Originally posted by adventureFAN:

Thx Dangus!
You're really into ihis =]

I'm not really getting anywhere though. I'm posting here in the hopes someone with a little more technical knowhow will be able to work with what I've found. I really don't like that the game does this to the art. I can deal with the irregular pixel sizes to some degree, I get why it happens, but the thin pixel halo around the tiles is really blowing my mind... did they force it in as a Bilinear filter padding precaution?

I'm not really getting it. You'd think it'd only be there on odd mulitpliers, but it's there on anything above native res, and then for some reason there on WHOLE NUMBER multiplications of the native res... why? What's the point? Shouldn't everything fit fine, why force the rim of the background tiles to always display at a narrower amount than the rest of the tile? They are 32x32 squares... there's no need to display them at anything other than 64x64 with 2x2 pixels at 1280x768, and yet, they display at 64x64 with a 1x rim and then an algorithmically spaced 30 pixels between that at either 2x3 or 2x2.

Basically, its still the original asset of 32 pixels, forced to have the outer rim be 1 pixel either tall or wide, and then 30 pixels forced into the middle, occasionally stetched to have an extra pixel make up for the gap. You can see it if you open my second image in photoshop and count it out. There's no logical reason I can come up with to do this...

Originally posted by Scarlet Crusade:

The black bars are because there's literally nothing to put there, no assets to show. The alternative is to crop the image and you lose something that could be being seen otherwise. It's like letterboxing in film. If you've played Final Fantasy VII on PC or the recent rerelease on PS4, they have black space too for the same reason.

I understand that entirely, but the math is confusing at what times it decides to pillarbox or letterbox. Also, the scaling seems inconsistent, sprites scale squarely, but world tiles never do.

Originally posted by GuyInDogSuit:

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

What bothers me the most is the way the game scales at resolutions higher than native. My biggest gripe was the filter, but now that that is gone, it's revealed to me just how weird the game is about stretching it's assets to larger screens. Character sprites scale correctly if multiplied evenly, but world tiles don't... the game can be forced via it's INI to run at any resolution you want by making changes and setting the file to read only. But then you get inconsistent black space filler... the game has an odd aspect ratio 5:3... I'm a little confused by it.

Yeah, I've noticed that. Full screen just looks odd, and there's no reason why those black bars should even be there.

I think there are actually, and in fact I think there should be more of them on the top and sides. If you do the math, on lets say a 1080p monitor, the game should only be allowed to get as big as 1280x768 before it bleeds off the screen (3x native gets you 1920 by 1152 - so 72 pixels need to be cropped). And yet, even through it should fit fine at 1920 width, at full screen it decides to pillar box the sides? HUH? That doesn't make sense to me at all.

Edit to point above: I take that back, it makes sense that if it crushes horizontally it has to pull in vertically. I wasn't thinking.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around these scaling decisions. I'd love another mod to always force it to fit properly, but I'm not sure the folks who are skilled enough to do it are interested in these more technical mods. I asked Nyxo about it and he said it was likely a rather difficult thing to fix.

Just some observations:

- The game runs natively at 5:3 (640x384)
- It's settings INI (user/appdata/local/ffv_game/) can be modified manually and forced via Read Only to remove the generated black space at any custom resolution (except when set to fullscreen=1)
- At native, all pixels appear 1:1
- At above native via even multiplication, only character sprites stretch evenly (2x2 pixel sizes)
- At above native via any multiplication, world tiles do NOT stetch evenly (even at 2x,3x native) - pixel widths and height are inconsistent, and in all observable cases the rim of the tile is (1x2,1x3,1x4, etc depending on size - this leads back to visible borders and was part of the initial tile seam issue compounded by the bilinear filter)
- Text scales to internally set resolution - running the game at native and using a 3rd party application (Windowed Borderless Gaming), to force fullscreen results in small text

Not sure where to go from here about forcing a change... if the game is running at fullscreen, is it setting resolution via a list? or simply stretching to fit? If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

Edit: Here are comparison screenshots of the tile scaling and the narrow pixel frame:
Native:
http://www.onelinergames.com/public/native.png

2x Native:
http://www.onelinergames.com/public/2xnative.png

They're both pixel accurate png's so they're small, download or zoom to get a better look.

Originally posted by GuyInDogSuit:

That puts it in an entirely different perspective. This is a MASSIVE undertaking, and to expect one person to attempt this is hilarious. Maybe if we did as someone suggested, selecting a project lead, and having a team of people work on this, would it be more feasible. I would think it's more likely that IcePenguin would do a menu conversion mod a la FFIII for this game first. And I hope he does.

Exactly. I downloaded the files out of curiosity the other day and was floored by how many assets there are. However, I think before long we will see small mods for the game, like font mods and UI mods. Changing the menu borders and UI are simple, but moving things around the screen and changing where they show up is a little more advanced.

