It has been, again, been a few months do I'd thought I do another update on the new FF7 engine that's rolling along. The last thread really had to do with some interesting tools that were created to assist with the projects, but this will be a kind of "official thread" that I will add on to. (As in, this should be the last thread I make on the subject and just add on to the current conversation when new updates arrive.) First a little mini FAQ to get the big questions out of the way. What is this Q-gears thing you keep posting about? Q-gears is an attempt to make a clone of Squaresoft's Final Fantasy 7 game engine. It is designed to be cross-platform and run on modern operating systems such as Win32 and Linux. In the future this is to serve as a framework for compatibility with other Square games. Many games after this were created with the same same code base and design philosophy. Written in C++, it uses cross-platform graphics libraries (SDL and OpenGL) along with GCC, a cross platform C/C++ compiler. It is named after "Gears" which is a wholly inaccurate and incredibly incomplete reference for the original FF7 engine. The "Q" means nothing, other than it's a cool letter to differentiate between the document and the program. Hey, isn't this illegal? I mean, this sounds kind of like Chrono Trigger Resurrection, and that was shut down by Square. No, because at the core of it all, Q-gears is just a virtual machine that does nothing without external game data, which is not included. The creation of virtual machines to play games is nothing new. Others exist, such as ScummVM, FreeSCI, Sarien, and Fortz. Making an implementation isn't illegal or else Linux (an implementation of UNIX) wouldn't be around right now. Are you sure you can talk about this here? The mods have been generous and have given permission, (though it was tenuous for a bit). When can I get more information? The forums are located here. The Q-gears specific forums are Here Anyway, with that out of the way.... NEW SCREENSHOTS! Debug room Midgar Station You meet Barret here Now with layers Inside the reactor You will notice a few things. First only the bottom background layer is rendered for now, the upper layers have been implemented, but not turned on yet. You will also see that the walkmesh that the 3D characters walk on isn't aligned yet, but it's getting there. The third thing you notice is the backgrounds are at a higher resolution. This is an artifact of field display code and will not stay like this. The code now just displays the entire field map. The end result will be just like the PC/PSX port where you will get only a window of this data and the PC in the center. We are going for compatibility first before anything else. Here's the offical homepage. http://q-gears.sourceforge.net/ I'm open for comments and questions.

I'm not sure if you noticed this halkun, but there's a lot of red, green, and wiremeshing in your engine! [spoiler:d95bb19484]*cough*[/spoiler:d95bb19484]

Everytime I see one of the threads about this project I'm unsure if it's actually further along or not.

Mmm - I'd love to play it on my PC with it all fixed and what not. Fantastic.

Everytime I see one of the threads about this project I'm unsure if it's actually further along or not. Figuring that it staretd like this I would say it looks a little more like FF7 than before.

Final Fantasy is a lie... a fantasy if you will.

The third thing you notice is the backgrounds are at a higher resolution. This is an artifact of field display code and will not stay like this. Erm... why? Early 3D games look utterly terrible. They haven't aged well at all. Where you can look back at FF3/6 and still be wowed by the sprites, you can look back at PSX-era 3D and wonder why they weren't still doing 2D, instead. Couldn't it at least be optional to enable the higher-resolution textures? FF7's a bit of an eyesore these days. Not as bad as Xenogears, mind you, but still not pretty to look at. The high-res textures could go a long ways towards fixing that.

The third thing you notice is the backgrounds are at a higher resolution. This is an artifact of field display code and will not stay like this. Erm... why? Early 3D games look utterly terrible. They haven't aged well at all. Where you can look back at FF3/6 and still be wowed by the sprites, you can look back at PSX-era 3D and wonder why they weren't still doing 2D, instead. Couldn't it at least be optional to enable the higher-resolution textures? FF7's a bit of an eyesore these days. Not as bad as Xenogears, mind you, but still not pretty to look at. The high-res textures could go a long ways towards fixing that. The real problem is we simply do not have the texture data. For example, let's take the train station screencap above. When you overlay the train layer over the background, there are parts missing. This screenshot below was an experiment we tried. (It's a little crappy looking as it was ment as a throw-away test. The light squares were to test for layer alignment) Besides messing up the walkmesh locations, you see on the right hand side where there are green blocks? That's texture information that's simply not in the game and was thrown out. The train only covers about 3/4 of the hole it's supposed to fill. (The missing data was never seen anyway) Every field file is like that.

I'm not sure if you noticed this halkun, but there's a lot of red, green, and wiremeshing in your engine! [spoiler:5d1bf89e06]*cough*[/spoiler:5d1bf89e06] The engine is perfect for the submarine battles. OHho ho ho.

I love FF7 but I actually don't understand what this is or why you are making a new engine or whatever. Can someone care to explain?

I fucking love seeing these updates halkun.

Purdy.

I love FF7 but I actually don't understand what this is or why you are making a new engine or whatever. Can someone care to explain? This is pretty much how I feel. And if after all this time, you're only at the Mako Reactor, won't it take you upwards of a decade to actually finish this project?

I love FF7 but I actually don't understand what this is or why you are making a new engine or whatever. Can someone care to explain? This is pretty much how I feel. And if after all this time, you're only at the Mako Reactor, won't it take you upwards of a decade to actually finish this project? Yeah there already is the ps1 version and the pc version. What use would a new engine serve?

So, wait, will this work sort of like the Unreal engine template, where you can use it to make new games, except you can never sell to others? Or am I confused.

