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Posted: 5/24/2011 7:07 PM
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reflect
Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 22
Thanks a lot for the time and effort put into TASing this game and big thanks to the encoders :)
Posted: 5/29/2011 1:47 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
To encoders: This game uses four different resolutions: 640x480, 368x216, 320x224 and 320x216. psxjin will make new segments for every resolution switch. 320x224 is presumably the most common resolution since it's used for normal gameplay, followed by 368x216 (for menus) and 320x216 (for battles). I need to check whether any of these resolutions are letterboxed. For example it could be that when switching from 320x224 to 320x216, all that really happens is the top and bottom are padded with 4px each. For the HD encode, the goal should be to point upscale each segment to some sensible resolution that hopefully fixes aspect correction and then downscale them all back down to something above 1080p using Lanczos3. (will be edited later as I figure out more)
Posted: 5/29/2011 9:50 PM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
Why not some edge directed interpolation, instead of point upscale? And why end at something over 1080?
Posted: 5/29/2011 9:53 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
nanogyth wrote:
Why not some edge directed interpolation, instead of point upscale? And why end at something over 1080?
This is for Youtube, so we need to essentially fool it into generating high quality encodes by upscaling the whole thing. Using anything other than point upscale makes the whole thing fuzzy, so we try to avoid it if possible (if we are able to keep things lossless, that is).
Posted: 5/29/2011 11:55 PM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
640x480 is it just the Sony logo at power up?
Posted: 5/30/2011 12:06 AM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
Battle reward screen is 368x224.
Posted: 5/30/2011 1:22 AM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
Dada wrote:
You said you turned off overscan cropping. Wouldn't that compress the image horizontally?
Posted: 5/30/2011 9:05 AM
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McBAIN
Joined: 1/9/2005
Posts: 219
Location: The Netherlands
Just watched it all on youtube. Nice run! Enjoyed watching it and enjoyed following the (earlier) process. I have some questions about your fights with Ultimecia though. What's the reason you didn't use The End on her forms that need more than 1 limit break? Couldn't you swap Irvine for Selphie? Also, against her final form you use some regular attacks after landing a Renzokuken. Why not follow up with a second limit break? It would seem to me like that would be faster than a few regular attacks, (plus some talking on Ultimecia's part) but correct me if i'm wrong. (which i guess is the case) Either way, congrats on finishing the run!
http://www.megazpeed.com - THE site for the ultimate MegaMan Zero superplay movies.
Posted: 5/30/2011 9:13 AM
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Sir_VG
He/Him
Player (40)
Joined: 10/9/2004
Posts: 1913
Location: Floating Tower
McBAIN wrote:
Just watched it all on youtube. Nice run! Enjoyed watching it and enjoyed following the (earlier) process. I have some questions about your fights with Ultimecia though. What's the reason you didn't use The End on her forms that need more than 1 limit break? Couldn't you swap Irvine for Selphie? Also, against her final form you use some regular attacks after landing a Renzokuken. Why not follow up with a second limit break? It would seem to me like that would be faster than a few regular attacks, (plus some talking on Ultimecia's part) but correct me if i'm wrong. (which i guess is the case) Either way, congrats on finishing the run!
For most instances, The End is slow. As for her final form, if I remember correctly, just attacking her advances her speech when she gets to a set amount of damage...it's not related to how much damage you do. Hence no need for limit breaks and such once you get to a certain point in the final form of the battle.
Taking over the world, one game at a time. Currently TASing: Nothing
Posted: 5/30/2011 9:21 AM
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McBAIN
Joined: 1/9/2005
Posts: 219
Location: The Netherlands
That makes perfect sense. Though i still wonder. If you would use The End on her final form, do you still get the speeches parts (thus, you only "ended" one segment of the fight) or would that be skipped completely?
http://www.megazpeed.com - THE site for the ultimate MegaMan Zero superplay movies.
Posted: 5/30/2011 10:13 AM
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Sir_VG
He/Him
Player (40)
Joined: 10/9/2004
Posts: 1913
Location: Floating Tower
If I remember right from when I hacked in the spell into the PC version, it doesn't skip the speeches.
