icemagician
Neo Member
Oh man, I love Grandia II. So underrated.
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Grandia® II Anniversary Edition (PC) |OT| Still Not Vague Enough 15 Years Later
- Thread starter Falk
- Start date
BONKERS
Member
There are a couple books with art in them. But from what I remember. They are different a little bit and some of the expressions aren't 100% the same.
Man, seriously. Grandia franchise is probably the only one where I bother to speak with literally everyone till their dialogue repeats, and do so every time a major event happens. (I might attempt to do this with other JRPGs but give up midway into the story)
So much characterization even with party members, not just the protagonist. AND DINNER TIME.
edit: Definitely post impressions after you're done with the game. I'd like to hear your thoughts coming from Grandia (1).
edit2: yay
'Grats! Feel free to keep sending me any other feedback directly via PMs as I am still collecting everything on a daily basis and sending it through the team.
EDIT!:
Incoming patch! http://steamcommunity.com/app/330390/discussions/0/517141624286903258/
PumpkinSpice
Banned
Yikes. Not to dissuade the hard work being put in, but... right now (I know it's unfinished) it looks less like a Dreamcast game and more like a mobile game. Mismatched resolutions and styles on each element and all.
Those new command icons have to go.
What mods are you running?
BONKERS
Member
They look the same to me, is there a higher resolution shot available? That seems a bit too small to see what you are talking about. (While I can see the font changes easily. And they are getting closer at matching. Dat "Critical" though 
)
Is it the sword? It looks the same as if upscaled with Point/NN. Which doesn't look that bad.
)Is it the sword? It looks the same as if upscaled with Point/NN. Which doesn't look that bad.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/330390/discussions/0/520519112492477670/#p3
This guy's ongoing project
I'm not running anything. I'm just following progress out of curiosity
I just have an aversion to mismatched resolutions in UIs (FF6 iOS played on an iPad traumatized me)
edit: And yeah, the fonts are getting there.
edit2: Forgot to link the higher res image. It's there in the steam thread, but for convenience
This guy's ongoing project
I'm not running anything. I'm just following progress out of curiosity
I just have an aversion to mismatched resolutions in UIs (FF6 iOS played on an iPad traumatized me)
edit: And yeah, the fonts are getting there.
edit2: Forgot to link the higher res image. It's there in the steam thread, but for convenience
I was wondering how he made his edits actually work in the battle scenes, just good old brute force hex editing.
edit: Yup, hexediting works.
I wonder why the battle hud is different in this way from the main hud.
BONKERS
Member
Can't say I blame you. SE's recent FFV mobile port to PC has infuriated me. They can't even bother to fix the UI so it's closer to the original game or you know not take up half the screen with a terrible font.. Not to mention the game is a blurry upscaled mess.
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/37/1441909341-4.jpg
Perfect opportunity to update all that shit to higher resolution higher quality work and they just don't care.
At such high resolutions they have the perfect opportunity to mimic the original Chibi artwork. The old mobile sprites seemed to be an attempt at this but fell short
Wait wat? Hex edit the textures after you save the new version. Hex edit what in them though?
Thanks for the patch GungHo!
Still doesn't fix my resolution issue though. Darn. There is a work around though. If I set my desktop res to the correct resolution first. It works. 4:3 resolutions still don't work
Still some microstuttering.
Elena still starts talking before she's finished singing. And the events and music in the Intro are still completely mis-timed with nothing syncing up as it is supposed to and the next sections of music are abruptly cutting in.
GOOD SIR, MAY I REFERENCE YOU THIS VIDEO? It showcases how these events are supposed to be. And if the first two major events are mis-timed, it makes me afraid to play any further. Who knows what else could be completely off-timing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ugIIqI5Zp0
It DID however, fix the Encounter sound effect overlapping the start of the battle music and some sound effect loops. Elena singing outside the church now fades out. Though the curve seems a bit odd initially. WOO
Really enjoying the latest patch. Looping is much, much better. The default audio settings are pretty much spot on for me now, and the option to let it stretch the window to widescreen is very much appreciated. Don't always like doing this in games but the characters really don't suffer that squashing effect you sometimes get and its much nicer to have it full screen.
Yup. When the game came out I tested it a bit and for some reason any and all texture edits in the battle UI were showing up blank regardless of what settings I threw at it. Copying the lines 00000020 to 00000040 from original texture to the new texture seemingly fixes it. So it's some kind of file header incompatibility issue I guess, but it just makes me wonder why the battle ui is different. "Normal" dds files work without any hex editing for the world ui, like the compass for example.
So the file format is DDS? The DDS header is 124 bytes, described here.
Those addresses would be 32 to 64 bytes in, so 8 to 16 DWORDS, in other words lots of reserved bytes plus some of the PIXEL_FORMAT struct.
I understood some of those words.
