Final Fantasy 8 in Unity?

[Maki]

Harbor finished


What should I... Ah, yes! The fishing pier that is visible only in FMV No, not now, we need to discuss some plan on how it should look

[Kandy_Man]

This is absolutely incredible.  I had a busy weekend so only just seeing these updates from the last couple days now.  As for it being open world, that was my ideal scenario, and Unity takes care of things like LOD and stuff for us, so going open world would actually be really easy assuming all of the scenery was aligned and scaled correctly.

As for not knowing Unity, that's fine.  Getting the assets done is the hard part I think.  Once they are imported it's just a case of aligning them to make an open world and then programming in some sort of dynamic loading so we don't have to have the entire world loaded at once (no point having Esthar loaded when we're in Balamb).  There's plenty of people familiar with Unity so if you personally are not, don't worry, focus on a different area such as the environments like you're doing now.

I've been completely blown away by your work Maki so if you want to go ahead with the fishing pier I'd have no problem with that.  Alternatively, if you'd rather have a discussion about that, we can, and like you mentioned, the interiors could be worked on next.  If we can get the entirety of Balamb Town done that would be a perfect place to move on from environments to things like props, characters etc I think, then we can make a demo using Balamb Town.  Demo doesn't have to make sense in terms of plot, but we can get something going such as NPCs, interactions, quests, random encounters, boss encounters etc just to show it working.

I'm super excited

[Zervox]

Really incredible work, as far as the scale to walkmesh I wouldn't worry too much about it as long as everything stays to scale with the remade assets tbh(although a certain amount of agreement for the assets scale would have to be made).

open world or not either is workable even performance wise as it can be streamed/loaded in on the go(the thing is if the world management will be having to work around precision of float or using a reset traversal is needed(moving the world instead of the character) to avoid it, possibly using double precision instead of single precision float and then cast to float relative to camera being at 0,0(rather complex things to handle)

unless I misremember asuming using float you can have up to 5 digits then you can only have 2 decimals.

I do however think it is easier to keep the world and locations separated, as then you won't have to worry as much of scale and precision(not to mention the time to make a world management that can handle the scale/size needed), as the world could be more compacted like it is in the original game/just imagine the distance from train tomemory  forrest before Galbadia Garden and remapping that distance relative to the actual size of Balamb town to world map ratio.

[Maki]

Okay, so currently the top view of Balamb looks like this:


*The hotel road is subject to change as it's too tight


About the pier:
This is frontal projection that shows the sea of level position for the pier. It would be on the same height as harbour


The question is how to get there:
1. By hotel road extension, as it will go directly straight and down up to the pier


2. By using Cat walks

to drop immidiately to pier level and then straight road on sea level

The pier will finally connect harbour spots that are not available in-game currently (like that opera-like building in distant)

EDIT:
About interiors- it's quiet okay, but the interior wall need to be separate model to remain as close to the original

[jmp434]

The inner wall with a Unwrap will have a different texture and will give a different look or simply detach the inner wall for texture has by basic texture, no?

[Maki]

oh, right
I forgot to upload a pic with inner wall (the room is mostly finished, I just need to fill the empty space that is not visible in FF8 and take care of the corridor and this one is done. Next is Zell's house

It is separate model with only one side (like plane) with normals flipped inside. I already cut-out the window and door so easy.
In FF8 vanilla it has different texture and feel outside and inside.

What with that pier? Anyone?

[Kandy_Man]

For the pier I like the idea of the catwalk personally.  I think it would be something a bit different to all of the plain roads whilst still feeling like it belonged (Near where I live is actually steps down to a river and then a long road next to the river so it makes sense to me).

For anyone who is interested, I did the battle theme:  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/Don%27t%20Be%20Afraid.mp3

Feel free to give feedback

[Yagami Light]

For the pier is that made up or are you talking about the rows of boats from the cutscene of balamb garden going out of control and ending up in the water. Regarding the opera building at the end of the harbor, are you sure that's not a boat where the gap is and beyond that there's another Island with the opera building on it. If you want to put the area with all the small boats down I'd put it to the right side of the harbor area. Anyway good job so far.

[Maki]

rows of boats from the cutscene of balamb garden going out of control and ending up in the water

This^

Regarding the opera building at the end of the harbor, are you sure that's not a boat where the gap is and beyond that there's another Island with the opera building on it.

I don't know. It's not in worldmap model also.

If you want to put the area with all the small boats down I'd put it to the right side of the harbor area.

How to get there if the boats were on right side of harbour (from logical point of view)?

For the pier I like the idea of the catwalk personally.

This will also give the look at sea if seen from the entrance of Balamb as there wouldn't be any foliage to cover the view.
I'll check your battle theme when I get home!

[Yagami Light]

Well the cutscene before shows the Garden to the left of the weapon shop steering leftish, you could assume it went clockwise around the town (I remember them saying no casualties) the first water area would be to the left of the harbor, or it could have went in a circle and ended up south east area of the train tracks. Hard to tell, I wonder if the devs just made up whatever they wanted. If I had to choose between your two choices I would choose cat walks since the road extensions are not there in the field file.

[Kandy_Man]

Just done a second pass over the battle theme after coming away from it for a day.  Again, any feedback welcome:

V1
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/Don%27t%20Be%20Afraid.mp3

V2
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/Don%27t%20Be%20Afraid%20V2.mp3

[Maki]

V1
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/Don%27t%20Be%20Afraid.mp3
V2
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/Don%27t%20Be%20Afraid%20V2.mp3

Am I retarded or this is the same music?


