Qhimm.com Forums
Miscellaneous Forums => Archive => Topic started by: bird on 2004-07-26 15:41:58
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hi,
I've pondered over this many times in the past but, due to the greatness of the task at hand and the difficulty i would face doing it alone, i never really looked into it in depth.
my wish. to re-write the ff7 engine from scratch, and essentially creating enhanced graphics, enhance sound and most of all, making ff7 playable on my mac (and equally on linux machines etc etc) ^^.
i think this would be a great project to get off the ground. as there is a world of things we could do to enhance our ff7 experience.
what we would require:
1. dedicated (or at least, good) programmers. i consider myself a good c++ programmer, however looking at it right now i can see having a few extra people to throw idea's around with would make the whole process a lot quicker and we would get a much cleaner end result ^^
2. people who are good at ripping apart the data files used in ff7. i know there are a lot of programs out there that extract model/texture/etc data. and a few guides that try and explain what is going on in them. However, we need people who know these files inside out, and can get us all the data we need. i myself suck at things like this. i've looked over some of the explinations on alexx's page a while ago, but was unable to get anything really useful from them. we need someone(s) who can. this is probably the biggest challenge in the process.
3. computer artists. wouldn't it be nice to have good high-res models of our beloved ff7 characters? if anyone is good with using maya or any similar 3d modeling program and would love to make new models for the characters this would be awesome. but i thing this would just be an added bonus, as there is a lot of models to be re-worked, and just getting it working with the standard models is going to be hard enough ^^.
Also this could include people who want to enhance background images and textures and all the other pixilly looking things to make them look slick and smooth. this i think is a bit more likely to happen than the models :)
4. others.... um, i dunno what else.. maybe: debuggers i.e. ppl who love ff7 so much they wanna play it over and over again to make sure our code never crashes :P. um, motivators: i.e. people who really wanna see something like this happen and can help motivate people to partake and keep developers motivated ^^.
ok.. now for a breif overview on what i think the difficulties will be.
as mentioned before, the dismantiling of the data files is the biggest problem. for examlpe: finding out how to get the information that ff7 uses to create events, loading all the maps stuff like that. however i believe that once past this step, the oceon will part and we will beable to walk right thru (slowly of course ^^)
as i mentioned before, enhancing the graphics may be asking too much, and definatly will be if we have no one who is a good graphic artist (i'm definatly not :P).. but i think we would start off using the base models, and maybe once we get something good going, we may attract the attention of some artists.
squaresoft/eidos may frown on us for this, i dunno, i'm not up on my law studies :P. i think it should be ok as long as we don't distribute any of the files on the cds, and make it so the original cd's are required to run the game, which is easily done beause the data files will be required to do anything. and we wont be selling the game, so i'm sure we're fine there ^^.
the source would also be open to the public under some kinda open source licence (gpl or whatever), maybe not to start with, but as soon as we get something runnable.
ok. now, as i've labled the topic, this is just a discussion on the feasibility.. i'm not going to start working on this on my own (unless you're willing to wait 1000 years for it :P), but if i can gather up a few knowlegable people who beleive such a thing is possible and are willing to help out, we can try and get this off the ground.
so please, let me know what you think about this.
if you don't think this is possible, please leave a rant about why.
if you have some idea's for the project, let us know.. brainstorming is the best thing for producing good products ^^
if you wanna help out in anyway. let us know what you think you can do, so if we get enough people we can get started.
if you are just keen to see this going, leave a comment to show your eager antisipation ^^
if you think i'm a crazy idiot.. well... flame me... if you must *shrugs*
ok, well thats a lot of stuff i just typed.. and i don't really wanna re-read it all, it's already really late and i'm getting quite sleepy, so let me know if something doesn't make sense, and i'll try clear it up. so!! get discussing!! ^^
thanks for reading
--bird
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I really can't ne bothered to rant why, due to the fact playing mgs substance for 6 hours striahgt *really* f*cked me up, but just search for Alhexx topic on it. all is explained there.
EDIT
Thanks for linking Mirex
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Something like this has been done before, look at the scummvm, freesci and sarien projects. And the fact that a large part of the game is written with a script engine gives me confidence that it possible. Recreating the battles is not difficult either, as all the rules are known and relatively simple.
What remains are possible legal problems from Square-Enix (and Eidos, if you use the PC version as a basis).
The AGI/SCI/SCUMM people are relatively safe as they don't need to include game logic or artwork from the game, so a re-implementation of some of the kernel or battle functions may be questionable.
But in the end, for now everyone is focussing on documenting the existing engine.
Download Halkun's file and have a look what is known so far and search this forum what has been tried before. And if you have a moment just implement a viewer for data that has been documented so far. I already have a PSX-version battle background viewer which uses OpenGL, and some fragments for a battle model and field viewer.
You could put some research into how animations are stored, or how the magic effects can be played back. Then write a viewer/disassembler/player for it.
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This is the Alhexx's thread:
http://forums.qhimm.com/viewtopic.php?t=3137&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0