I experimented a little and I think I know what's going on. Well, kind of.
I don't know if this is a common way to do things, and I'm hardly an expert, but it seems like the game loads all battle hud textures into an array (I'd guess), and then uses the first byte from the 00000020 line of each texture to determine what texture it is and what element of the UI to display it in.
So for example.
I didn't rename any textures, but I swapped that specific byte between btl_sys1_7.dds and btl_sys1_8.dds and now the game loads Elena's portrait in there, and I swapped that byte between btl_sys1_20.dds and btl_sys1_18, and it swapped the textures the game tries to use for all the action bar stuff and the commandlist texts, among other things.
There's even a handy btl_sys1.csv file that seems to list all the loaded hud textures. At this point the texture names don't even matter. I can rename the Ryodo portrait into poop_face.dds, and as long as I also edit the csv list to match so that the texture is loaded into the array, it will still work.
Anyways, that byte is the key and if it doesn't match what's in the original texture, the game will not show it at all.
WAIT HOLY SHIT
That actually means we can completely redesign the UI?
or
OR!!!
Redo the UI with modified positioning for widescreen
(!!!)
edit: Wait, I'm assuming they're indexed and hardcoded rather than an actual x/y position, so while you can swap stuff around, you can't actually move them around freely.
Oh well.
That actually means we can completely redesign the UI?
or
OR!!!
Redo the UI with modified positioning for widescreen
(!!!)
edit: Wait, I'm assuming they're indexed and hardcoded rather than an actual x/y position, so while you can swap stuff around, you can't actually move them around freely.
Oh well.
I haven't seen any obvious positional data for anything in any of the related files. It could be somewhere, but who knows. Yeah, what I did was just swap the number between two files so that an entirely different texture gets displayed in place of a thing, rather than change its position.
BONKERS
Member
Feel free to PM me any direct feedback or bugs/glitches you'd like for the team to be aware of =D
Thanks for the amazing support! I sent you a message with an issue I think is happening.
BONKERS
Member
I put together some comparisons.
I originally was using NullDC but it had some graphical glitches that made it unusable. (It automatically will upres the game to your desktop resolution).
I used DeMul instead which only offers fixed scales.
So the resolution is mismatched.
DeMul may be incorrect in it's own ways as well unfortunately.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/143062
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/143063
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/143065
But the differences, though subtle make a very nice impact on IQ.
I originally was using NullDC but it had some graphical glitches that made it unusable. (It automatically will upres the game to your desktop resolution).
I used DeMul instead which only offers fixed scales.
So the resolution is mismatched.
DeMul may be incorrect in it's own ways as well unfortunately.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/143062
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/143063
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/143065
But the differences, though subtle make a very nice impact on IQ.
Ok so I'm NOT crazy. I've only played the game for 20-30 mins, but I did not remember all of the advanced shadows being in the Dreamcast version. Glad to know I have some validation now.
The shopkeeper area looks better on the DC version though... something is off about it in the PC version. It's almost like the DC version had Ambient Occlusion, while the PC one removed it in favor of sharpness.
Edit:
I think it's the added object shadows in the PC version that make the scene seem more artificial, due to the lack of Ambient Occlusion.
BONKERS
Member
I feel the opposite TBH. I think those indoor scenes look way better.
Ah that's only for the original PC version. Which isn't terribly great.
The game is still 4:3. But it looks better than ever and battles can run at 60FPS
PumpkinSpice
Banned
If you already have it on DC this probably isn't worth switching over to. There's higher resolution and a few other extras but the DC version is solid.
Although if that controller bugs you as much as it did for me, that might be a huge improvement.
Although if that controller bugs you as much as it did for me, that might be a huge improvement.
I've been told that the original Dreamcast version was 60fps both in and outside battles. If that's the case I'd call that version the better experience. Personally I'd value that much higher than an extra hard mode.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
It's 30 all the way on DC.
I hate to say this, but is that something you can prove? I played it a long time ago and can't remember whether it's 60fps or 30fps and don't own the game myself, so I can check it out.
Go right ahead..
And let me stress I'm not claiming you're wrong. I've just been told different things and am in doubt as to who is right.
BONKERS
Member
It's 30FPS.
If you play it an emulator (Rip your own discs, or download an iso if you have the discs), the emulator reports it as 60VPS but 30RPS. In and out of battle. The BIOS runs at 60VPS/60RPS. Games like Soul Calibur run at 60VPS/60RPS
Even in VGA mode.
Only the original PC port ran at 60FPS in battles.
If you play it an emulator (Rip your own discs, or download an iso if you have the discs), the emulator reports it as 60VPS but 30RPS. In and out of battle. The BIOS runs at 60VPS/60RPS. Games like Soul Calibur run at 60VPS/60RPS
Even in VGA mode.
Only the original PC port ran at 60FPS in battles.