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View Full Version : Proof that the PC Version looks 2 times as bad as it should:



FinalBob42
07-26-2004, 02:06 AM
Videos.

Have you ever noticed that the videos in the game are very pixelatic? Now, go to your Final Fantasy 7 directory and into the movies folder. Open any of these files with Windows Media Player 9 and go to Fullscreen (alt + enter). The video(s) should play and they look considerably better! Take a look at the girl in the beginning for example: she looks much rounder and most of the pixel garbage is gone! The new filters applied to the videos improve the image quality greatly. No editing of the files themselves is necessary, the player does it automatically.

Ingame.

Go into the game and take a look at the backgrounds. Just looking at the train in the beginning of the game once you have control of the character and you'll see immediately what the problem is: the backgrounds are 320*240! Now, enable "Anisotropic Filtering" in the display options of your graphics card. There will be a lot of corruption in the game in the form of boxes, but look at the train itself again. It looks fantastic! The filtering makes the backgrounds look like they are of a much higher resolution than they really are.

I was much impressed with the efforts of FF fans editing this game (the end result, an Ultima edition, is especially nice). There was an editing forum I came across a while ago (does anyone have a link of that by the way? It has a lot of FF7 modding discussion going on.)

I just wonder if there is anything you can do about this stuff, especially the resolution of the video. From my logic, it should be possible to take the videos, run them through a program like VirtualDub (doesn't support the file type, however) and take the better looking end result, replacing the old files in the folder. Or somehow change the default ingame video player.

I'm also looking into the box stuff with Anisotropic Filtering (and Anti-Aliasing), although fixing that should be much more difficult.

NM
07-26-2004, 06:49 PM
FFVII on PC looks bad because it's a direct port of the Playstation version. Like all console to PC ports. It's a quick and easy way to convert it and make some money.

With regards to the resolution off the backgrounds. There limited in size to max 640*480 I belive. Reason being if you decided to run the game at 1280*1024 it's gonna look damn awful. Take a 320 pic and blow it upto a higher scale in Photoshop and see how pixelated it becomes.

Turning on AA and AF will cause problems because the game dosn't support them. Those features didn't exist on the GFX cards back when the game was released. That was the days of the Voodoo 2/3.

Best thing to do is get a Playstation emulator and run the PSX version of FFVII through that. It looks better, sounds better and runs better.

Oh and finally. FFVII cut scenes are also grainy. Just watch the bit were the cable car pulls into North Corel from the Goldsaucer.

Dragonfire
07-27-2004, 01:22 AM
in WMP9 it plays upside down and reversed for me. any thoughts?

Lost Heretic
07-27-2004, 02:46 AM
in WMP9 it plays upside down and reversed for me. any thoughts?

yeah, one word.

Microshaft

FinalBob42
07-27-2004, 05:22 AM
Best thing to do is get a Playstation emulator and run the PSX version of FFVII through that. It looks better, sounds better and runs better.


I think that's going to be the best thing. I am running Final Fantasy 9 on an PS1 emulator and the game looks fantastic. The videos certainly don't look "that" good but quite impressive regardless, without the pixel garbage of the ones directly from FF7 PC. And so does the game itself: 2D image filtering rocks.

Aside from some minor text fixes in the PC version and higher hardware requirements from the emulator, I don't see a reason not to choose the PSX emulated version over the PC one :|

It's much more complicated with FF8 though. The videos are high-resolution and the game offers a new filtering mode that blurs out the 2D images to make them look better. At the same time, certain scenes look MUCH better with an emulator, especially on the world map. I recall some screenshots prooving this a while ago, where the textures looked 2 times as good on the emulated version on a world map scene with a building.

At least I got 7, 8 and 9 working accetably now. Off to play some more...finally :)

FinalBob42
07-27-2004, 05:24 AM
in WMP9 it plays upside down and reversed for me. any thoughts?

There is a patch for that.
http://www.eidos.co.uk/support/patchinfo.html?ptid=16

Raistlin
07-27-2004, 05:46 AM
The PC version sucks. Just get a Playstation, people.