Whoa, that's pretty crazy. Will definitely try this later tonight...

I'm surprised they haven't ported FF Origins (aka I & II) yet. Or Tactics for that matter.

Originally posted by Weretiger Rei:

Necro post but I think Id be more interested in getting these games to run at 60 FPS than anything else

Unfortunately, the framerate of these games is directly tied to their speed. There is a mod or two for some of them that will increase battle FPS to ~25 (any more than that and everything will start to animate unrealistically quickly), but that's really about all you can do with such an archaic engine. These were DS games before they were ported to mobile and then to PC, and unfortunately it shows - not just in every aspect of the games themselves, but also in any attempt to fix them.

Hmm. This doesn't seem to work with Final Fantasy III. The game will crash on startup if OpenGl32.dll is in the game's directory at launch. The regular OpenGL.dll file will allow the game to open, but doesn't do anything. Any ideas?

Awesome work! I figured Gedosato would be of use here...

It's a huge improvement overall, though there are a few unexpected animation-related quirks. For instance, the moving gears on the walls in the Tower of Zot are severely glitched, and the save point circle moves around the same way the gears do[i.imgur.com]. Still though - again - most of the game looks so much better now.

I personally play the game in windowed mode at 1280x768 resolution, as that's one of the only resolutions that doesn't letterbox or pillarbox the display. I'm using a variant of your second config file that downsamples the game from 2560x1536 rather than 2732x1536 (to keep the ratio at 5:3 like the original) and it looks great. I will try some different resolutions and tweaks and see if something can be done about the moving sprites on the walls/floor. Thanks so much for all your hard work so far!

Works great with FF4:TAY as well, just tested.

Originally posted by Dangus ))<>(( Taargus:

The two routes I could see going are:

The long road - change the sprites by taking the original assets and applying a filter - reloading them back into the archive

The short road - finding a way to mod the way the game filters textures as they are pulled into the game

Good thinking. Right now I think the short-road plan is the way to try first, as it's entirely possible the long-road strategy might not even work. If the game's engine is a straight port of the DS's, it may end up "unfiltering" any filtered textures that are put into the game's files; that pixelated, no-mipmapping method could simply be the only way it knows how to render things.

I think the short road, therefore, cuts right to the heart of the problem, by giving the game a way to actually display textures more clearly. I don't know how feasible it would be to make a mod like that, but I definitely appreciate that someone's at least looking into it. Keep it up!

Originally posted by Lodovico Rivers:

I just noticed that a huge con to having this filter applied is that the backgrounds also look incredibly blurred as well.

Actually, that's mostly because the PSP version uses lower-quality textures for some assets. Looking at a few things for comparison in the PC shot, especially that pillar with the rune-like symbols carved in it, you can tell the base resolution of the texture is noticeably higher on PC.

Check out an LP of the PSP version to see the unfiltered version in action. The battle backgrounds look nearly the same with bilinear filtering on than with it off. It's mostly the character/enemy models that show great improvement with the filter on.

Originally posted by Dangus ))<>(( Taargus:

I think I have seen it mentioned before. I'd assume it's a matter of turning it on... the way Nyxo and Krisan Thyme turned 'off' the filter for V and VI. If the game uses openGL then it's a matter of determining the filter used... and changing it.

I hope this is the case as well. I agree that the pixelated look has its moments, but most of the 3D models, especially enemies, just look so much better with it on. The big models in particular use very low resolution textures compared to the ground and walls around them (the Before picture is a great example of that; just compare one of its scales/fins to the floor tiles!), and the filtered version goes a long way towards bridging that gap.

Because the 3D versions of Final Fantasy III and IV were originally made for the Nintendo DS, they didn't have texture filtering. It's very bizarre, however, that this lack of filtering carried over to the mobile/PSP/PC ports of the game (as well as in FF4: The After Years).

I mean, just look how much better FF3's tutorial boss looks with filtering on:
Before[i.imgur.com], After[i.imgur.com]

(FYI: the "After" pic is from a PSP emulator, which has a filtering option.)

I can't believe no one's brought it up here before, but is there any known way to get filtered textures in FF3+4? I tried forcing various texture filtering options on through my graphics driver, but nothing worked. How feasible would it be to mod something like that in?