Braver - open source FF7 engine reimplementation

[ficedula]

Been a long time since I released anything, but I got the FF7 bug again a while ago, so here - have Braver.

Quoting from the readme:

Braver is a from scratch reimplemented game engine for the original (1997/8) FF7 PC release - although it should run with the more modern Steam re-release since that changes very little. The idea is to run the original game compatibly, from the original game files where possible, but also provide an easily moddable/hackable engine for adding extra functionality.

Yes, another engine implementation. Hopefully it won't peter out and die, I'm aware I'm not the first to try this, but I am releasing the code https://github.com/ficed/Braver so everything's available for people to look at regardless.

How close is it to done? NOT AT ALL. It's loading more field locations than I expected, but that just means you can play through from the opening to, like, the train scenes after the first reactor explosion. (And maybe further, but I haven't tested further yet!). Most locations will have graphical glitches, the battle engine is very incomplete and so on. But you can technically play a non-zero amount of the game and maybe see the possibilities. Example field location (few more screenshots on the website linked above):



Since this is a first release there is every chance I've missed something obvious and it will crash, not load, etc. on some (many? most?) PCs. However I did do the bare minimum, i.e. tested it loads on at least *one* PC other than my development box...

What's the immediate plans? Not going to promise anything, because I'm mostly writing this for fun. But some things that are definitely on my list to think about:

• Continue working through the field locations and fixing/implementing functionality that stops the locations from working at all
  
• Look at loading some of the simpler mods, at least - Braver will happily run in 2K resolution, but you can't yet take advantage of mods with higher quality assets
  
• Look at finishing networking support. I've had a few ideas which are partially implemented; one was to allow a multiplayer mode where each player is assigned control of certain party members ... so you could maybe play through FF7 with three players, each controlling one character in battle. I've written the basic code to synchronise the game state over the network, but it's probably broken because I haven't been keeping it up to date as I add new functionality in. Might try and bring that up to date.
  

What can anyone else do right now? Well, not loads, but...

• Confirm whether it does, or doesn't, work on their PC at all. As mentioned, very likely I've screwed something up in this first alpha release.
• I know there's a lot of glitches in the early field locations (although they are playable ... more or less). If someone wanted to make a definitive list of the places where Braver is getting things wrong in those first few locations (with screenshots/video clips comparing to FF7 official) that would be useful as a reference/to-do list for "things that still need work"

[gjoerulv]

Neat!

One of my (wet) dreams is to make a FF7 like game with PvP (or mod FF7 with PvP possibilities). Referring to the networking here ofc. I bet having the possibility to fight other players with your team over the internet would be massively popular. But that would require a huge amount of work that's not within the scope here, I guess?

[ficedula]

Huge? Eh, once the battle engine is fully done (and that's a fair bit of work!), it wouldn't be a horrible amount of work to add in something like that since it's almost entirely reusing the existing code for damage calculations, animations, and so on. Not anywhere near that yet, though!

I'd've thought the bigger problem with PvP is that the FF7 battle engine isn't balanced at all for PvP - i.e. players often have abilities that do massive amounts of damage because monsters aren't capped at 9999HP. So spells and limits that would just take off 10% of a boss monsters HP will kill a player outright. Unless you took the simple approach of just "multiply everybody's HP by 10" or something...

[Bonez]

Huge? Eh, once the battle engine is fully done (and that's a fair bit of work!), it wouldn't be a horrible amount of work to add in something like that since it's almost entirely reusing the existing code for damage calculations, animations, and so on. Not anywhere near that yet, though!

I'd've thought the bigger problem with PvP is that the FF7 battle engine isn't balanced at all for PvP - i.e. players often have abilities that do massive amounts of damage because monsters aren't capped at 9999HP. So spells and limits that would just take off 10% of a boss monsters HP will kill a player outright. Unless you took the simple approach of just "multiply everybody's HP by 10" or something...

This is why people talking about wanting PVP never made sense to me. There'd be no elemental/status weaknesses to exploit or protect from, and one use of Ultima or Knights of the Round would wipe an entire party at full HP. That's why the only turn based combat you see able to do PVP successfully is Pokemon, because there's basically an infinite combination of fighters with those weaknesses and strengths I mentioned before. Without those stats, every fight would just be a slash battle of attrition.

[gjoerulv]

Welp... Obviously, FF7 PvP, like, real "fair" competitive PvP, wouldn't just work out-of-the-box like that. It would require balancing the skills, rules, etc. to actually make it a viable, fair PvP. I assumed that was a given xP. Anyone can see that.
But even the novelty to play other players, with your team over the internet would be a fun experiment if nothing else. And I can already see the meme fights right now. Someone agreeing to play fair, only to pop KotR right away, lol.

@ficedula Nice to see you shrug my concerns off like that.
Again, cool project, cheers for possibilities!

[TrueOdin]

Well, first of all, it's an honor having you back in the scene Welcome back! I'll be really happy if you could join us on Discord so we can get in touch more often. I truly think this project is revolutionary, and I'm happy to see someone finally kickstarting it. We've had many times the idea to do so as well, but the only challenge I foresee is how to handle the likely event SE would DMCA back. How are you going to handle this situation eventually? Have you already thought of a plan or have you got some kind of whitelisting on their own side?

Congratulations again, looking forward for this project and to get in touch with you!

[ficedula]

@ficedula Nice to see you shrug my concerns off like that.
Again, cool project, cheers for possibilities!

Eh, I'm saying it's fairly straightforward once the battle engine's already implemented in single player. Which is still not anywhere near done! So don't expect anything like that next week

Well, first of all, it's an honor having you back in the scene Welcome back! I'll be really happy if you could join us on Discord so we can get in touch more often. I truly think this project is revolutionary, and I'm happy to see someone finally kickstarting it. We've had many times the idea to do so as well, but the only challenge I foresee is how to handle the likely event SE would DMCA back. How are you going to handle this situation eventually? Have you already thought of a plan or have you got some kind of whitelisting on their own side?

Congratulations again, looking forward for this project and to get in touch with you!

Thanks! Well, nothing stopping SE from DMCAing the project, but I get the impression they care more about the remake than the original release. There's a lot of mods distributing large chunks of the original game and they don't seem to care a lot (possibly because in general the modding community is fairly good about not supporting pirated copies where possible?), so hopefully the same applies here.

In any case - the source is fully available on github, so if anybody wants to keep a copy in case github get a DMCA notice and take it down, please do...

Progress in the past few days:

-Fixed transparency in field models (so, save points render correctly now)
-Improved BG scrolling
-Added basic plugin support. Not going to work too much on this until somebody actually has a mod they want to port over, but: replacement files, background replacement, and dialog events are supported. Quick hacked up plugin to insert hi res backgrounds:

https://braver.ficedula.co.uk/hiresbg.jpg