field specs...

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_Ombra_

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Hi Guys,

i really love what you're doing with the engine. Since me and my group translated the game to Italian we are really into it and so i was wondering, by the posts i've seen looks like you guys have some problems fully understanding the field files. Probably you already know but Snailrush, creator of 7mimic (sadly the page disappeared) decoded pretty much all the sections of the field, especially the BG with lights ans so on.

Please kill me if you already knew or even better if you already know everything that there is to know about the bgs.

Else... PM me and I'll give you the email address so you can contact with him but let me tell you that the guy isn't easy. I mailed him once about the same thing and got an unpleasant answer.
 
We have a community here that is pretty tight-knit. We already have enough poeple in the forums who aren't easy or give unpleasent answers. I think I can say for the rest of us that we would much rather prefer hackers that are a little more cooperitive. If he could do it, so could we.
 
halkun
Ouch!

Ombra
Hey! I haven't heard from snailrush in a long while! I miss telling him stupid things I found in FF7 battle models (LOL).

In any case most of the field file is now known.  I think there are a few small details left to beat senseless.  I've been adding things to the big ole information collection.  Current explorations are mostly with the fieldscripting.

The best way to look at things in my perspective is Snailrush showed it could be done, therefore we weren't discouraged.

Cyb
 
Sorry, I've been over my head in senior thesis for the last four days.... Coupled with a flaky internet, I've been gumpy...

If the reply sounded rude, I didn't mean it...   :-)
 
No problem Halkum,

it'll be nice to see the project go on faster without having to focus on stuff that's already chewed if you know what i mean.  :-D
 
Hi Guys,

i really love what you're doing with the engine. Since me and my group translated the game to Italian we are really into it and so i was wondering, by the posts i've seen looks like you guys have some problems fully understanding the field files. Probably you already know but Snailrush, creator of 7mimic (sadly the page disappeared) decoded pretty much all the sections of the field, especially the BG with lights ans so on.

Please kill me if you already knew or even better if you already know everything that there is to know about the bgs.

Else... PM me and I'll give you the email address so you can contact with him but let me tell you that the guy isn't easy. I mailed him once about the same thing and got an unpleasant answer.
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Hello, long time no see =)

There are few things that we don't know about background (for example Z-ordering of sprites in front layer) as well as we don't know nothing about palette opcodes.
 
Hey Akari! Yep, yep, loooong time no see :P

I think that Snailrush figured that out. On 7mimic you even where able to see the animations on the backgrounds as well as the light sources that affected the models while walking near some parts of a bg. I PMed the email address of Snailrush to Cyberman. I hope he can get some informations out of him. Take care
 
Hey Akari! Yep, yep, loooong time no see :P

I think that Snailrush figured that out. On 7mimic you even where able to see the animations on the backgrounds as well as the light sources that affected the models while walking near some parts of a bg. I PMed the email address of Snailrush to Cyberman. I hope he can get some informations out of him. Take care
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What is 7mimic anyway? I never met this name before.
 
Hey Akari! Yep, yep, loooong time no see :P

I think that Snailrush figured that out. On 7mimic you even where able to see the animations on the backgrounds as well as the light sources that affected the models while walking near some parts of a bg. I PMed the email address of Snailrush to Cyberman. I hope he can get some informations out of him. Take care
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What is 7mimic anyway? I never met this name before.
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I have, I remeber it being a very propiatary scene renderer from about three yeras ago. Now I know who you are talking about because I tried to get some information out of the author as well. 7mimic could do scenes like ztruck and the rooftop field (tenjo?) where the background spanned beyond the vewport on a different plane than the foreground. 

If i remeber right, he was quite "unpleasant" when I spoke with him too. I was putting togeather "Gears" at the time, and I think he felt I wanted to leech off his work.
 
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Here is a link to it and maybe you can get something out of it

7mimic

and for those who like FF8

8mimic

Those are the latest versions before the page disappeard.

Akari, take a look at them... you are going to like 'em

Oh, btw, he had a program called PSound wich opened the music/sound effects format of many games including FF7 and Xenogears
 
PSound is a APCM player, it plays the Adaptive PCM sound samples from the disk. It was in a APCM is what the PSX's sound chip could do natively.
 
Oh, ok. I didn't knew but if i recall correctly it even opens special file formats from certain games, but that's something else.
 
