Final Fantasy IV Graphics Update (SNES)

[Gedankenschild]

I didn't like the new mountains at first, but the more I looked at them, the more I liked them. Something about the steps looks "off" though. Like the sense of depth/dimension isn't right. Like they are awkwardly slapped on top.

I guess you will have to take that one up with Square, the stairs are an exact port...



If you are in the mood for some pixel artistry: Be my guest! You got 4 16x16 tiles at your disposal.

[SunGodPortal]

Hmm. That might be hard to remedy because I'm guessing that not all of the stairs are in the shadows such as that one.

[Gedankenschild]

Is it the palette you're talking about? That it's too bright? That would be easy to change. We'll see what the others say...

[SunGodPortal]

Is it the palette you're talking about? That it's too bright? That would be easy to change. We'll see what the others say...

Hmm. That might work. Maybe that's why it "pops out" so much.

[Synnae]

The updated graphics look great. I'm hoping that you make any font changes optional. I'm sure some would like compatibility with Namingway Edition.

I'd certainly enjoy that myself.

@Gedankenschild:
The mountain update looks great! Keep up the good job.

[Gedankenschild]

Thanks Synnae!

I'm gonna throw something out here:

You may have noticed that the one part that wasn't updated for the remake is the forest/mountains background.



What has changed is that it now uses only one 16-color palette instead of four 8-color palettes.



I really like the idea of improving that one in some way. There are now 60 colors reserved for it, which is quite something...
Is there a tileset/complete shot of the PSP version's anywhere to be found? I didn't come across it.

[Kiyoshi Aman]

If the opening cutscene is anything to go by, they don't use one texture for that whole backdrop in the PSP version. But I was having problems with the GPU crashing while I was playing it in PPSSPP.

[Gedankenschild]

I never played the PSP version myself. While its graphics are obviously beyond what the SNES could do, I thought they could maybe serve as a basis. There doesn't seem to be a complete picture of it around, though...

I'm trying out some stuff here and there.

[SunGodPortal]

Looks like a good start.

[SC]

Any update on this? I've been secretly longing for the evolution on this awesome project!

[Gedankenschild]

Any update on this? I've been secretly longing for the evolution on this awesome project!

Well, here's what I've been up to:

I did some work on the town interior tileset. The basic copy and paste stuff. The good news is that there's a nice amount of tile space left unused, so most of the additional stuff (wall decoration, shadows and such) can be ported over next.



Some ASM research had to be done to figure out how the game determines how many bytes of map layout to load (it does so by loading both the offsets of the current map and the next one).

I then switched to the town maps because they are good candidates for some further testing and I can only look at a specific tileset for so long before I get sick of it...

I'm focusing on optimization here as I port things over, removing some redundancies and making room for new wall tiles.



Then it's time for a bit more variation in the grass...

[Vanya]

Sweet! I can't wait to have this.

[SC]

Nice! For some time I thought this was reaching stuck or dead status. 

Let's hope you continue delivering this level of awesomeness to ancient FF4.

[DackR]

Excellent work! I can't wait. 

[azidahaka]

I'm impressed, honestly i hope you'll work on other games too in the future 

Is there anything i could help you with? I'm pretty good with photoshop and similar things.

Btw you should make a video of the enhanced version you are working on add some music and post it on youtube. You'll boom

BTW i presume this will work on real hardware too, right?

[SC]

BTW i presume this will work on real hardware too, right?

Unless he or she is doing some badly coded ASM changes to the game, it should.

[Gedankenschild]

It's always nice to hear that people are interested.

I made a bit more space for tile roof tiles (heh), the original ones are extremely simplistic. Hopefully I'll also be able to include the new chimneys.



Even more time was spent on examining the tables used to load tilesets, maps, palettes and such. I rewrote the graphics loading code, too. What I had until now was a horrible bastardization of the airship code attached to the standard location loading code. Now it's simple and clean and doesn't need any jumps to additional subroutines...

I'm impressed, honestly i hope you'll work on other games too in the future 

Is there anything i could help you with? I'm pretty good with photoshop and similar things.

Btw you should make a video of the enhanced version you are working on add some music and post it on youtube. You'll boom

BTW i presume this will work on real hardware too, right?

One thing I'd REALLY like to do is update the battle backgrounds of Final Fantasy V (SNES), porting back the GBA version's as far as possible. But that will have to wait, my HDD is cluttered enough with this project...

Since you're asking: There has been a discussion on Slick Forums about what version of the game has the best portraits. Quite a few people don't seem to really like the GBA version's that much... Complete Collection was preferred by quite a few. I tried running these through some automated processes, downsampling them to 32x32 @ 16 colors. The results were quite horrible!
Rydia's green hair and skin colors were fused into some sort of monochrome brownish mess. My skills are limited to MS Paint - which is more than enough for copy and pasting tiles.

And yes, this will work on real hardware. I'm not doing anything outside the actual SNES's capabilities.

[azidahaka]

It's always nice to hear that people are interested.

I made a bit more space for tile roof tiles (heh), the original ones are extremely simplistic. Hopefully I'll also be able to include the new chimneys.



Even more time was spent on examining the tables used to load tilesets, maps, palettes and such. I rewrote the graphics loading code, too. What I had until now was a horrible bastardization of the airship code attached to the standard location loading code. Now it's simple and clean and doesn't need any jumps to additional subroutines...

One thing I'd REALLY like to do is update the battle backgrounds of Final Fantasy V (SNES), porting back the GBA version's as far as possible. But that will have to wait, my HDD is cluttered enough with this project...

Since you're asking: There has been a discussion on Slick Forums about what version of the game has the best portraits. Quite a few people don't seem to really like the GBA version's that much... Complete Collection was preferred by quite a few. I tried running these through some automated processes, downsampling them to 32x32 @ 16 colors. The results were quite horrible!
Rydia's green hair and skin colors were fused into some sort of monochrome brownish mess. My skills are limited to MS Paint - which is more than enough for copy and pasting tiles.

And yes, this will work on real hardware. I'm not doing anything outside the actual SNES's capabilities.

Can you direct to those files/discussion so that i can take a look at them?

[chillyfeez]

Can you direct to those files/discussion so that i can take a look at them?

Not sure to which files you're referring, but here's the discussion:
http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=1945.0

[Gedankenschild]

I think the discussion around the portraits took place when I hijacked one of Gemini's threads. The screens I posted are gone now, though. I think they didn't survive the forum update.

The PSP portraits can be seen here:
http://www.spriters-resource.com/psp/finalfantasy4thecompletecollection/sheet/67865/