Like I've said before, I'm not terribly interested in changing anything really, I think most of the assets are fine, what bothers me the most is the way the game scales at resolutions higher than native. My biggest gripe was the filter, but now that that is gone, it's revealed to me just how weird the game is about stretching it's assets to larger screens. Character sprites scale correctly if multiplied evenly, but world tiles don't... the game can be forced via it's INI to run at any resolution you want by making changes and setting the file to read only. But then you get inconsistent black space filler... the game has an odd aspect ratio 5:3... I'm a little confused by it.

I'm dead set on fixing it (because I believe it to be another oversight on the part of the porting devs), but I'm just not skilled enough at modding compliled code... asset mods are simple. They just take time. I'd expect more work to be done on VI sooner than V, as it's the more popular game.

Originally posted by Andar:

Is there anyone who accepts sprite art commissions that could take this on? Would commissioning new sprites be begging for legal trouble?

I would like nothing more than to be able to see some high quality, PSP-style sprites (as in the ones from I/II/IV) in this underrated gem of a game. It's also what it would take to convince me to buy this or VI on steam. If there were someone who were willing to take such a project on, I'd be happy to throw something their way, even in the form of donation.

There 1861 FILES in the assets folder. That's files, not sprites... files. A good chunk of those are sprite SHEETS... with upwards of 30-40 world tile assets, and others with 10-20 character animation sprites.

So, given that, I'd estimate the amount of individual assets to alter to be upwards of 6,000 or more (this was just a rough guess, a good chunk of the files are also just one image, or likely not worth changing because they already achieve what your after).

I'd really encourage you to download the asset dump in the main topic comment. You can browse all of the files in a matter of mintues just to get a sense of the undertaking. It'd take a team of people to do it, and they'd not only be making changes, but aesthetic decisions too, which are likely even harder to pin down.

I've looked over the files myself, and I don't think they look terrible, but I do think they could use a little work in the coloring and gradient department, which is a much less daunting task. But I don't personally have the time to take this on. Sorry to be discouraging. I bet you'll see someone do something eventually, but given the reaction to the game when it released, I'm betting it'll be an SNES conversion mod before it's a PSP style re-working.

Originally posted by Nyxo:

I just released my archive extractor/repackager: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38150185/FFVI/FFVI_Explore_v0.1.zip

Great work!

Originally posted by Zunnoab #931:

Yes that's what I'm saying. It's stretching the window to fit full screen without borders, which isn't matching up 1:1, is my guess.

From what I can tell, it's all happening at the engine level.

Originally posted by Zunnoab #931:

The game's full screen is full screen windowed mode (without labeling it as such). This is why it breaks if you have Windows DPI re-scaling on (because the game was not designed to look for it). That is my guess as to what you are describing.

No, I'm not talking about the game breaking or any crashing issues (I've had DPI scaling off since day one). I'm pointing out that the game is stretching the assets to irregular sizes when it's told to display in fullscreen. It gets the windows res. and then just stetches to fill. This is producing distortion both in the static tiles, and the way character sprites track across the screen (as a sprite is drawn it will pass over parts of the screen where a pixel is being stretched or pinched, and visually undulate). Similarly, the background tiles are getting stetched to a length that gives them a thin border (which is part of why the tile seems looked so bad with the filter on).

When you run the game at 640x480 in a window, you'll see 1:1 pixel dimensions, and everything is being drawn properly... the game has that crisp, clean look. At fullscreen, the game is not evenly scaling the pixels (by drawing them properly at 2x,3x, or 4x), and you get the warping I'm talking about. An obvious fix is the force the game to scale evenly, and that's what I'm asking about with this topic.

This is by no means a huge deal, just something the filter removal patch revealed to me. The game looks a lot better, but there was some discussion in another topic about fixing V and VI's aspect ratio and scaling methods, and so I just wanted to start a new thread about it to guage interest in those that were bothered by it.

To Krisan Thyme or Nyxo. In your excellent work removing the filter, I've been looking at the way V and VI are both scaling to fullscreen, and curious about what I've noticed.

With the filter off, it looks like the game (V) does not render square,evenly scaled pixels in fullscreen, and that part of what was causing the bad tile seeming, are actually very narrowly scaled pixels running the rim of background tiles(so on my 1080p monitor, I was seeing pixels represented at 1x4 or 1x3). So even with the filter off, there are still badly drawn pixels on screen creating odd artifacts.

While this is certainly nitpicky, I had noticed a few people interested in getting the games to run in their proper aspect ratio's while in fullscreen. My question then, is did either of you come across anything useful in restricting the way the game scales tiles when it stretches them to match the screen resolution, and if so, would it be easy to implement a scaling restriction depending on your screen size?