I love FF7 but I actually don't understand what this is or why you are making a new engine or whatever. Can someone care to explain? This is pretty much how I feel. And if after all this time, you're only at the Mako Reactor, won't it take you upwards of a decade to actually finish this project? They aren't remaking the FF7 data from scratch, they're creating an engine.

halkun: It's a cool project. Keep it up.

I love FF7 but I actually don't understand what this is or why you are making a new engine or whatever. Can someone care to explain? This is pretty much how I feel. And if after all this time, you're only at the Mako Reactor, won't it take you upwards of a decade to actually finish this project? They aren't remaking the FF7 data from scratch, they're creating an engine. That uses the FF7 data. The question is why make an engine for it in the first place. It already has one.

Yeah, I just want to know why? Why create a new engine? Are you going to remake the game? Add new scenarios? Because from what I see, it looks exactly the same, except for some squiggly lines and a lot of red and green blocks.

Yeah, I just want to know why? Why create a new engine? Are you going to remake the game? Add new scenarios? Because from what I see, it looks exactly the same, except for some squiggly lines and a lot of red and green blocks. You never tried to play FF7 on Win XP did you? It involves downloading non-official patches to get it to work and I hear it has problems.

Yeah, I just want to know why? Why create a new engine? Are you going to remake the game? Add new scenarios? Because from what I see, it looks exactly the same, except for some squiggly lines and a lot of red and green blocks. You never tried to play FF7 on Win XP did you? It involves downloading non-official patches to get it to work and I hear it has problems. So they are doing this so you can play it on XP? That doesn't sound right. I dunno, I see FF7 so I am enthusiastic even though I have no idea what this will do. If it is for XP compatibility, seems like a lot of work for little reward.

These are pretty good questions so allow me to elaborate. I love FF7 but I actually don't understand what this is or why you are making a new engine or whatever. Can someone care to explain? This is pretty much how I feel. And if after all this time, you're only at the Mako Reactor, won't it take you upwards of a decade to actually finish this project? Ok, I can see where the confusion is. I'll first explain why a new engine must exist with a quote I did in another thread. The first problem is simple code-rot. When a program is no longer being coded, the actual source code begins to deteriorate. This starts to happen within the first few weeks. The longer it sits as a .zip file somewhere, or sits on a pressed archival CD-ROM, the code loses it's ability to function. After a while, it just becomes fossilized, like bread left to dry in the sun. Now I'm not saying the code physically degrades. What happens is programmers move on, APIs are forgotten, supporting tooling and architecture are either deleted or deprecated, and anything that can use the code simply vanishes. This, in turn, makes the code useless as a functioning core of a programming project. The code for FF7 is almost 10 years old now. The second problem is the data. FF7 was designed around the PSX. All the music, backgrounds, movies, models, animations, and other non-code items were conceptualized and created with only that platform in mind. The train-wreck of a PC port was a direct result of trying to shoe-horn PSX data into something a PC could understand. All the tools that were used to create/render the data are long gone, (See the first problem), and so, it sits, rotting too. The goal of this project mirrors the same philosophy as ScummVM. Old engines die a slow deprecating death. S-E knows this and has been updating their back catalog of games for newer systems over the last few years. The problem is that this particular engine is very very weird. In it's many incarnations, it has run FF7/8/9, PE, PE2, Xenogears, and a handful of others. The issue is that this engine was designed from the ground up for the only the PS1. The original PSX is what I like to call a "transitional system". It had a lot of strange technologies that were ahead of it's time at launch. Besides having a built-in packet-based 3D accelerator, (abet, non-filtered), it also supported such weirdness as multiple color depths on a single drawing surface and oddball resolutions that are created by simply drawing a rectangle on VRAM. Ever see a game that ran in 1024x240? (The Macross game [ab]used this resolution a lot) That's the kind of stuff made the PSX kind of a pain to code. This engine has several goals. First it allows us to "start fresh" and create a new engine using the original PSX (raw) data. (The PC version will also be supported later) The hope is to get something stable and working without the need of emulation. It will also allow anyone to take this code and port it so they can play it on the Gameboy FutureSystem X, or whatever new computing platforms come out in the years to come. Also it will have the ability to accept user code and data so you can make your own FF7-like game. (The engine, however, will make it impossible to mix the user content and the original Square data. The less we step on toes the better) You must have the original game to make this work. The engine requires the Squaresoft data set to be functional. Also, as the engine is object-orientated, we have the ability to add games into the system, like ScummVM. We have a very basic Xenogears framework in there right now. What you are seeing is not us making the levels, that's Square's data, what we are doing is loading the levels and trying to execute them. So when you say "We are only at the reactor" the truth is we can load up *ANY* field file right now (well, kinda anyway). We just started at the beginning of the game. Does that make sense? Mostly, though, we do it because it's there. ^_^

Yeah, I just want to know why? Why create a new engine? Are you going to remake the game? Add new scenarios? Because from what I see, it looks exactly the same, except for some squiggly lines and a lot of red and green blocks. You never tried to play FF7 on Win XP did you? It involves downloading non-official patches to get it to work and I hear it has problems. Have you tried running Final Fantasy VII on Mac OS X? Now that's worse. I've no clue on Linux, but I'm guessing a native engine beats WINE anyway.

They're doing it because they can. Plus this will allow people to make mods for FF7 with reletive ease once it's done.

Yeah, I just want to know why? Mostly, though, it's because it's there. ^_^ What other reason does anybody need to do something geeky and neat?