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[Thad]

Well, right, I don't think anybody's disagreeing.

What I said was that by the time you're doing actual real-time rendering you may as well completely redo the environments anyway.

I stand by that, because even if you restored them from higher-res scans/rendered them in real-time, those backgrounds would still be a goddamn mess.

[LaserBeing]

Along the train track route on the way to Corel there is a hidden cave with nothing in it except an abandoned bulldozer and an old tarp. This cave serves no purpose and as far as I know the bulldozer model is not used in any other part of the game.

I just wanted to bring this up as an example of how little the developers knew what they were doing, at least by modern industry standards.

[Thad]

Oh Jesus, that fucking cave.

Remember I hit a ridonkulous number of random monsters on the way to and from it on my playthrough last year.

[Royal☭]

Not suggesting that they make a free look camera, but more that they could have an easier time scaling the graphics while also not making it look like Cloud is just hovering in air.

[Brentai]

Tbf it would involve adding in a new rendering engine (since not everything in those backgrounds is a flat untextured polygon) and that's probably still more work than they're putting into this.

[A˛]

So... FFVII leaked onto Square's store and was pulled... from what people have seen so far:

Ogg files present in the game are recorded MIDIs off probably a sound card or synth, instead of the original PSX sound track. This includes OWA which is completely missing its lyrics.

Videos are upscaled versions of the original PSX videos (possibly with extra compression added to make them look worse)

Also contains SecuROM DRM.

[DestyNova]

*Insert every bloody negative icon here*

[Spram]

Look what I found:


[spoiler]
It's a Mexican Black Mage![/spoiler]

[A˛]

So FF7 is on Steam. It's the same godawful PC version, except without SecuROM.

[Thad]

Well, nice that there's no SecuROM, anyhow.

There's a tutorial over at Qhimm on how to get mods running on the re-release versions.  The sheer breadth of what's available is pretty overwhelming but there's some neat stuff out there.  I wrote about my experience two years ago; things have come along a bit since then and, among other things, it looks like that thread's got an installer that greatly simplifies the process of installing mods (putting a whole lot of them in one place so you don't have to install them individually).

I'll probably save my next replay for when the fan translation is finished.  Maybe it'll be good, maybe it won't, but I'm interested in finding out.

Apparently that's actually not so far off (jumping to the end of the thread, he says he's in the home stretch but working through a bunch of fiddly box placement issues); I bet it's out soon enough that I won't get to it until well after release.  Low priority; currently I'm working my way through a replay of FF6A, having stalled out somewhere in the middle of FF5A and FF4DS.  (And FF1 PSP, though mostly I was just playing that to kill time in-between other stuff.  And, come to think of it, I never finished FF3DS either.)

[Defenestration]

At first I was pleased with the FF7 bit on steam. But it still uses the shitty midi files from the original PC version, and that is completely unexcusable.

[Beat Bandit]

Let me know when fans have remade FF1-6 in that engine.

[Thad]

At first I was pleased with the FF7 bit on steam. But it still uses the shitty midi files from the original PC version, and that is completely unexcusable.

There's a tool called FF7Music (see link above) that will let you replace the music with the PS1 versions, with a pretty solid remastered version, or even arbitrary oggs of your choosing.  (I replaced the terrible FF7 victory fanfare with a Minibosses cover version.)  It's kind of an ugly hack (you have to run the ff7music binary, and THAT works as a wrapper and calls the main binary, and my recollection is that it didn't respect modern permissions settings and had to be run as admin), but if you've already paid for the thing I certainly wouldn't play it without it.

Let me know when fans have remade FF1-6 in that engine.

I'm sure that if it ever DOES get finished, the forums will one day be littered with half-completed, abandoned attempts to do just that.  Whether anyone actually manages to succeed at it?  Well, I wouldn't rule out the possibility but I wouldn't bet on it either.

Presumably the priority will be to get games that were actually designed with the same engine to work in it -- that's Xenogears, FF8&9, and maybe some others I can't think of offhand.

Would be interesting to see some homebrew with it too, but I'm not convinced an FF7-based engine is the best place to start a game design project in this decade.  But I'm still pretty impressed by what they've done with Q-Gears so far and the final product could wind up being pretty versatile.

[Defenestration]

To be clear, I didn't buy it. I meant that I would if they put any effort at all to make it a decent port. It's not even like it would have been hard for them to do.

[Thad]

Fair enough.  The fan hacks are pretty impressive -- but of course that also throws how thoroughly half-assed the port is into even sharper relief.

At least they fixed the movies.  Sort of, a little.

[Rico]

Finally getting around to listening to Balance and Ruin, and there a surprising number of stand-out tracks. Smoke and Clouds (Locke); Ascension of a Madman (Kefka); La Montaņa de los Caballos Jovenes (Mt. Koltz); Fistful of Nickels (Shadow); and Gobble, Snarf, Snap (Phantom Train) are all excellent and that's just off the first disc. The later discs get a bit more techno, but all in all very satisfied with how this turned out.


THAD EDIT: Fixed link.

[Thad]

Yeah, I'm on my way to bed so I'm just going to link to my blog post about it again, but I think it's pretty damn great.

[Rico]

That's what I get for Googling to find the link and then trying to quickly fix the absurd string of referral characters. The other discs aren't quite as loaded as the first one, but still very satisfied. If you skip Event Horizon the end of the third disc starting at Tranquil Rest going straight through disc 4's Trauermarsch skipping Endless Stair is a solid 9 tracks. The story I heard is that XPRTNovice hadn't really done any game music rearrangements until he submitted a contest entry for this project, which is too bad because his stuff is amazing and I would unreservedly give him project MVP.

Disappointed by Impressario, though, which I only mention because everyone else loves it and I need to feel edgy and cool. It's a cool arrangement, but after the pretty solid first three minutes, when it breaks out into Aria the vocalists can't keep up with the demands anymore, at which point it's kind of the arranger's job to move some stuff around. Although I was pleasantly surprised that there was very little Bohemian Rhapsody (the solo nod right around 5 minutes, and a couple bits that aren't really arranged in the 6th minute) and way more Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. II: Scenes From a Memory album. There, take that, consensus!

[Thad]

That's what I get for Googling to find the link and then trying to quickly fix the absurd string of referral characters.

Wasn't actually an issue with the URL you pasted, it was the tagging; it looked like you started to do straight-url-in-url-tags but changed your mind partway through; you wound up linking to http://ff6.ocremix.org/[/url.

[Thad]

Is there anything in FF6 worse than the Auction House?

I contend that there is not.  You can make a compelling case for the Fanatics' Tower, but given that you can actually walk in and out of there in five minutes with everything you want and without resorting to savestates, I have to give the nod to Jidoor.