Now that FFVII is fully playable on the PSP...

[Mantis]

Is there no way to edit the models/other data in the PSX version? It would be so great, but probably unlikely. 

[squeeble]

Yes this has been spoken about quite a bit latley and if you wouldve checked the npcrc recently you would've seen halkuns post on the issue, and also in mine from wintermute who also refers to the npcrc. Now i keep hearing people say the psp is almost as powerful as the PS2 , well it's not refering to games such as ratchet and upcoming crisis core. Well they use special techniques to make it seem that the graphics are "almost" as good as a PS2 when there not. Like in ratchet everything is quite low poly if you take a close look at the various characters and as for the backrounds there very low poly with nice texture mapping that's all. So there would be no way to implement decent models into the game. Most of the models from the PS2 KH and FFX are are mostly around the 3500-5000+ poly mark.

[Mantis]

I don't think looking at a few games' levels is going to be confirmation of the PSP's 'graphics' being worse than the PS2's. The PSP has quite similar specs to the PS2's. And, I'm not talking about having brilliant-quality new models. Just the ability to customise them a bit. Only slightly higher-poly than the originals.

[squeeble]

About hacking the PS1 version...
Unless you have the ability to re-author a whole new CD using Squaresoft's BIOS sector accessing system, you aren't going to be modding anything.

I'm probably going to be putting this in a FAQ soon...

The PSX version of FF7 does *NOT* load any data by filenames. You can delete the directory entry on 90% of all the files and the game will still run. (They fixed this in FF8, where they got rid of filenames all togeather)

The game is hard-coded to look for data directly at sector locations on the disk. The game doesn't look for models by opening a file called "cdrom:/enemy/cloud.lzs" It looks for sector 3753983 and is told to load 16 data chunks in 8k segments. Unless the data you replace is exactly the same size and exactly on the same location of the disk, it's not going to load. You make the file larger, you are going to overwrite other data. If you make the file too small, you will underun the streaming buffer and most likely cause a divide-by-zero error.

Also, this is a PSX we are talking about. You have about 512 bytes of texture space for your character. If your character has eyes, you have used half of it already. The system only has 2MB of video ram, and a 3rd of it is being taken up by the video buffers, and a half is for the background, you have about a 5th of it used for statics and text.... You really don't have enough room left for textures after that.

If you can tell me where the master sector lookup table is for loading data, and if you can sucessfully edit it so that it won't point to the hard-coded locations on the disk, *then* you can actually start editing the data....

Keeping in mind that you have to make sure that any extra data is properly timed for entery into the polygon ordering table, and that you don't have a DMA buffer overrun when you stream the data packets to the GTE. You are also going to have to make sure the extra data isn't going to choke the GPU, which, if not timed correctly, will lock your rendering pipeline.

The PSX and PC data formats are different. PCs are well-known for happily taking garbage. On a PSX, if you mess with the rendering pipeline just a little bit, you've locked the system and you aren't going to be drawing anything on the screen.

Not even garbage.

You don't tell a PSX to "draw a model" like in OpenGL. You have to hand-make every data packet that's going to the GPU. I wish you luck, but I think it's a fool's errand.

**EDIT** What would be the point in puting slightly better models in anyway considering the amount of work, not to mention FF7 even has slow down in the battle scene's now so all in all it's just not worth it.

[Mantis]

That's a real shame. I thought it'd be pretty cool. The thing I hate about FFVII/VIII PC modding is that unless you back up the entire game - if you do something wrong - you're fucked. Everything's really fiddly and you can only have one installation obviously, so there's no multiple mod loading. That's of course expected with most PC games. Oh well, it was worth asking.

[halkun]

Actually, the PC version is designed to be tamper-resistent too. We just have found a way to get into the files. When we were first starting, we had the same limitations as the PSX version.

[Mantis]

So it is in theory possible? But didn't you read that quote? The data is read in a different way. Even if it is possible, I bet the models will need to use the same amount of indices/vertices (I don't know much about 3D modelling so correct me if I'm wrong) as the PSX originals.

[squeeble]

lol that quote was from halkun