[slidelljohn]

mrrichard999:
Interesting, I'll definitely check out your patch when you finish it. I do plan on adding a font and text editor to the editor I'm working on.

Here is another small update on the map viewer. I optimized the algorithm for loading the map and tile sets by about 4-5 times faster. On my good pc it's all loading at about 0-31 milliseconds and on my average pc it's loading at about 11-37 milliseconds. I still have 2 other things to do to optimize the code for loading the map and tile sets faster.

1. I'm creating a qimage then converting it to a qpixmap and that eats up a lot of time. Instead of creating a qimage I'm going to write the image data as a windows bitmap image then load that as a qpixmap. That will definitely speed things up a little bit.

2. I will make the map and tile set viewers about half the current size and that should also add a nice speed boost.

Everything is fast enough right now but I want the code to be a little faster because I might end up adding extra background layer, animations, and I want very fast updating of the tiles when things are edited. I added all of the town and dungeon maps but it's still not loading all of the correct sizes for the maps and tile sets yet. The maps do have a x/y size in the rom but the tile sets do not have a set size. I think the tile sets just have a maximum size of 0x7FF tiles per set but all of them are not that big.



Here is a download for the newest update for the editor. This update the screen is larger than 1080p but after this update I should have everything to where it fits inside of a 1080p screen. I think the only main map left to add is the world map. There is a milliseconds timer to test how fast it loads the tile sets on everyones pc but I'm not sure how accurate it is.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/1zufhh8pp98m239/7th+saga+test+map+viewer.rar

[jink640]

Nice!

[mrrichard999]

This forum motivated me to make a patch fixing the lower case errors in the shops, character intros where Lemele meets each one, and start menu screens. Also it makes use of the unused icons in the game to symbolize gems, bottles, runes, and keys. This should help make item navigation easier.

It's in the queue now but hopefully should be readily available soon.

Also i didn't realize the Final Fantasy 6 font had shading and it works out real nice here! When your playing a game like this where you are looking at font for the most part it is a lot better on the eyes than the thin lettering that is used by default.

Here are some samples

[slidelljohn]

Can you post before and after pictures so we can compare the original and new font? I actually like the original font but I don't like the spacing of the letters for some of the words. If I end up changing the menus from sprites to a background layer then I'll probably incorporate a vwf to fix the spacing between letters.

Here is a pic showing the original battle menu.


And here is a pic showing a mockup of what I would like the vwf to look like.

It's not a huge difference but I think it does slightly improve the looks of the text if a vwf was incorporated.

Even though I have seen them in the decompressed graphics I didn't realize the icons for gems, bottles, runes, and keys were unused. I'm definitely interested in seeing some pics using these. I know how to add extra spaces for the text so if that's something that could help for adding the unused icons let me know.

[justin3009]

It's actually very easy to VWF the sprites they use now, the only problem is that all the letters have that stupid BG on them as well so it's a no-go unless the BG of the letters gets drawn as a separate sprite layer.. which is more lag so that's a no go.

We'd definitely have to go the way of dropping Mode 7 entirely and implementing everything as BG3 for it to work with far less lag and be more efficient. Though it does remove the cool effect of the battle backgrounds..which would also mean there'd have to be custom backgrounds and tile maps entirely set for every battle screen instance which is a lot of work.

[slidelljohn]

The mode 7 is a cool effect but I think dropping it from battles would allow for some big improvements. I'm not sure yet about dropping it from the world map though. Definitely would need some new battle backgrounds and I have found a few backgrounds that I like from snes treasures of rudras. I like some but not all of these backgrounds

[mrrichard999]

Can you post before and after pictures so we can compare the original and new font?

Sure!

Here are some comparison shots



Here are photos with the small font



I think it's mainly because the letters aren't behind a flat color block like in most games but it's much easier on the eyes in my opinion.

[slidelljohn]

For the images that show the stats values I think the ff3 numbers look better than 7th sagas numbers. The 7th sagas letters I think look better than ff3's letters but that's probably because of the background color of the font. Any chance you can make a image showing the stats with the ff3 font without that background color on them?

[pianohombre]

mrrichard, you may want to delete some of your messages or change your e-mail settings on this forum. I tried sending you a personal message (about a rom hack translation we were working on) and got an error. Thanks.