PSound is a APCM player, it plays the Adaptive PCM sound samples from the disk. It was in a APCM is what the PSX's sound chip could do natively.
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ADPCM (Sony will sue you for mispelling it really! ;) ), his software had the ability to search through the files on the CD to locatate sound clips in various formats (often ones game specific) embeded into the game files, not just play them.  Snailrush really did some interesting things.  Just people asked him to do things for them such as I remember one person asking "Well you have FF7 backgrounds decoded, do you know the 3d structure format for Soul Reaver? Or even better could you dump it to a Quake Level format for me?", if you think I'm joking, I am VERY serious someone really DID ask that.

As for his unpleasantness it's kind of understandable from me, he really liked to have time to work on his programs it would seem.  However people kept doing things like "I demand your source code" yes someone ACTUALLY did that. They apparently thought his software was under the GPL because he was letting people download it free.  Also the "If you can do this what about ...", so he got a bit, anoyed by it all, and with everyone, unfortunately.

Cyb
 
That's really wierd, here I just say. "Hey, you mind implementing the fieldscript system" and "We need a battle module placeholder" and it poeple just do it.

Maybe I'm just special......
 
Cyberman, i share your thoughts. When i was working on the FF7 translation with my team mates we had a lot of problems due to incomplete documentation and broken software which led to almost dropping the project. That slowed us down to the point that we had to restart the project from scratch. While that happened, on our page we already had published infos on the project an people started (excuse me French) BITCHIN' about it not being released or that it was taking forever.
All that hype generated a flood of angry people and frustrated us A LOT but we went on because we wanted to finish the project for ourselves.

After the first patch was released everything went back to normal and that thought us that we don't need to publicize our projects until we are 100% sure that we won't have problems with the translation (that's why the Xenogears translation went smooth).

All that just to show that no matter how far people can go with their senseless questions we still go on. Unfortunately not everybody is born with a fully functional brain and that's why we have to use it for those that don't have it. (Figure speech, don't kill me for that :-D).

halkun, you are not special... you just have a different way of thinking (Better way for what i see)

I hope that snailrush reads this and understands. People like him should search for people like us, willing to go forward with what we like and ignore all the stupid people that don't even think what they are doing or writing.
 
That's really wierd, here I just say. "Hey, you mind implementing the fieldscript system" and "We need a battle module placeholder" and it poeple just do it.

Maybe I'm just special......
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Well think of it this way, there are more than one person (IE you), second you actually do things.  Third a lot of people here are already thinking about these things, you are merely asking for what they've already put time and effort in.  This is the difference from being 1 person and being a group.

Cyb
 
Here is a link to it and maybe you can get something out of it

7mimic

and for those who like FF8

8mimic

Those are the latest versions before the page disappeard.

Akari, take a look at them... you are going to like 'em

Oh, btw, he had a program called PSound wich opened the music/sound effects format of many games including FF7 and Xenogears
Click to expand...
Wow... looks like 7mimic solve all the troubles with background that I have. (It doesnt show palette animation though)
 
Now you just have to convince snailrush to co-operate. :P

People who have noted that he's probably not the... easiest person to work with, are correct. Actually, you might still be able to Google what he thinks of Qhimm's... but I'm not sure since his site seems to be down.
 
ADPCM (Sony will sue you for mispelling it really! ;) )
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It's not like if ADPCM was a sony name... there are many other ADPCM implementations not by Sony. The D in the name means "Differential" or sometimes "Delta" (same meaning) because the data in the samples gets decoded as a "difference" from the last sample. The format the PSX (and PS2) use is XA ADPCM, and is the same audio compression in the CD/XA specification.
One of the other projects I work on is a SPU2 plugin for ps2 emulators (basically only pcsx2 now), I haven't released it publicly yet, tho.
If someone has "decoded" the instrument files in the FF7 data, or the sound effects files, it wouldn't be too hard for me to code a "note renderer" for it... someday (I'm kinda busy with another project now).
 
I took a looking into the audio file once upon a time. However, it was just a quick test as all I did was cat the data directly to my PCM  (dsp) decoder device in Linux. I could hear the sounds, but as my device was a PCM decoder and not a ADPCM decoder, the adaptive data was rendered as static.

At the tail end, through the noise, I did hear a very staticy "Whoo-Hoo" sample from the chocobo race song.

It appeared to be a two block file format. A header with data offsets and then a data block of samples. At least, that was what I got from the instrument bank.
 
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