Taking over the world, one game at a time. Currently TASing: Nothing
Posted: 5/30/2011 12:14 PM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
Here are some screencaps done PS3->dazzle. The last 4 are sampled at 720x480 to better represent the overscan. (thumbnails link to real image) How are you feeling? Battle Reward Worldmap Menu
Posted: 5/30/2011 12:21 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Thank you, that's very helpful. Could you also make a screenshot sampled at 720x480 of the regular gameplay so we can compare that too? Judging from these screenshots, the x216 height resolutions are simply letterboxed with 4px black top and bottom. That simplifies things. edit: it's strange. If I take the menu, for example, which is 368x224, and then simply scale it to 320x224, it's simply not in the center of the screen. In your screenshots, however, it is. If I move the menu to the left by 6px, then crop off 4px from the left side, and move it up by 3px, and then scale it to 320x224, it looks almost exactly the same as your screenshot. But that seems so arbitrary.
Posted: 5/30/2011 4:38 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
If I take the menu videos, which are 368x224, and first letterbox them to 380x230, then crop 16px from the left side and 6px from the top, then scale everything to 320x224 (same resolution as regular gameplay and battles), I get the following: Link to video Quite arbitrary but it does look similar to the real screenshots this way.
Posted: 5/30/2011 5:01 PM
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DarkKobold
Skilled player (1652)
Joined: 11/15/2004
Posts: 2202
Location: Killjoy
Arcade TASer of 2010 PCE TASer of 2010 Arcade TAS of 2010 Lucky TAS of 2009 Lucky TAS of 2007
McBAIN wrote:
Just watched it all on youtube. Nice run! Enjoyed watching it and enjoyed following the (earlier) process. I have some questions about your fights with Ultimecia though. What's the reason you didn't use The End on her forms that need more than 1 limit break? Couldn't you swap Irvine for Selphie? Also, against her final form you use some regular attacks after landing a Renzokuken. Why not follow up with a second limit break? It would seem to me like that would be faster than a few regular attacks, (plus some talking on Ultimecia's part) but correct me if i'm wrong. (which i guess is the case) Either way, congrats on finishing the run!
All of her forms take only 1 limit break. The reason Renzo doesn't finish off Form 3 is intentional. (You will see me miss 3 attacks of the 8). This gives Squall a chance to re-queue a Limit Break before moving to form 4, since Irvine waits to take the final shot. Also, after Ultimecia 'dies' to Renzo, she becomes 5 sequential 100 HP enemies. Even if you used a multi-hit limit break, you'd have to stop, wait for her speech, and then the next enemy appears. As far as I can tell, the speech/enemy routine is unavoidable.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Posted: 5/30/2011 8:27 PM
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natt
Editor, Emulator Coder, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Dada wrote:
I need to check whether any of these resolutions are letterboxed. For example it could be that when switching from 320x224 to 320x216, all that really happens is the top and bottom are padded with 4px each.
There are only two vertical resolutions for the ntsc PSX: 240 and 480. 240 is ~60p; 480 is ~60i. Any other supposed vertical resolution is in effect a cropped version of one of those. Practically speaking, you didn't see more than about 450 lines or so on actual hardware (overscan). Similarly, there are only 5 horizontal resolutions: 256, 320, 384, 512 or 640, corresponding to 5 different selectable pixel clock rates. Anything in between is one of those with cropping. I don't know what the appropriate aspect ratios are, but I'd imagine it's similar to other NTSC output devices (256 has a similar pixel clock to nes/snes, 320 gives approximately square pixels with 240 height, etc...)
Posted: 5/30/2011 9:08 PM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
natt wrote:
there are only 5 horizontal resolutions: 256, 320, 384, 512 or 640
Our 368 is the 384, they just didn't bother calculating the last 16 pixels in the line because it is overscanned offscreen on most TVs. The first 16 pixels are also usually blank, but if the cursor is at that edge of the screen it does extend into the cutoff zone.
Posted: 5/30/2011 9:37 PM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
Dada wrote:
Could you also make a screenshot sampled at 720x480 of the regular gameplay so we can compare that too?
