to focus on the things that matter more.
For example, I'm in chapter 1, doing various signs around the Shinra Building.

What world map did you use for the computer background btw?
There's a world map in the hallway that needs a new version. I can work on that.

I also think it'd be a good idea if we began using this thread as a way to keep us updated on what's being added/changed. I notice you're doing some stuff on Github, but I don't really know what you're doing because that website is a bit confusing.

eqprog · « **Reply #8 on:** 2020-07-01 22:17:23 »

That looks very very good. Great job!

As for the world map, check out the /edits/linked objects folder and open world_map.psb . Assuming you're using photoshop it is a smart object that will update in your documents if its modified. Here's a png tho.

As far as the source, I took a depth map meant for a 3d printer and essentially colorized/texturized it.

Yesterday I was mostly working on improving the texture viewer. Today I'm working on the foliage textures. I haven't pushed anything yet. I decided to do these first because the AI really did a bad job and they require a bunch of tedious editing. I've taken a big chunk out of it so far though.

eqprog · « **Reply #9 on:** 2020-07-02 04:05:29 »

Posting an example here so the work can be seen:

Original

AI upscaled... I put a background on this one to make sure the artifacts could be clearly seen

A little bit of TLC put on it and it looks much better. I kind of have a process now so hopefully the rest of them should be done in the next few days.

Devina, continue working as you are, I think its a good idea. Just make sure you push your work to the repository. I recommend you get the github desktop application that way you'll have a working folder on your harddrive to more easily get your work uploaded. The best way to make sure we don't do overlapping work is to work in different areas and to keep the branch up to date.

eqprog · « **Reply #10 on:** 2020-07-03 04:54:46 »

I got some feedback saying that downloading this from github is very slow - here is a google drive link to the version we have now: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Xj4KSkRlcfxIlmmRYiCLhOmc4P6A_-Kw/view?usp=sharing

Keep in mind that the github page will always have the latest available version - I will try to remember to update this link as things progress.

eqprog · « **Reply #11 on:** 2020-07-04 06:17:24 »

I got kinda bored with the foliage textures so I decided to put a bit of time in improving the details on zack.

Devina · « **Reply #12 on:** 2020-07-04 12:49:07 »

Looks good, do you know if you can try fixing that animation glitch in his black shirt?
You just have to idle for 10 seconds while he's in his black shirt and you should get the dumps.

I just finished the main hallway for now.

I desaturated some walls to get rid of the CA, and I fixed the glass transparency issue by reverting a texture back to its original.

I had to use a grey background in the middle of the glass directory to make some of the fading look better (by hiding it), so I added some flavor text for now I might change later.

I also don't know what to do with the world map for now, so I just added a basic version. Might come back to spice it up later.

Also, I realized that in order to single out the textures you want, you don't have to drag out the texture folder, you can just rename it "texturess", then rename it back after.

Going to do the rest of the Shinra Building, shouldn't take long. Keep in mind, my goal here isn't really "perfection" or else this whole project would take 5 years, my goal is to fix the more obvious hideous immersion-breaking textures and the like.

Also, we made some news sites!

https://wccftech.com/crisis-core-final-fantasy-vii-ai-enhanced-texture-pack/

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/final-fantasy-7-crisis-core-receives-remaster-treatment-thanks-to-this-ai-enhanced-hd-texture-pack/

eqprog · « **Reply #13 on:** 2020-07-04 14:46:26 »

Yeah I saw that!

My goal isn’t perfection, either. If you look in the priority folders those are textures I thought were particularly bad looking & prominent.

I will put the one animation for Zack on my list. I might be relatively inactive for the next few days, just a heads up.

Devina · « **Reply #14 on:** 2020-07-04 17:34:01 »

I did a few more textures around Shinra Building, don't really plan on going back there for now, it's sort of a boring place.

I'm going to keep going with the game. I notice when you begin the Wutai mission, the moon and fog looks a bit messed. Think you can fix that?

I desaturated the swords. I noticed Angeal's looks horrid, as if it's made of leather or something.

Fortunately, I found a better texture in the same folder and copied it over and check out this massive quality increase:

orichalcon · « **Reply #15 on:** 2020-07-04 17:55:07 »

have never played this, will definitely be taking advantage of this project to finally check out the story from this game

Devina · « **Reply #16 on:** 2020-07-04 18:56:55 »

This is still quite a rough beta, if you really want a definitive experience, I recommend playing in 6 months from now, by then, I'll be done the game and have ironed out a lot of textures. Everyone playing now is basically a beta tester.

Some more issues eqprog can help with:

When Zack is on his phone, there's an animation error when he says this line:

A huge chunk of the forest (plus the Genesis copies) aren't done after fighting the two bosses:

Sephiroth's hair looks a bit bad (I can probably try working on this later):

Immediately after the mission, there seems to be a missing Shinra upscale on the PC:

Also this too (funnily enough, the texture shows their faces so I plan on resizing it once eqprog upscales it. I feel bad for the texture artists who do work which is never even shown in the game because the cutscene directors decide to use bad camera angles):

eqprog · « **Reply #17 on:** 2020-07-04 19:16:13 »

Do you have texture saving enabled? If you saved the non-upscaled textures would you mind uploading them to the missed textures directory? That’s where I’ve been putting any “masters” that got missed on the initial upscale. It would make it easier for me.

