FFVIII's Menu Gradients...

[Aavock]

I've found the menu gradient texture and tried my best since it is a indexed colors bitmap manipulation, it sure does look better but I think I can do better:

Also, I find it surprising that no one is complaining about the "hi-res" font: unlike FFVII, the upscaled font texture was done from scratch so the shadows of each letters are almost non existant and it was very bad font choice since it's very thin and narrow. Unfortunately, the 2013 version disable the option of choosing between original and "hi res" menu textures (font, avatars and some other menu elements): it is now a default option.

Next thing I tried was re inserting upscaled textures (*.tex files @200%) back to the "menu.fs" (pretty much like what I did for FFVII, see here) using myst6re's Deling v0.7b but the program crash when clicking on it to show the preview. Is there any other *.fs repacker ?

 

[LeonhartGR]

Looking forward to any improvement! Please take this into consideration as well!

 

[Aavock]

Thanks LeonhartGR, I've downloaded this great project a while back; all improved and resized textures are *.png files so it won't work with the 2013 version unless a FFVIII "new to old" patch shows up but in the meantime I'm working with the original game file format; of course, results will never looks as smooth as png-24 files specially for the menu gradient but re-inserting upscaled *.tex files (@200/400%) will definitely help.

 

[falkTX]

why not make the menu a single color?

I'm not sure how well it will look, but maybe it's worth a try.

 

[Aavock]

There's a lot of potential watching this thread; after using Img2Tex, Biturn and Omega, I've realized that those tools were mainly created for FFVII (resized textures works fine with FFVII) and even if both games are using the same file format (*.tex), the header, wich contains the palettes and texture size, seems different. When trying to convert a resized *.tex file, the game will eventually crash on the game main menu.

Edit and import are no longer an issue; right now I'm looking for the hex values of the height and weight texture sizes.