Thanks for the positive comments, guys!
Great idea! I especially like what you've done with those field skills. It would be interesting to see how they would help to progress through the game. Those rogue and assassination mission options look very intriguing as well. Just from the video alone it shows you've put a lot of time and effort into this so I hope one day the necessary tools will be available for you to complete it.
And is this other RPG of yours still quite early on in development?
My vision for the field skills were as such:
- Lockpicking's main use would be for breaking into people's houses and stealing gil/items from various places in the room background. It would also of been needed in the higher level dungeons for better loot (this idea is from Ultima Online). Each dungeon had a difficulty rating depending on level.
- Explosives: Each NPC has a bit (basically a variable). So if Barret blew one up, they would be gone forever from the world (and you could kill anyone basically, just like Morrowind etc). He could also place it near rocks and get more interesting materials for crafting.
- Ninja jump: Useful for navigating backgrounds in more interesting ways, items could potentially be placed in hard to reach places. Also in Kalm, Yuffie has access to windows from this position (this is where she would of met Cloud, in the inn, as she wanted to kill him)
- Levitate: Haha this was mainly for coolness. But it can be useful for quickly moving Vincent just above the ground (if you go too high and wander about, the z-index makes it difficult for you to return to a suitable position).
The rogue/assassination missions would of been repeatable and real easy to script. It would essentially just assign a random NPC, and going near that NPC would of triggered a custom battle scripted with Proud Clod. Also doing missions would get you town karma/faction points (the three main factions would of been Shinra, Jenova (aka followers of Sephiroth, as he is sort of the real leader) and AVALANCHE). I calculated the variables for all these things and there is just enough to space (though resource points suck up a lot, as they need a refill timer as well).
Yes, the Unreal Engine RPG is very early in development (programming/design wise) - though the story/world is pretty well developed. I wanted to prototype with FF7 a little as it has existing assets
JonJon412: Hey, thanks! FF7 scripting is not too difficult once you get used to all the variables you will use. I'd be interested in hearing your feedback/thoughts regardless! I didn't have much feedback yet as I just made a game I wanted to play myself (for example, 9 CDs is not a problem for me as my phone has huge space, so I can switch CDs easily). If someone is really interested in making a similar game, I can help them out the best I can with my resources.
I'm not sure I can finish this FF7 project even in my spare time as the scope is huge (9 CDs means one change in a PHS script would affect every room on every CD - over 6000 or so). But if you reduce the CDs to 2 or 3, you lose the team functionality which would of been a big part of doing missions. The idea was you NEEDED at least 2 teams for some missions (for example, stopping the Mako reactors before fighting Sephiroth when he is encased in "Ultimate Materia" - according to the book Ultimania). This Ultimate materia would of been a major plotpoint also.
JBedford128: Haha, thanks very much. You are indeed very correct, I really worked myself into a corner trying to deliver an "uncompromised vision". When doing the team script function, I programmed things like "if this specific character has already met this other character" ( I never even used that function ever, lol, but its there) and if they are in the same room (you can only form teams if the characters are physically in the same area) resulting in a script thousand of lines long.
Also interesting point about the PS1, I'm not sure all of the features are possible on PC without some injecting.. you would need to inject separate field files for each character, as well as world map models. However, a lot of other things may be easier using the PC version (such as having models appear across fields). The drawback of the PS1 version is tons of hex editing and constant ISO manipulation. And the initial expansion of every field in the game to 35KB took ages to plan/do.