I was able to get the inside skinny on the technology and program flow on the newest Final Fantasy. There are some improvement as well as some setbacks to FF10. This is all hearsay and roumors but I was able to at least talk to the wife of a square devoper to see what was going on. Sneaky me ^_^
First and formost, Square's "even team" is working on this one. they were responsable for FF8 which I wan't a big fan of. You can visually tell it's the same dev team from the character designs to some of the aspects of the battle system, which I will be getting into later.
Let's talk about what's diffent.
The engine uses a extramly modded version of the bouncer engine. Kind of like when FF8 used a modded version of the parasite eve engine. The Anti-alising is done in software using the "fuzzy-blur" method. It's a shame that the hardware AA is sooo slooow. Oh well, every PSX must have a critical hardware bug in it. (The original PSX had a clipping bug in the GPU, that's why clipping looked so bad in many many many games)
The fields are not pre-rendered anymore. I have mixed feelings about this. Will square give up some detail in thier renders for 3d graphics again (I know, the renders were only 320x244, but they looked good on a TV screen) The backgrounds I've seen so far have been less then stellar. The game isn't done yet though.
The battle module and the field module have been merged so the system can go from drama to battle seamlessly. There is no "whooh" with a cool mosic and then a 3d battle stage. I havn't seen if thw world map still enters battle the old way or not. When you run from a battle, the monster is still in the environment The battle menus are gon though.
The battle system has gotten cooler and dumber at the same time. Here's how it works.
The battle uses three characters like in 8, but you can swap in your other party members during battle. In the upper right hand corner there are icons of the three characters in battle with an ATB bar after them. below that you have the monsters icons and thier ATB bar (yes, you can see them now) and then the remaining characters that are "banked out" are placed under that with full ATB. I'm not too clear on how characters can be switched in.
Every character has a job class like in 9. Yuna is a summoner, lulu is a white mage. That is cool. There is also an antho-lion who is a dragoon (has the "jump command") But with sadness I must announce that the "one-shot" magic system from FF8 is back again.
There is no drawing from what I can tell. Also junctions appear to be absent. When you aqire spells from a yet-to-be-determined way. You will only have so much. The menus I saw had "blizard 8 firga 22 stop 12" selectable after the magic command was issued.
The commands are also swappable, you have three slots (as opposed to FF8 which had four) I beleave one of the battle commands can not be switched out (The "intresic" one if you will) but I've seen "item" switched for something else. The menus are semi-trasparent blue. They look pretty.
Mogs are there.
Speech! augh, square better get some good voice actors, Trust me, if we get some sort of Resident Evil voices, square would know.
That's it for my report now... comments ^_^
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YAY! I'm a CRAZY POSTER !!!!!!!
[This message has been edited by halkun (edited April 09, 2001).]
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