[FF8PC-Steam] BerryMapper- texture replacement for Tonberry mod (2014-12-15)

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Tonberry is at a pretty stable state right now with all requested features implemented, no known bugs, and is running as efficiently as possible (as far as I can tell). I don't have much else to work on :P

The new hashing method along with selective object replacement (i.e. if it finds a match for an object but not the whole texture then it replaces the object and simply upscales the rest of the texture to 1024x1024 without changing it) is 80-90% complete but, truth be told, it doesn't seem like there's all that much modding demand for it. FatedCourage has done an excellent job wrestling with the character collisions and the other mods (read: Mcindus') work almost flawlessly. The glitches are minor at worst. Besides disappearing characters and the occasional background collision, none of the current mods will be much improved by the new hashing algorithm, and in fact Tonberry will necessarily be a bit slower.

The new hashing method would open up a lot of possibilities for new mods (e.g. animated textures), but until modders start probing in that direction (and I get a whole lot more textures to finalize the hashing coordinates) I have to say I don't feel the same urgency as I did with the current version of Tonberry.
This makes me a sad Panda.  Currently, we can't have a Shiva, Blinking Eyes, and Tonberry animation (irony).  I know I've been MIA lately, but that is due to some new opportunities that have dropped in my lap.  I'm not done modding FF8 by any means.  If we can make exceptions for those files individually, then maybe it's not a huge deal, but it would still be nice to have a 'complete' model.  Trust me, mavirick - Fated has done a BEAST of a job finding all of those hashcodes, and I don't think any other modder out there would have had the patience for it, IMO.  I know I wouldn't.  Please keep up your amazing work.  Just don't feel rushed -- that's the benefit/pitfall of the free modding community... it's all on your own time ;)
 
This makes me a sad Panda.  Currently, we can't have a Shiva, Blinking Eyes, and Tonberry animation (irony).  I know I've been MIA lately, but that is due to some new opportunities that have dropped in my lap.  I'm not done modding FF8 by any means.  If we can make exceptions for those files individually, then maybe it's not a huge deal, but it would still be nice to have a 'complete' model.  Trust me, mavirick - Fated has done a BEAST of a job finding all of those hashcodes, and I don't think any other modder out there would have had the patience for it, IMO.  I know I wouldn't.  Please keep up your amazing work.  Just don't feel rushed -- that's the benefit/pitfall of the free modding community... it's all on your own time ;)
Oh don't worry, I'm not done here either. I only mean that things are moving slower on my end. Up until the 2.04 release I was spending a ton of time on Tonberry because there were bugs and people's games were crashing and I didn't like that one bit >:( I also had JeMa to work with and to bounce ideas off of up until ~2.03, but he has had some stuff come up that is going to keep him from contributing for the foreseeable future. That combined with the fact that a stable Tonberry takes the pressure off me just means that you shouldn't expect the new version to be available next week ;)

JeMa did ask me to apologize for his withdrawal, however unneeded the apology may be. He's the reason development progressed past 1.06 and his significant contribution should be recognized; without him we wouldn't be where we are today.
 
People (particularly those who only chime in once a blue moon to ask "when do you think xxx will be finished, I can't wait...") need to understand that modding any game of this caliber won't happen over night. It takes years of work to finish some projects, and equally as much patience to wait for them. FF7 modding started 10+ years ago, way before my time began here to know exactly when it did, but it still has projects being worked on. Everything we experience along the way is what keeps me going and digging for more. If you keep that in mind, then you'll always feel happy to be here knowing there is always something new ready to be discovered and modded.
 
Yeap I started mine back like two or so years ago and still not finished with the project as some bugs that where fixed persisted and forbid some pc's go down so sometimes you have to start over that is why you want to get external hard drives or cloud storage.
 
People (particularly those who only chime in once a blue moon to ask "when do you think xxx will be finished, I can't wait...") need to understand that modding any game of this caliber won't happen over night. It takes years of work to finish some projects, and equally as much patience to wait for them. FF7 modding started 10+ years ago, way before my time began here to know exactly when it did, but it still has projects being worked on. Everything we experience along the way is what keeps me going and digging for more. If you keep that in mind, then you'll always feel happy to be here knowing there is always something new ready to be discovered and modded.
Yeap I started mine back like two or so years ago and still not finished with the project as some bugs that where fixed persisted and forbid some pc's go down so sometimes you have to start over that is why you want to get external hard drives or cloud storage.
Thanks for the encouragement guys, it means a lot.