Edit: looking at the github it looks like one of my pull requests didn’t work right... once I get back to my pc tonight I’ll have to double check. I thought I got a big portion of those already.

Devina · « **Reply #18 on:** 2020-07-06 00:13:32 »

I didn't have texture dumping enabled but I can always go back later, but I feel like I might mess something up, and there are a lot of textures involved. It's not very far in the game and you can speed up PPSSPP and flee battles to make the process quicker.

How goes double-checking that pull request?

I'm in Banora now and I noticed Angeal's mother and everything in the house isn't upscaled. I'm going to keep exploring tho and taking notes. I also redid the posters in front of the big building.

eqprog · « **Reply #19 on:** 2020-07-06 07:03:30 »

Just so you know, I have the image evaluator set up to not add any duplicate file names to the database. If you do dump any missing textures in the future don’t worry messing stuff up. Just putting it in the missing textures directory and I’ll take care of it.

Didn’t get a chance to work on much today. Made some progress fixing up Zack a little bit, as well as did some self-teaching for setting up “artboards” in photoshop so that whenever I make a change to the a character skin I can apply it to each texture and export it them all at once. My personal goal for this week is (at the least) finish up scaling any missing textures and set up artboards for all the character textures. You’re using photoshop, right? I’ll upload these artboards files to the GitHub page so that you/others can utilize them.

By the way, I think we should set up a discord. It would be easier to communicate.

Devina · « **Reply #20 on:** 2020-07-06 16:20:44 »

Yeah, I use Photoshop. I'm not really sure how to use these programs so I just do things the old-fashioned way myself, don't worry about it. I also don't have Discord atm, but I don't think I'll be that useful once I'm done over-seeing the game, so I'll just keep doing my status updates here to let you know what I'm up to.

In Banora, I noticed that there's a weird dark texture error so I brightened the texture and it looks better.

The entire Banora factory hasn't been upscaled.

Heading back into Shinra HQ, there's a cutscene in Lazard's office so I did a couple textures here (I removed the text because I don't want to write filler text here):

This laboratory after the reactor hasn't been upscaled:

Devina · « **Reply #21 on:** 2020-07-07 06:27:43 »

Met Aerith, the whole Aerith section seems fine, although like I noted before, the wooden floor in the church has a seam issue. I don't feel like trying to fix it just yet so I left it for now. I changed this store sign back to its original since it was poorly upscaled:

Redid the signs here on the highway (but the lighting is still noisy, not sure how to fix)

More flavor text in Hojo's lab:

The capsule here has an error so I had to revert it back here:

Had a go at the helicopter:

I stopped at the Cloud snow section. Haven't seen any missing textures so that's good.

eqprog · « **Reply #22 on:** 2020-07-07 21:11:05 »

Lookin' good! Thanks for your continued efforts.

Played through the game to grab the missing masters and got them upscaled up through the banora factory, up to the cutscene where you find angeal's mother again. Takin' a break for a few hours. I may get some more done tonight. I also got zack fixed up a little better I just need to fix his belt(s) for the high-quality cutscene textures.

Devina · « **Reply #23 on:** 2020-07-08 00:52:47 »

I got up to Junon, am going to do some signs there. I made Cait Sith (when he appears on the DMW) look better and I also restored the original cloud textures during the beach scene because they looked bad.

I download the recent pack, looks like the idle animation glitch is fixed, although this one in the church is still bad (I got a save if you need it:

https://i.imgur.com/A29mW9U.gif

I noticed something weird, my HD art of the guys on the save screen is no longer HD.
I went into texture.ini and I noticed the lines for it (and some other summon pics apparently) had a # in front.
I loaded the game, still wouldn't work, so I changed it to "00000000023139f0a7afe217" and it worked (it was another similar number before, not sure why.) I don't know if the other summons have correct numbers. Any idea why this is?

eqprog · « **Reply #24 on:** 2020-07-08 03:06:52 »

The ones that have # in front are to ignore their replacement. I never got lucky enough in my initial playthrough to get get the summon to come up (I didnt get all the materia either...)

The reason why is that the original UI upscale used the quickhash feature and not the the xxh64 hash. The quickhash causes a bunch of repeat dumps so I have to actually get the textures to dump with the new hash in order to implement them.

The save icon was set to ignore in the texture database and I fixed a bug that was making those textures not be ignored and instead being placed in the textures.ini file. . I can get it the save screen fixed but ideally we'd make it look better than the AI. I tried my hand at it earlier today but I did a pretty embarrassing job.

Just FYI I need to fix the textures.ini file so that the textures which shouldn’t be included are IN the file as “[texturehash] = “ so that the emulator doesn’t think it’s a “new” texture. It’ll be done tomorrow.