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Author Topic: Japanese Version of FF7 character encoding?  (Read 2017 times)
KingMike
Guest
« Reply #30 on: January 29, 2007, 07:41:03 pm »
Quote from: Moulinoski on January 22, 2007, 07:47:58 pm
Quote from: Cyberman on January 21, 2007, 12:58:40 pm
Quote from: Moulinoski on January 21, 2007, 10:29:29 am
I'm gonna leave or else I'll risk being thought of as a retard, lol. O.O
LGP archives are the format of the PC data, basically they repackaged the entire game into these archives, instead of having large tracks of files they all got packed into big archives for the hard disk. Ditto for the movies and other media.  Much of the data is identical to the PS1 version so accessing it, isn't a big deal.  The big differences are things like battle models, field models and movies. The bulk is pretty much identical. Even the animation format.

Cyb

Ah, I get it. Kinda like a .zip file...
Regarding the models, isn't that because the PC version had supposed better graphics? I dunno, I've never been able to get my hands on a PC version.

Aren't the movies in the PC version just plain old AVI files?
(except that they appear upside-down in everything I've tried except Nero Showtime)
Kajitani-Eizan
Guest
« Reply #31 on: January 29, 2007, 08:44:12 pm »
just to make sure, you guys know the guys over at qhimm.com, right?

EDIT: never mind, i'm an idiot.
Cyberman
Guest
« Reply #32 on: January 30, 2007, 12:32:51 am »
Smiley as matter of fact.. I do

Because many of the people know English as there primary or second language, and a few know Japanese (but haven't touched the game in terms of hacking), that's what it's like LOL.

Ahem.. erstwhile I just decided I needed to rewrite all my decoding routines just to be sure they are working right.  ZLIB won't work since the data doesn't seem to be liked by Zlib at all. That explains some of my evening at the very least.

Cyb
Cyberman
Guest
« Reply #33 on: February 02, 2007, 01:26:52 am »
Right so like I used a bomb on my code... and suddenly this bomb imploded and sucked all the bad stuff out.
LOL
SCENE.BIN now decodes. @Wooopie.

Now back to something interesting I guess. ZLIB saved my sanity on this by the way.

So I suppose in order to find the character encoding I have to have the Japanese version of FF7.
Erstwhile I found something rather pecular in the FF7 scene.BIN something about if you read this message let someone know.
hmmm weird huh?  I suspect it's part of a batte script probably a debug script.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2007, 09:40:32 pm by Cyberman »
Aerdan
Guest
« Reply #34 on: February 02, 2007, 09:02:25 am »
Please use the edit button instead of doubleposting. It produces the same effect and doesn't waste database space.
Cyberman
Guest
« Reply #35 on: February 21, 2007, 09:52:12 pm »
First sorry about that, I didn't realize the forums supported that. Not all do as it seems to vary a lot.

Now back to the chase... sort of

There I was looking at FIELD.BIN.

FIELD.BIN appears to have a number of interesting things in it. (First it's a GZIPED file skip the first 8 bytes and the rest is a Gziped file).
In the US release between 0003A5B8 and 0003F0DC there appears to be what Gemini descibed before a series of LBA's and file sizes. Currently I'm working on verifying if these are exactly what they appear to be.  If this is true 'obviously' this is what's necessary to play with if you change a file enough to change the sector locations on the disc.   This section in particular contains all the offsets and sizes of FIELD location specific files. The order is DAT MIM BSX.  Starting with DUMMY.DAT and ending at ZTRUCK.BSX At location 0003F08C to 0003F0DC the BCX files are iterated and ended with the FIELD.TDB (Textures for all the field models).

In addition the entire field script opcode list is within this file.  (Verified with the PC version names).  A series of offsets within the PS1 memory are in there as well.  It's a bit puzzling as to what data they are for, since they can't be variable locations. The only thought is these are the load locations for some files.

The 'fun' part of dealing with the Japanese version of FF7 has fallen upon someone else (who has that version of the game, which helps).  A side note to this is that symetrical functions to convert between FF7 code and Unicode will be introduced as well.  'Psuedo' scene files are loadable via XML code (unique to Q-gears). This is primarily to test the Virtual Machine (IE Japanese and English and other possible translation output).  Unicode is only needed to be supported because of use of XML (IE unicode characters are translated to FF7 symbols and then passed to the engine), and for debugging (FF7 symbols are read and passed to a debugging screen to show what is supposed to be displayed in a window).

The Q-gears SVN source tree has been updated (within the last 2 weeks that is) major revision 0.11 is now out. I believe the latest Binary is available for download as well.

FIELD.BIN appears to be the FIELD engine after a bit more analysis.  So if anyone is hacking FF7 and the field script message lengths change any of the file sizes this is the place to attack. (WOO?)  I believe movie support has also been added recently to Q-gears in the SVN version (Go 'G' !). The majority of the other directories on the PS1 CD's are less than 60 files long.  I suppose they setup the FIELD directory that way because they didn't want to make the path table from hell and wander around it a lot to find there file.

Cyb
DarknessSavior
Guest
« Reply #36 on: February 22, 2007, 08:52:23 am »
Holy...hell...>.<

Wow, man. I gotta say I'm VERY impressed with the work you've done. I don't understand a word of what you guys are talking about, coding wise and such. But...whoa. ^_^

So, from the screenshots it seems plausible that you guys have the engine for walking around and such done, but you have no progress on the battle engine itself? Still, very well done.

~DS
Cyberman
Guest
« Reply #37 on: February 22, 2007, 10:26:20 am »
I think the current status is
"Field models decodable and sort of work but lack a complete animation sequence"
Same location from the screen shot thing on the source forge page

Field location (see background image) mostly working.  Field animation and such works, this image demonstrates the field window (white box) which is normally only what you see, the walkmap (yes it's really 3d thank God!), and that weird cyan box is the character Cheesy. Red lines are walkmesh edges and white lines are inside the walkmesh. The wide BLUE line is a LINE which triggers a script. IE you cross the line a script executes.  FF7 is almost all script code. (the script code is roughly 10 megs of data.. not just the text that is spewed to the screen either).

FF7 is an impressive achievement for a mid 1990's game.  In any case since I have the ISO image access routines somewhat working (They are incomplete but functional) things will get more interesting soon.

Cyb
Nightcrawler
Guest
« Reply #38 on: February 22, 2007, 11:00:45 am »
Nice progress! This dissecting a game project is pretty cool and informative. I can see many cool things that can be done with this project later on down the road. Even if/when you achieve your initial goal, this will pave the way for other things.

Do you plan on eventually releasing documentation on how to manipulate the engine and what not? Yes, you'll have an FF7 engine, but it could really take off as something if people would one day be able to use it to create their own games using your FF7 engine.
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