When I first found the mods here for FF8, I tried to register a new account and found out that "mavirick" had already been taken. Turns out I had come here for FF7 graphics mods in 2008 and totally forgotten. All I remember is that FF7 has always been my favorites and it was awesome getting to play it for the umpteenth time with better graphics.

I plan on sharing the github for Tonberry (after I clean up the code a little bit), and the same approach may be applicable to the Steam version of FF7. If the same D3D9Callback interceptor could be used, all it would require is one speedrun to collect a bunch of textures, my same program for finding crucial coordinates for hashing, and building a hash table for all the beautiful textures modders have already created.
 
That sounds groovy, I'd love to track Tonberry on GitHub. I wonder, are there any games besides FF7 and FF8 that the injector could be used on?
 
I suspect there's lots of neat things that could be done with this approach for other games, so long as they use Direct3D 9. It's possible that the same approach could be used with newer versions of D3D as well, although the callback interceptor would have to be rewritten and that could take quite a bit of work. Obviously newer games would be more difficult: textures are larger, which means they're harder to hash distinctively, and much more numerous per scene, which slows things down quite a bit. But if your PC is substantially faster than the requirements for the game it should be possible.

As far as I know, nothing like this has ever been done--generally textures are replaced at the source whereas Tonberry replaces textures as they're actually set to the device stage for the GPU to render, hence the need for a good hashing algorithm. Omzy deserves a lot of credit for dreaming this up and figuring it out.
 
Hi

What do you thing about this screens of battle backgrounds? please tell me which could improve :)

2i89kif.jpg


In movement is better

maybe I create a new thread to not mess this
they look great, I have never seen one battle map retexture mod for FF8, are you working on a mod for it?

yes a dedicated thread for FF8 battle maps would be good, It's a very important thing that must be done.
 
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Please i need help :C, i don´t know how to put the textures Battlefield and G.F from "Mcindus" and how to upscales files :C i´m not good in english , but a need help, anyone does one video for youtube to explain how to put this mods, the others mods texture and etc i know right, because they have everthing and its so easy to put on tonberry, please, i want know how can put the textures battlestage with hd clouds and montains , grass etc, and g.f texture in hd :C...
 
First of all, thanks for all your hard work.

Here's one glitch I noticed (but failed to screenshot, sorry.):

In Timber (Disc 1), when Squall & co. are watching Seifer take Deling hostage on the huge outdoor TV, Seifer & Selphie's textures are switched. It's only for this short scene, and they flip back once Squall enters the TV station.
 
2uLsRLC.png


So, I'm having a bit of trouble proceeding. In the Lunar Base on Disc 3, Squall's spacesuit is mapped to Zell's texture as you can see in the pic above. This isn't so much of a problem, but when Squall goes out of the pod in order to save Rinoa, Rinoa is completely gone! Her model texture is completely invisible, making it impossible to catch her and proceed with the game.
When I try to remove the char_textures hashmap file, everybody in the game reverts to their normal texture, except for Squall and Rinoa's spacesuit!  >:(

Can anybody help?


NM, Found solution... https://www.ff7catalog.com/posts/181201/
 
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I've been trying to mess around with battle scene textures and can't figure out how to properly hash them to appear in game using Tonberry 2.04. I turn on debug mode, find the textures in the noreplace folder but all the textures have a numerical sequence (ex. 1026, 1027, 1028...) as opposed to the scheme I see in released mods (ex. sql_13). I attempted to run these through Berrymapper after moving them to the input folder (and editing them with an X in Paint as a test) but they are obviously not working in game. I moved the new textures to the textures folder under a new "10" folder and then named the folders inside (1026, 1027 ect.) I also named the hashmap "test" and moved it to the hashmap folder. Obviously this isn't right.

Is there a guide to using Berrymapper/Tonberry debug? How do I get the correct file name for the texture and what is the proper file hierarchy once you are going to add them to the textures folder? Are there limitations on texture size? Let me know guys, I'd love to start a new project sprucing up battle textures similar to what others have posted.
 
