Final Fantasy VII - Improvements

I posted this at another forum, but I think also be good here:

As some of you might be aware, FFVII PC is being improved by a few programmers and modders over at Qhimm's forum.

Whilst some of these changes are not very good (such as changing avatars to be from advent children), others really have made a big difference. Final Fantasy VII was always graphically superior for the PC because it does not use dithering and the 3D models are rendered much better.

The main gripe with the PC version was the bugs. Luckily though, Aali's driver has eliminated all these bugs and improved stability ten fold. He has also made it so you can use the game on 64bit windows and the driver also supports FFVIII PC.

The changes Aali's driver has made to VII are:

1. Uses stable driver which is not dependant on graphic card
2. H264 and other video formats are now supported (I am updating the FMV's with Sony vegas and another resize tool to be 1280 pixels wide with H264 encoding]
3. 64bit vista also supported.
4. Bugs fixed, chocobo racing bug for example, and minigame frame rate
5. Allows window mode and full screen.
6. Internal timer has been updated
7. dialogue box transparency
8. battle menu transparency, black areas also drawn to
9. Higher resolution supported, unlike the 640*480 original

among other changes. I will upload a video shortly showing these things.

Other mods in operation:

1. Retranslation project (mine, this month for the non dialogue part probably)
2. Updating spell graphics (make them smoother or appear higher res)
3. Font changer. Games font is improved
4. Battle menu GUI change
5. NPC model change. Many models updated to high res models. Square arms and hands removed also.
6. Battle models used for the field and world map as well.
7. High res cloud model from the final battle used by default
8. Get rid of cait sith (another of my projects, less liked)
9. FMV updater. Size changed and improvements. Someone has already made one using divx, mine will use h264 and AAC and be a much more professional job. Of course for slower PC's, divx will probably be a better option. Uses the superior PSOne FMV's
10. Music updated. MP3's and PSF are allowed to be used in game replacing midi
11. Difficulty mod. Someone has already made one of these, though I am making my own.

The days of FF7 PC being some ugly twin of the PSOne are well and truly over.

I will post some examples soon on youtube, for now, this was one I made earlier (some more improvements since this one > YouTube - Final Fantasy VII - Example of Story Based Walk Through


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http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup7.png

Forget a movie, here are some images (they have some of my retranslations, the actual dialogue was done long time ago and is subject to change):


2. NPC changes (unfortunately incomplete, but still better than nothing)

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup8.png

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup9.png

3. Cloud on world map as battle model

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup6.png

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup2.png

4. World map upgrade

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup5.png

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup4.png

5. Map Upgrade (original higher)

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...ff7menup10.png

6. Menu upgrade including higher res avatars

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...ff7menup11.png

7. Battle menu upgrade

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup7.png

8. Dialogue box and playable character upgrade

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../ff7menup1.png

9. Item upgrade

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...ff7menup13.png

10. Materia upgrade

and improved (external source, not mine):

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/334...2909104881.png

Being a person who uses x64 bit windows, this is good news. However, could you scale down the pictures or put them in as an attachment? They are a little large.

Anyway, great work. I hope you'll stick around.

They are large because they are png to preserve the quality. May as well leave 1 of them outside the links also, as a demo. I don't think it matters much as that is all I am posting on ir for now...

Well, I do notice the increase in quality, but still, in future posts you might want to wrap them in spoiler tags. Not everyone has a great internet connection.

As part of the re-translation project, I and another have restructured the menu:

Corrected
http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...finished-1.png

Original
http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...8/original.jpg

Still a small amount of work to do aligning the info in the main box.

Well this is about as good as I can make the new menu:

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...8/revised2.png

I would prefer if it looked as good as the FF7 Japanese game but it isn't possible mainly due to space differences.

It's a question of innovativeness. Do you want a game that has its own difficulty level or one you make difficult on your own?

How many final fantasies had a difficulty level? Tactics needed one.

All games have a built in level of difficulty but I believe Final Fantasy 7.8.9 and 10 suffered by not having a difficulty mode choice.

A balanced hard difficulty would be wonderful. Regardless, I really want to play this. Great work. smurf the PS3.

Progress is being made. At mo, as said I am sorting the poor menu (not just the main menu).

This is the final revision of the main menu:

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g.../revision3.png

original

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...8/original.png

Too bad it is only for the PC version, how I wish the one I played on emulator can have something like this. :(

I've never actually played the PS version. I was raised on the PC version, which is far better in my opinion. They fixed at least the most egregious translation errors.