Anyone familiar with the code base at this point?

[yarLson]

Is there anyone who still has a working knowledge of the code base? I see it's been dead on GitHub for about 5 years. I really love the idea, as am sure most of us do, so what went wrong here? Did it fail due to some sort of engineering oversight? Some sort of structural design problem? Or was it just a time commitment issue? Anyone know?

I mean I can grep through the code base and get an idea of what's up but I'm just asking if anyone already knows before I go through that... shall we say... fun process. Nothing quite so fun as reversing a legacy C++ code base after all.

Just looking at the stats I see it's a pretty far along project, almost 70,000 lines of code. I need a new side project, something more low level than what I'm doing at work and it'd be awesome to either pick this up and try to get it further along, or if it has some sort of critical design flaw maybe even start from scratch in a language I much prefer, like Rust and begin this hopeless endeavor all over again!

These are all just thoughts, don't anybody get excited now. I would really like to see a fully working open source engine for these games though, and it doesn't seem like anyone else is gonna do it, so I could waste a few years trying. Why not? Always wanted to build a game engine from scratch anyhow and the world doesn't need yet another general purpose engine. One for old classic games sounds much more fun!

Just collecting information to guage how feasble such a thing would be. But if someone pays me... (haha yea right)

I'll be lurking through this forum, the code and the website to see what I can find out over the next few days, but there is no substitue for hands on experience, so if you have it, please share.

I'm gonna try to at least add nix build support since that's what I do all day anyway. That will make it a lot simpler to package and build, and create a unified dev environment. Maybe that alone would be enough to kick up interest from some others. I know it wouldn't work on Windows but I don't care really.

[KnifeTheSky77]

The last time I noodled around with things, there was quite a bit left to reverse engineer, which I guess you could also call the design flaw. qgears was always meant to work with the original formats of things, and be a drop in replacement for the ff7 exe (if I'm remembering this right). Ogre3D as a game engine is also... tricky to work with imo

I think akari still does some reversing every once in a while
Edit: here's some fun stuff https://github.com/Akari1982/q-gears_reverse

[Sega Chief]

There's a new reverse project called Sister Ray as well, they can be found on the Qhimm Discord. Repo's here: https://github.com/FFT-Hackers/SisterRay

[yarLson]

Sound like time would be best spent reversing then. Is there any sort of centralized db for keeping track of the progress, or is it just scattered throughout the various efforts? If so, perhaps organizing such an db would be useful.

[Akari]

The last time I noodled around with things, there was quite a bit left to reverse engineer, which I guess you could also call the design flaw. qgears was always meant to work with the original formats of things, and be a drop in replacement for the ff7 exe (if I'm remembering this right). Ogre3D as a game engine is also... tricky to work with imo

The idea behind my work on Q-Gears was to create JRPG engine capable of run games like Final Fantasy 7 8 9 and Xenogears. All data was meant to be exported into this format. That should allow anyone to create their own scenario, additional mechanics with little coding.

I'm working in game industry and Ogre is one of the simplest render engine available for open source. Now I think something like Open Framework is better because it supports not only render, but sound and video as well.

Reimplement ffvii engine is also possible. But you need to reimplement a thousands of hardcoded hacks as well then.

I think akari still does some reversing every once in a while
Edit: here's some fun stuff https://github.com/Akari1982/q-gears_reverse

I reversed almost everything from world map engine lately. Very interesting and very hardcoded.

Sound like time would be best spent reversing then. Is there any sort of centralized db for keeping track of the progress, or is it just scattered throughout the various efforts? If so, perhaps organizing such an db would be useful.

I think that reversing isnt needed at this time. Almost everything is understood. You just need to grab your beloved editor and start to write things, implement them one by one. But first question is - what are you want to do - just reimplement engine with all its problems and restrictions or create enviroment that can run original content as well as new - custom one.

[Khoral]

I think that reversing isnt needed at this time. Almost everything is understood.

Is there some place where all this knowledge has been gathered ?

The Qhimm wiki lacks lots of information