In terms of music my vote is for the original untouched - it's perfect! Or maybe an option?
What about sound effects? They were somewhat muffled in the PSX version, weren't they?
How exactly did TOSE manage to screw up the sound in every single of their PSX ports anyway, I wonder...
I haven't done much about sound, although I did get myself into a yet-to-be-perfected NDS SEQ tracker that plays most of the FF4 DS tunes more or less indecently. If that can be completed for good, we can use the tracker as a base to port over the SNES tunes and make them play with either original instruments or improved ones. The real challenge in this port is that TOSE didn't bother to use a tracker format for music and simply went streamed instead, locking the CD-Rom unit pretty much entirely. The other horrible gimmick they have in this port is that the entire sound library for SFX is stored inside a single, huge file always cached in the SPU RAM. In other words, they put in there a ton sound samples and made sure they would fit in 400 or so KB, butchering quality beyond redemption.
Fortunately this problem can be fixed when I'm done identifying most of the sound core aspects of the engine, so that a replacement with dynamic loading can be provided. This is how I'd store the sound fonts:
- System samples that are always supposed to be in memory (i.e. cursor sounds, spells for menu, misc sfx from the field module);
- Battle static samples, such as sword slashes, arrow hits, etc. In other words, a pool of samples that are always supposed to be there and cached when the battle module is running;
- Dynamic caching of spell samples, loading along with new graphics as soon as a player finishes casting;
- SEQ+VAG banks for music, cached as soon as a new tune starts playing.
Looking at those Golbez and Rubicant sprites reminds me of something:
You probably realize that some sprites were shrunk for the WSC/GBA versions and never made it back to their original size. Even in versions that provided enough space:
Just yesterday I found out that the game "Final Fantasy: All the Bravest" has some of them restored to full size:
SNES/GBA/Bravest
I do remember some of the sprites going down in size even in other ports, like FFOrigins, but with FF4 it's barely noticeable. Not that I wouldn't like restored size while they retain improved color smoothness.
My bestiary module can already take any size of sprites, as long as they fit in 256x256 pixel VRAM pages (they always fit
). Heck, I could even put some of those to break the 16 color limit, like Zeromus EZ/EG.
I would also be interested in full sprite-sheets of players, but I couldn't find myself a decent way to rip them, other than grabbing a few from S-E's website. :/
Using the original SNES music with upgraded samples gets my vote.
I'm most looking forward to the ability to pretty much freely adding "custom parts".
There are quite a few spells and commands I'd like to add.
If I can add a way to replace spell formulas and sprite effects, this is definitively going into the project.
I added something new to the mix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOr3cY3LiE8Monsters now have a description, too. It is stored right inside their bestiary data, so the descriptions cache in real time and don't sink down my memory reserved for system strings.
For those who can't open YT videos, here's what the bestiary looks like right now:
Moar news: I started slightly rewriting part of the way the menu works in order to split submodules into separate overlays (as I was running low on RAM space
) - should be extremely useful when item/magic usage code starts to get added in. I also took some time to drop most statically defined strings (i.e. function string parameters) and I replaced them with a proper system pool; messages are stored to an external chunk of data and can be rebuilt without the need of a source recompilation or huge #ifdef's in the code. This will be somewhat useful if anybody wants to make a localized version in other languages, plus it strips away all the string padding GCC bloats the binaries with.
When I'm done with string packages, all of them will be moved to independent files that can be cached and accessed at will from the CD-Rom unit, for example from a language selector.
By way, the bestiary is pretty much complete and embellished with some FF Origins icons. ;D
I have no idea why, but it also loads much faster than its GBA counterpart, and I'm not even using compression.
Also, anybody willing to put together a nice list of monster descriptions? I'm totally not good at writing any of those - I may even end up describing Bahamut's lunar palace in detail instead of going background info on him.
And finally:
Adding the last few menus left - headaches ahead, yay!