Back to art, after importing I encountered many important issues, this is sample unfinished scene:

The issues are just a scale issues (or I just forgot to import the ceiling, too lazy to check everything again) and overlapping exterior/interior things also I exported like 1/2 without moving pivot and had to adjust everything manually again. Only one very small lightmap issue with small mesh, so don't bother it, everything else is producing nice lightmap. The interior, walls, rings in center and exterior mesh needs to be fixed (like moving a window a bit, whole room even idk yet

EDIT: https://sketchfab.com/models/7ba50e4a169646fa909d0c5ccde9f460
mhm

[Kandy_Man]

Am I retarded or this is the same music?


Back to art, after importing I encountered many important issues, this is sample unfinished scene:

The issues are just a scale issues (or I just forgot to import the ceiling, too lazy to check everything again) and overlapping exterior/interior things also I exported like 1/2 without moving pivot and had to adjust everything manually again. Only one very small lightmap issue with small mesh, so don't bother it, everything else is producing nice lightmap. The interior, walls, rings in center and exterior mesh needs to be fixed (like moving a window a bit, whole room even idk yet

Looking brilliant as always Maki.  As for the music, they are both the same track (battle theme) but V2 had some tweaking with eq and volume of individual instruments and things.  Still not 100% satisfied with it but will probably try and get a final version this week sometime.

[Kandy_Man]

So unless anyone has any objections, I think this is my final version of the battle theme:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/Don%27t%20Be%20Afraid%20V3.mp3

If anyone has any feedback to give, please let me know, I'd like the music to be the best it can possibly be.

[LeonhartGR]

Awesome!

[Kandy_Man]

Got another one for you guys, first draft of the game over theme.  Not sure on the strings sounds, may have to go the route of what I did with the battle theme and separate out each note to its own instrument instead of a "strings section" patch, what do you guys think?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/The%20Loser%20V1.mp3

Edit:

Here's V2, strings sounded too artificial to me in V1 and the entire thing was a bit too compressed

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/The%20Loser%20V2.mp3

[Kandy_Man]

Got another one for you guys, as always, this is just a first draft, spent too long on it today so I need to come away and go back to it another day with a fresh head.

Victory theme!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77339434/The%20Winner%20V1.mp3

[Maki]

Hm... still in old midi-style
Have you tried using real waves for instruments?
Adagio Strings bundle for example but it's Kontakt exclusive. I don't know in what software you are remastering it
I had a very nice and extremely light VSTi plugin for Floppy studio called "Orchestra" but can't find it anymore...

Your Blue Fields is the best so far IMO

[Kandy_Man]

Hm... still in old midi-style
Have you tried using real waves for instruments?
Adagio Strings bundle for example but it's Kontakt exclusive. I don't know in what software you are remastering it
I had a very nice and extremely light VSTi plugin for Floppy studio called "Orchestra" but can't find it anymore...

Your Blue Fields is the best so far IMO

I'm using uvi orchestral suite for the instruments.  Maybe I just need to get used to it a bit more as the examples shown were incredible, just as good as Kontact but a lot cheaper.

I'll try and get them to sound more natural.  With us currently working in Balamb Town I was only going to do the boss theme after this and then try and get them all sounding as good as possible as we don't need more music than that to put something together based in Balamb Town.  I guess I just need to spend a bit more time on them.

And thanks, I really like how Blue Fields turned out, only thing that bothers me is lead melody near the beginning of the song isn't using the right instruments as orchestral suite didn't have it which I didn't realise when I bought it.  I'll figure it out though, unless it sounds good as it is in which case I'll leave it.

[Kandy_Man]

Maki, how far along is Balamb Town?  Really excited to see the finished product.  Are there any final assets you can pass along so I can get them into Unity or are you putting the entire town into one file?

[Zervox]

I find Omnisphere very entertaining to play around with(then again I only convert midi but the tool is rather cool(though abit expensive for just playing around with but eh worth it))

[Kandy_Man]

I find Omnisphere very entertaining to play around with(then again I only convert midi but the tool is rather cool(though abit expensive for just playing around with but eh worth it))

Just had a listen to Omnisphere, it does sound pretty awesome.  Sadly not that appropriate for the FF8 soundtrack as there's a lot of orchestral stuff rather than synth stuff, and if I did need synth stuff, I have Massive.  Will definitely look into that in the future though, even if it's just for messing around with like you say

[Maki]

putting the entire town into one file?

Like single model? No, never, madness.

To be honest, I didn't do anything more. It's like whole Balamb finished except all the textures and interiors and that places that are not visible to player [in vanilla FF8], that's quite everything. I did some materials already, but I'm not good at it so it looks not so good, anyway I'll send you every fully completed meshes so far this week.

[Maki]

First pull request! 

Oh God, I hate that git-thing (that was easy in VS when it took care of everything for me, but here, manually...  )
I just destroyed my fork when trying to commit second batch of models....

Okay, let's make it different way. I will upload whole zip with project

Okay, it looks like this right now:

I imported everything except the Zell neighboor interior and imported maps for everything I had so far
I sent you a PM with d/l link, please if you could update the repo with this project.

[Kandy_Man]

Sorry I've had a really busy week at work, I've only just gotten around to reading the thread and the PM.  I'm taking care of it as I type this and adding in the music files as well, hopefully won't be too long and git will be updated