https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uUhe6yOc-Y
i founded this on YT. i don't know if somebody already shared this video, but i don't care.
i honestly don't like the music, but it's not bad (except maybe the opening which is a bit 'too much')
I'll be writing a massive article/series/page/guide thing in relation to PC Mods at some point, but I can tell you now - don't use that mod. The mods that are a part of it are 2 years out of date, buggy and crap.
Since then almost every mod has been completely revamped (that AC mod is actually illegal because it uses Dissidia or Crisis Core models/ model parts) such as the menu mod etc.
There are a million other mod videos on YouTube so have a look at those too if you're interested, just don't put any stock in this one.
The FFVII fan movie webseries project thing are packaging this mod with a copy of VII PC on a USB as a prize for something at the moment. I've messaged them about it, the article I was going to write about them is on hold until I hear back.
I like the sound of this article. I'd love to play around with some mods. My biggest problem with most that I've seen is consistency. There are lego characters and realistic ones. Or the high-poly for Cloud - which I love - but everyone else looks like crap.
I was intrigued by a comprehensive difficulty mod. Purportedly it made the game harder in a BALANCED way (rather than just making the enemies super strong or something). I was interested to try that,really test my materia setting skills
Well if you look here on my Twitch channel back at the history of videos, some of the old community playthrough chapters are of my modded version of FFVII.
Indeed, at THAT time mine were outdated, but they're still far superior to this.
In short, modding the game allows:
HD Resolutions (prior to the release of the "new" FFVII PC
Redone backgrounds (as in, no jaggies)
Well upscaled FMV's (look better than the originals played on a big CRT - in HD too)
A mod that removes the black bar from the bottom of the screen during battles, letting you see more
Font updates
A mod to make all dialogue boxes semi transparent (including battle).
And one of my favourites - a battle GUI update that not only lets you see the originally hidden bottom half of the screen, but has a choice between a style similar to FFIX or FFX. -
,
And the obvious things like you can pick your own music to replace in game music (I tend to go for orchestral where possible) and the far too-often focused on model replacements.
There is a mod that has all the lego characters replaced with either fan made or battle models. There are hundreds of different model types to choose from now - AC Cloud, etc. The best phase was when Crisis Core and Dissidia came out - all the character models were being ripped from Dissidia, CC, Dirge, Kingdom Hearts and put into the game.
It's still possible to do this yourself but it was banned on the modding forums due to the illegality of it. It's a shame, because they looked amazing in FF7, especially in battles.
There are also a million other mods - just about everything in the game is now moddable, from avatars to the text.
There are also hundreds of tools available for you to change things like EXP, Strength of enemies, names of enemies, names of weapons, enemy AI, spells - names of anything, and any text anywhere in the game. Anything from the name of potion to the way enemies respond when you attack them can be edited with a simple program.
Makoureactor, the script editor Shademp uses for various things, actually allows you to add full scenes, new items, bosses, scenarios etc into the game. This is time consuming and difficult, but there are active projects that use this - including adding some of the deleted stuff/ scenes that are readable in Shademp's unused text series. It's all doable, but not easy. There's even a proper Aerith resurrection mod so the game doesn't crash if you put her in your party in places she's not supposed to be.
The point I'm making is, there's a shit tonne of stuff to improve the game. IMO if you're a purist, play the PS version, if you want a bit more, play the PC version. The vast majority of modders are purists that just want to give the game a face lift.
EDIT: And there are also various difficulty mods, which are nice. You can break the HP and MP limits too etc. There's a lot I'm not covering here (I just wouldn't be able to), this is why I think it needs its own article series.
...That's very cool. I'd love to play around with the HD backgrounds and alternate battle screens. And if combined with a good difficulty mod, I could justify playing the game again with it. Dammit Lex, are you gonna make my buy yet another copy of this game?
The only problem is it's remarkably difficult - in my limited experience - to find good, clearly defined, solid mods without extensive searching. I wish there was jsut one place that had it all (and not a forum). Does such a thing exist? Or is that what you want your articles to be?
Such a thing does exist. It's a program called bootleg. It lets you preview and choose all the mods you want to use in your game after a fresh install of either the new FFVII or the original 1998 one.
The purpose of the articles would be for a few reasons:
Firstly, because I want to kill people who go "zomg lewk its clowdz AC cawstyoom in ff7 zomg HOW DO I GET IT TELL ME NOW" and don't do the research that tells them it's both outdated and illegal (which by the way has happened today twice, I'm not even talking about this thread).
Secondly, we're aiming to be the premier source of FFVII information on the net and we don't have a single lick of information anywhere on the site about the PC version. This is a major flaw.
And Thirdly, using mods can really enrich the playing experience. It's the closest thing to a remake while also remaining pure, but it's very very very daunting to people who don't know what they're doing. When I first joined the forum of extreme horror and death, I was very young and had to learn how to hex edit shit and use command line just to give an armor triple growth. Now easy programs have been made for it, and while I find it really easy now, there was also a massive boom in modding back around the time of Crisis Core's release that has just scattered all of the information and mods everywhere. While bootleg brings them all back together, it'd be nice to have a series on them. Basically, it's easy to install something you don't like, so a series of articles on that would encourage people to read through it first.
For example, there are now about 10 fan created soundtracks. Some sound like the shitty PC MIDI, some take in compilation tracks, some take in OC Remix, some are just the PS tracks in looping OGG format. There's also a really fiddly installer involved at the moment called FF7Music to enable custom music in the old PC Version, but bootleg does it all for you.