I've been trying to mess around with battle scene textures and can't figure out how to properly hash them to appear in game using Tonberry 2.04. I turn on debug mode, find the textures in the noreplace folder but all the textures have a numerical sequence (ex. 1026, 1027, 1028...) as opposed to the scheme I see in released mods (ex. sql_13). I attempted to run these through Berrymapper after moving them to the input folder (and editing them with an X in Paint as a test) but they are obviously not working in game. I moved the new textures to the textures folder under a new "10" folder and then named the folders inside (1026, 1027 ect.) I also named the hashmap "test" and moved it to the hashmap folder. Obviously this isn't right.

Is there a guide to using Berrymapper/Tonberry debug? How do I get the correct file name for the texture and what is the proper file hierarchy once you are going to add them to the textures folder? Are there limitations on texture size? Let me know guys, I'd love to start a new project sprucing up battle textures similar to what others have posted.
You have to create your own filenames.  In textures, create a 'master folder' with the first two letters of your new file names.  I used "wm" for worldmap textures for horizonpack.  Then, you name the files xxxxxx_13.png and place them in that folder - pretty sure you should always start with the number 13 and then numerically sequence them from there.  What I do is change all of my bitmap file names -before- i hash in berry mapper, that way berry mapper plots the right hash codes to the right textures and i can just drop the new hash file in.  There's also some more info on the original Tonberrry v1.5 thread that Omzy posted if you need more help.

I am working on my own battle backgrounds along with FatedCourage - but my time is spread far too thin to really finish this project.  I would love to get everyone together who is working on it currently and split up the tasks so that we aren't all making the same backgrounds.  Eff it... I guess I'll just release my progress thus far.
 
You have to create your own filenames.  In textures, create a 'master folder' with the first two letters of your new file names.  I used "wm" for worldmap textures for horizonpack.  Then, you name the files xxxxxx_13.png and place them in that folder - pretty sure you should always start with the number 13 and then numerically sequence them from there.  What I do is change all of my bitmap file names -before- i hash in berry mapper, that way berry mapper plots the right hash codes to the right textures and i can just drop the new hash file in.  There's also some more info on the original Tonberrry v1.5 thread that Omzy posted if you need more help.

I am working on my own battle backgrounds along with FatedCourage - but my time is spread far too thin to really finish this project.  I would love to get everyone together who is working on it currently and split up the tasks so that we aren't all making the same backgrounds.  Eff it... I guess I'll just release my progress thus far.
Awesome, thanks for the reply Mcindus! I was actually just going to message you on YouTube to see if you could do a Berrymapper tutorial. I appreciate you clearing that up for me, I wasn't sure where these file names were coming from. I'll check the Tonberry 1.5 thread as well if I am unsure of things... chances are it's probably been answered already. Check your inbox Mcindus, you should have a new PM.  :)

EDIT:
It turns out I had the process already down, just my file naming was WAY off!  :-P If there is interest I might throw together a quick tutorial! It's not as daunting as it seems, there just isn't much info on using Berrymapper and actually hashing things. I'm pretty confident even novice modders could get the hang of it quickly if there was a guide. People are always much more willing to try things when there is something to hold their hands, I know I am.

2015-10-17_00004_zpsvxzv5hey.jpg


Anyway, proof of concept. This is the stage you battle Diablos in completely upscaled! It actually looks great, the only thing that throws it off now are the pixelated particle effects during attacks. Maybe that's another project?
 
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HEY everybody! Please don't let this die. I'm an artist willing to help!
I always end up finding modding forums late in the process and never get a good chance to help out.

Is there a "master thread" where all the projects are being collectively tracked? I'm trying to find a place where I could be of assistance. Please get back with me. I'm willing to work on any textures or background painting.
-Zeeber
 
Thanks for the quick response, MaKiPL!
I guess the first order of business is to start trying out some of the mods that've already been made. I do hope to find a way to start pulling textures and reinserting them, as I could get to work immediately on updating/repainting backgrounds or textures. I'm sure there are insane amounts of them to be done!

-Zeeber
 
Thanks for the quick response, MaKiPL!
I guess the first order of business is to start trying out some of the mods that've already been made. I do hope to find a way to start pulling textures and reinserting them, as I could get to work immediately on updating/repainting backgrounds or textures. I'm sure there are insane amounts of them to be done!

-Zeeber
I have a whole collection of battle backgrounds that need to be done!  Would you like a pack to start with?

Try these:
Original Bitmaps To Be Done
 
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