As for FF7 prequel I believe they were working on something like that here.
I am actually not planning on re-making the game. We are planning on making a NWN persistent world using the setting from FF7.
Real time combat will not work like FF7 and I don't recomend trying it either.
Well actually, The FF7 battle system will absolutely NOT work in a persistent world (As it will impact all of the other players online playing in the PW), so we will have to use a real time combat system. In fact, the only real change between 'real' realtime battles and the FF7 system is that we will not be 'jumping players to a battle screen'. All actions in combat (attack, steal, magic, etc.) will be radial menu commands (programmable to the function keys f1-f12 or the hotkey bar). The battle system will work similar to FFXI (but using systems from FF7).
The combat system in FF7 I believe to be quite ingeneous and assuming you can't implement it in NWN likely means you don't know much about NWN scripting system.
Actually we have these systems already scripted. We have a working materia system. It's not the scripting that we are having problems with (we have an excess of master programmers and scripters). We are mostly having problems with the 'physical graphics' part of the conversion. Most of us know very little about modelling, texturing, animations...
As for minigames...
I repeat WE ARE NOT REMAKING FF7. So none of the minigames from the original are even applicable. (accept maybe at the Gold Saucer Wonder Square, but then again, arcades do not typically keep the same games for years anyway.) The Chocobo thing is actually quite simple (provided we can figure out how to import the chocobo models). There exists already a similar system for horses. We will just replace the horse with a chocobo. The biggest limitation in NWN in regards to minigames is no 'high speed' engine. The game was never designed to handle high-speed chases and whatnot. Our minigames will have to work around this.
Difficult things are Combat round ending animations, stealing in combat, enemy skill. Vincent's break limits. Break limits in general. Summon's (still doable but will be interesting). Special combat situations (Proudclod for example). Since some of the combat things have odd characteristics this should be carefully thought out. Such as the Gi part with Nanaki at Comso.
1. We will probably do without the ending combat animations (no big loss IMO)
2. Stealing will work exactly the same as the pick-pocket ability in NWN and since it is realtime, there will be no problems at all.
3. Vincent's Limit breaks? We probably won't even have vincent in the game, but this is the easiest possible thing there is to do. It requires no scripting ability whatsoever. There is a 'polymorph' ability that you can assign to characters.
4. What about the Gi caves would be difficult? (aside from the graphic aspects due to our limited skill)
meeting Yufi basically REQUIRES you don't kill her, you can't control that with regular NWN.
actually yes you can. It's done in hundreds of community created modules for things like tavern brawls. It's called non-lethal damage. There is also a 'surrender' type of scripting option.
I also don't want this to come off as sounding arrogant or defensive. I just wanted to answer your charges. I respect your opinion and appreciate a good debate.
We have the scripting part of this project down. I think even you would be surprised what you can do with the scripting system of the Aurora Engine. What we actually need the most help with is graphics. Models, textures, tilesets... If we knew how to import this kind of thing, the module(PW) would be up and running in a month.