You see what I mean? I just spent a paragraph talking about 1/10th of the information available on this one program that alters one tiny aspect of the game (music). There's a wealth of information there.
Not to mention the vast majority of the people at Qhimm are just not nice. It's gotten better in recent years but I've been there since 2000 and at first if you asked a question they shouted at you and told you to use google for everything. I want to write this series so that people have a non-intimidating, non-dickhead way to access all the information and understand as much as I can tell them about the mods.
I've been tl;dr'ing a lot lately. I have to stop that.
hey you can tl'dr about this all you like. I downloaded a illegal PC version a few years ago to try mods. But it was a bitch just getting the thing to work, much less find the mods I want. And when I did, the thing just stopped working. I would consider getting the rerelease to have a stable base to do fun things with...
Makoureactor, the script editor Shademp uses for various things, actually allows you to add full scenes, new items, bosses, scenarios etc into the game.
Other than additional scenes being re-edited into the game by various people and Gjoe's hardcore mod, nothing really. It has amazing potential but it's tricky to get used to. Shademp has experience working with it for his unused text series of course.
Apparently that hardcore mod has a trio of SOLDIERs that fight you throughout the game like the Turks? Sounded intriguing. I wish you could play his version of the content without everything having a million HP.
I can imagine all the modding you could do with FFVII on the PC, but I like my emulator best... I'm already modding Skyrim heavily so I really don't need another game to do it with.
Apparently that hardcore mod has a trio of SOLDIERs that fight you throughout the game like the Turks? Sounded intriguing. I wish you could play his version of the content without everything having a million HP.
It's a huge undertaking to edit even a new boss fight in when you consider the amount of things you need to take into account - enemy AI is a massive pain in the ass to understand and get your head around. Then there's the way new models are handled, how to properly address them so that everything loads properly etc. It's a nightmare, I've dabbled in it myself.
One of the most fun things to do is to mess around with the walkmesh. Which is something you really shouldn't do, but it's so easy. You can see the 3D overlay of where the character is allowed to walk with that program, and changing those parameters is visual - you just click and drag to extend certain areas. Click save and you can have some fun putting Cloud in places he's not supposed to get to (i.e. that infamous cave in the area before the Forgotten Capital).
Some people have messed quite a bit with it. There's the Aerith revival mod which makes her playable and adds a great deal of dialogue and changes things so the game basically doesn't crash when she's on the screen.
At the time I was messing with it to create a Cloudless party mod - that is, to be able to switch anyone in and out as party leader. I have a ton of images somewhere, but suffice it to say the results are weird when the characters don't all have paths/ aren't supposed to appear in certain areas. It's doable, but would be incredibly time consuming. You'd literally have to go through every scene and add paths for each character, but you have to be careful because adding a walkable path can mess with where that character is supposed to appear in scripted scenes.
Not to mention there's no real way to determine who the party leader is, the mechanism for that would have to be dissected too (what happens is, the last character swapped in usually ends up the party leader, but sometimes it doesn't due to other reasons and it just gets confusing). What I'd love to do is first sort it out so that in areas where certain characters aren't supposed to appear, they can do so as party leader without being invisible (this happens a lot and means you're stuck). You'd then need to add character models for each character on the world map, since only Cloud, Tifa and Cid have models in the world map file.
But a nice additional feature would be using the Square button to assign someone as party leader while in "order". Gives the button a use. There could be a nice little icon indicating who the leader is in the menu <3
I see the orginal post was about a FFVII AC Mod (completed in 2010) for the PC/CD version. Myself now coming back into the FFVII World, I just purchased the FFVII Digital Download version, and started searching for Good Mods.
I found this Mod called "Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete Mod" it was completed just last year sometime for the PC/CD version.
I tested it on the new FFVII Digital Download version and it works great! Looks awesome!
Note: there are some minor difference with the install from the instructions given in the download (for FFVII PC/CD version) compared to how it needs to be installed for the FFVII Digital Download version.
Here are the Steps:
1. run FF7 AC Mod executable
2. select the FF7 install directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Square Enix\FINAL FANTASY VII\data
3. click next to complete install
3. now you will find new lgp files to your data directory
4. drag each lgp file into the following directory:
battle.lpg > battle/ char.lgp > field/ menu_us.lgp > menu/ world_us.lgp > wm/
5. and your done.
That's the same mod. Kula Wende was a member on the Qhimm forums and created the original AC mod (which is the one that was originally being posted about) years ago. I don't know where the "completed last year" comes from, could be that he just slightly updated some models last year or something.
Kuro, check out the FFVII PC Re-release thread. I've listed links and talked about installing mods at length in there. The best thing to do is use the bootleg configurator, again explained in the other thread. But let this thread die because the AC mod uses illegal model parts which is why it isn't hosted on or discussed on Qhimm.
Kuro, check out the FFVII PC Re-release thread. I've listed links and talked about installing mods at length in there. The best thing to do is use the bootleg configurator, again explained in the other thread. But let this thread die because the AC mod uses illegal model parts which is why it isn't hosted on or discussed on Qhimm.
hmmm interesting enough i did try the Bootleg mod first, and i just didn't like the whole process... I just wanted something that you can easily install...
and this FFVII AC Mod works like a charm, with no hassle, install, move some file into directory and BAM!
Honestly I don't understand what's illegal about it if your not Selling the Mod. If someone was profiting from the Modification then I could understand. But if no one is profiting who cares... a Mod is a Mod.