What constitutes regular gameplay? Running around in the garden? Here is what I measured. size [ center ] Battle -emu 320x216 [160,108] -cap 638x432 [359.5,243.5] Worldmap -emu 320x224 [160,112] -cap 638x448 [359.5,243.5] Reward -emu 351x202 [192,108.5] -cap 619x408 [360,237.5] Menu -emu 336x210 [192.5,110.5] -cap 590x422 [360.5,240.5] All the capture centers line up very well with the horizontal center of the screen. The data for the menus is centered at 192, which is half of the 384 mentioned in the other post. I'm not sure there is a good way to resize non-square pixels used for text at this small of a scale. Instead of one pixel wide white lines you end up with some 2-pixel wide grey blocks. Might look better to treat them as square and just throw out whatever isn't in the middle 320.
Posted: 5/30/2011 10:40 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
natt wrote:
There are only two vertical resolutions for the ntsc PSX: 240 and 480. 240 is ~60p; 480 is ~60i. Any other supposed vertical resolution is in effect a cropped version of one of those. Practically speaking, you didn't see more than about 450 lines or so on actual hardware (overscan).
So how does overscan affect this? For example, the main gameplay is dumped by the emulator as 320x224, is that simply because it was 240 but got cropped by overscan to 224? I don't know much about how overscan works, so I need some guidance here, particularly in determining how we will treat the source material. The video on the previous page is my attempt at positioning things based on what looks good, there's no science behind that effort. At this point, however, I don't even know if we should correct the 320x224 material to 4:3.
Posted: 5/31/2011 1:25 AM
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natt
Editor, Emulator Coder, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Dada wrote:
So how does overscan affect this? For example, the main gameplay is dumped by the emulator as 320x224, is that simply because it was 240 but got cropped by overscan to 224? I don't know much about how overscan works, so I need some guidance here, particularly in determining how we will treat the source material. The video on the previous page is my attempt at positioning things based on what looks good, there's no science behind that effort. At this point, however, I don't even know if we should correct the 320x224 material to 4:3.
I googled long and hard for the actual pixel clock/dot clock values for the PS1, and couldn't find anything. (I figured it'd be pretty easy to find, but apparently not.) Without a precise measurement of that, all you can do is look at how a capture appears and fudge values from that.
Posted: 5/31/2011 7:45 AM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
The 320x224 represent square pixels. The 368x224 don't, they have a pixel aspect ratio of 10/11 and take up a larger section of the screen. Basic overscan: http://www.lurkertech.com/lg/pixelaspect.html More technical: http://www.iki.fi/znark/video/conversion/ While the 368s have non-square pixels, trying to "square" them by resizing will lead to ugliness, most notably in the text. I think things will look the least distorted if everything is letterboxed to 224, the 368 is cropped to 352 and the 320 is pillarboxed to 352. 
a=avisource("013_intro-320x216.avi").trim( 12,815) # battle
b=avisource("014_intro-368x224.avi").trim(  3,235) # reward
c=avisource("015_intro-320x224.avi").trim(202,437) # worldmap
d=avisource("016_intro-368x216.avi").trim(  5,360) # menu

a=a.addBorders(16,4,16,4)
b=b.crop(16,0,0,0)
c=c.addBorders(16,0,16,0)
d=d.addBorders(0,4,0,4).crop(10,0,-6,0)

a++b++c++d
selectevery(2).converttoyv12()
http://ia600608.us.archive.org/32/items/Ff8ScreencapSamples/p8.mp4
Posted: 5/31/2011 5:02 PM
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natt
Editor, Emulator Coder, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
nanogyth wrote:
The 320x224 represent square pixels. The 368x224 don't, they have a pixel aspect ratio of 10/11 and take up a larger section of the screen.
I am interested in reading your source for this, because I couldn't find it anywhere.
Posted: 5/31/2011 5:31 PM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
http://lurkertech.com/lg/pixelaspect/#tellaspect Its not a source from Sony or Square saying that those frames output in a certain fashion, just the basic way analog video works and how the emulated picture lines up with the screen capture.
Posted: 5/31/2011 7:23 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Since 320x224 is square pixels, does that mean it does not need to be resized to 320x240 for the aspect ratio to be correct? That greatly simplifies things.
Posted: 5/31/2011 7:40 PM
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nanogyth
Player (66)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
Yes Does anyone have the PC version? The pixels would have to be square there, so it should be an easier target to aim at than analog captures.
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