Qhimm.com Forums
Miscellaneous Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: Terminal Insanity on 2003-09-25 22:37:17
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Ive tried several website links i found in the forums
( http://www.warwickcompsoc.co.uk/~ficedula/remake/ being one of them)
And I cant find any working links to the project :(
What kind of resolutions will it support? and will it be entirely 3d? Or are you just reworking the engine for compatability reasons? =o
Also, will there be a linux port?
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Whilst I'm not really the one to answer as I've no access to the technical side of things; it won't be entirely 3D as in real-time 3D objects, it'll be pre-rendered backgrounds as in the existing FF7. It's not the same story, more a prequel than a retelling. Not sure about the resolutions.
Either way don't count down the days as it's not going to be available any time soon. :)
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But.. :( No 3d rendered models like there is in the real FF7 game?
Will it be easyer to edit?
Mabe someone could write addons, or extra storylines for it :P
Or... recreate the ff7 story/dialog on the new engine *grin*
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I wish... :roll:
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The link is offline since Ficedula, the engine coder, has got a lot of work do to in his "real" life at the moment, so he hasn't got time to take care of the remake engine itself or its website. But there'll surely be an update (soon)...
As for the technical site: Resolutions shouldn't be a problem, it will support a lot of them :D
The enigne is made to look the same as the original FF7 engine, so there will be 2D backgrounds and 3D-Models moving on them, as in FF7/FF8/...
Easier editing? Yes, until now, it mainly works on scripts, written in plain text. So editing them will be a lot easier than the original FF7 files.
As for the linux port: I'm not sure. Our engine is written in Delphi, butz fice told me, that he also has a Delphi version for linux... but I can't promise anything
- Alhexx
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It'd be great if this project gets off the ground. It definately would be exciting to be part of a fan-driven prequel of an already great game. I think that my writing skills could be a great help in getting this thing started. I've done 3d modeling before, but never programming, so I'm really not really versatile in all fields. Even though the project seems to have grinded to a complete halt, I have a feeling that eventually things will get moving again. As for now, I'm hoping we've just hit a rough spot. I've noticed (as many others have) that this board itself seems to be slowing down. That is..it seems to be less active. Hopefully a rough spot. Sure, the boards are just words and pictures placed by almost complete strangers, but I miss the days where old and new faces could have endless discussions about final fantasy and whatnot. I guess what we're lacking is participation...which no one is obligated to do.
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I think its more or less that we already did all that stuff.. maybe the new people werent around for it.. but all us old folks should remember some of the great threads and debates and analysis of games of the ff series.. But once you have put it out there there is no point to bring it back.. unless a new person starts something like that.. but none of the old active posters probably would..
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Alhexx
I really think that if you are making an engine that'll look like FF7, you should do an actual remake (as well as that prequel?), that'll have better support for modern graphics cards, maybe playing movies more like media player (which smoothens them somehow, and I think the details actually improve somehow :D, no sharpness is lost). A support for antialiasing that doesn't screw up the backgrounds and/or menus would also be very much appreciated.
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If you wanted higher resolution and such in FF7, a few things would have to be done...
1) Re-render the movies
2) Recreate the field file backgrounds, so the borders could not be seen
amongst other things. I haven't messed with FF7 in two years...
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Would we really have to re-render fmv's if we wanted ff7pc in high-resolution? The screen size can be as high as 640x480 in ff7pc. It's safe to say that all the in-game movies are in 320x224. That means that they stretch to fit the screen. If you notice, every field (not including world map) and battle scene has this 16/32 pixel (depends on your resolution. 32 pixels for 640x480, 16 pixels for 320x240) part of the bottom of the screen blacked out. I don't have any clue why they did this, but I think I can imagine why. I'm gussing they needed more room on the discs for the videos so they rendered them to 320x224 and had the game rendering at 320x224 and 640x448, and leaving a black spot at the bottom. So then, the movies would fit the screen correctly. So it's safe to say that we really are never playing in actual fullscreen in ff7pc. But you can always stretch your monitor :P.
IIRC, it's not like this in the PSX version. So my point is that we probably do not need to re-render the movies for the game to be played at a higher resolution. Fonts, windows, and a few textures will need to be modified, though.
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I don't have any clue why they did this, but I think I can imagine why.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that's just the size the picture is on the PSX version and it fills your whole TV screen if played on the PSX.
IIRC, In FF8PC, the image doesn't fit the whole screen either, but at least they centered it instead of leaving all of the black part at the bottom.
If you did not rerender the movies and backgrounds, then you'd have nice high-definition models running around on a really really blocky background. The battles would be cool though.
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If you did not rerender the movies and backgrounds, then you'd have nice high-definition models running around on a really really blocky background. The battles would be cool though.
Yes, in theory that we could get ahold of some high-res originals and render them at a higher resolution. Let's see what happens if we stretch the screen to 1024x768 (http://kucoru.dyndns.org/ff7stret.png). It looks not that great. So in order to play it in high-resolution we would definately have to render backgrounds pretty largely. For the sake of your eyes. As for FMV's, we wouldn't have to go too high, because some videos look the same after a certain point because of inevitable compression.
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You are right as far as the picture looking like crap but it could be made into a decent little fun wallpaper..
--and also--
Wouldnt re-rendering the backgournds take quite a bit of time and skill? I doubt that there is any way to get ahold of hi-rez images.. i wouldnt even know how to go about making them look decent in that high of a rez.. & if this was having to be done through a graphics program and manual editing wouldnt that take quite a taskforce.. not only that i thnk most of the people here.. myself included are in college or school and hella busy..
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Only Square can rerender the backgrounds, providing they didn't delete the scene definitions after rendering them as they are now. Ironically, Square would have so little to do, to make an awesome FF7PC remake. They probably have the definitions for backgrounds and movies, right? Simply rerender them - movies at full 640x480 and backgrounds so, that a full 640x480 resolution area of any background would always be shown in-game. It would look awesome. Then, fix those few bugs (some gramatical and some graphical, like that Vincent model in the ancient's city that I mentioned in my first post :D). Third, they should remake character models to a higher polygon count - perhaps the world models only (replace them with battle models?), battle models can be left alone (giving Square even less work :wink:). And lastly, repair the game's code, so that it'll work perfectly on all Windows, including the newest. But it's important, that the game would otherwise stay as close to original as possible.
Four relatively simple steps, the bugs are probably widely known and could be pointed out by the FF7 community, only fixing the code could take a while - I don't know, with a giant like Square - maybe a month or two? Less?
In the end, they would have a (currently :-?) perfect version of a perfect game. I'd buy two immediately, hehe.
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Yeah that'd be about enough to fix the game up. But the high-resolution stuff and the script fixes would have to be released on both platforms (PC and PSX) for it to be "fair" to the consumers. However, chances are that Square won't be releasing a single player game which is already on a console for the PC...ever again. But if they did do all this, theoretically, they could simply give the ff7pc users a huge patch that'll fix all that stuff. I wouldn't count on it; Squeenix has "bigger fish to fry".
So, anyone willing to get a job as a night janitor at Squeenix headquarters to steal some original FF7 content? :P