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[New FF7 engine] New thread for the new forums.
halkun
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The new frorums won't allow me to change the title, so it's a little difficult to make updates. Because so much has advanced, I decided update the thread from the beginning with new screenshots, and new troops to command...
For those of you not in the know, for the last 7 years and some change, I've been reverse engineering Final Fantasy 7 with a small band of international cohorts. Very recently, we have decided to re-create the FF7 engine for newer computers. This goal is almost the same as ScummVM, which is an engine to play old SCUMM games on new platforms.
Progress has been going well. I'll present a small FAQ of common questions and then go on to the new screenshots and technologies we have found...
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?
Q-gears has a homepage now. It's http://q-gears.sourceforge.net
Stop by the forums if you want to say "Hi"
New screenshots...
The old thread shows so pretty bad shots with not-so good layering being shown. The big thing is that we actually have 3D avatars walking on the field background now.
I would first like to thank Squagesoft for leaving in the debug rooms. Those rooms have proven to be so incredably valueable to the development of Q-gears. It actually gives us access to play with the kernel functions, and to test the original engine. From this we can then re-implement the kernel on our new engine. The screen shot above a slightly modded debug room running on our engine. You can talk the the entities and "start" the game.
Do you want to know how far you can get in Q-gears? The following below is a screen of that...
You can get all the way to the bottom of the first reactor. We have only implemented enough of the fieldscript system to get cloud down there, but the game is still far from playable. The blue-green box is the entity rootpoint, and the red/white lines are the walkmesh the enttiy can walk on. the white box will be the actual screen boundry. As I have said before, for now, we are not going to be running the game in resolutions that it wasn't originally designed in. This means it will be running in 320x240x16 until we get it stable.
Also, we have broken the movie format. The screenshot below is a tool that one of my programmers have to work on it.
Linked for H-Scroll
This the moive, frame-by-frame. The .bs files contain the extracted camera data that was imbedded in the moive.
All in all, much progress has been made.
Any comments?
For those of you not in the know, for the last 7 years and some change, I've been reverse engineering Final Fantasy 7 with a small band of international cohorts. Very recently, we have decided to re-create the FF7 engine for newer computers. This goal is almost the same as ScummVM, which is an engine to play old SCUMM games on new platforms.
Progress has been going well. I'll present a small FAQ of common questions and then go on to the new screenshots and technologies we have found...
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?
Q-gears has a homepage now. It's http://q-gears.sourceforge.net
Stop by the forums if you want to say "Hi"
New screenshots...
The old thread shows so pretty bad shots with not-so good layering being shown. The big thing is that we actually have 3D avatars walking on the field background now.
I would first like to thank Squagesoft for leaving in the debug rooms. Those rooms have proven to be so incredably valueable to the development of Q-gears. It actually gives us access to play with the kernel functions, and to test the original engine. From this we can then re-implement the kernel on our new engine. The screen shot above a slightly modded debug room running on our engine. You can talk the the entities and "start" the game.
Do you want to know how far you can get in Q-gears? The following below is a screen of that...
You can get all the way to the bottom of the first reactor. We have only implemented enough of the fieldscript system to get cloud down there, but the game is still far from playable. The blue-green box is the entity rootpoint, and the red/white lines are the walkmesh the enttiy can walk on. the white box will be the actual screen boundry. As I have said before, for now, we are not going to be running the game in resolutions that it wasn't originally designed in. This means it will be running in 320x240x16 until we get it stable.
Also, we have broken the movie format. The screenshot below is a tool that one of my programmers have to work on it.
Linked for H-Scroll
This the moive, frame-by-frame. The .bs files contain the extracted camera data that was imbedded in the moive.
All in all, much progress has been made.
Any comments?
halkun on
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Posts
I will always love you for that.
I'm one of those guys who think that FFVII wasn't that great of a game (I know, I know), but I think what you guys are doing is awesome.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
All I said was I didn't want to talk to Sony's lawyers. They didn't have to go and buy the company you know.... ^_^
I enjoy the comments about how the progress of this program. Are the updates to ho-hum? Do they strike a chord? Is this thread to be pushed off to a bocklogged wasteland?
I know doing this is pretty hard and I'm pulling for you and your team.
With that said, I love the updates, especially on something that is shown in a screenshot.
Keep it up!
Let me know if you add me, and I'll add you back. (I'm also on the Roster)
We have movies and the beginnings of sound YAY! Also we have a real properly sized viewport!
Avatars!
Movie Overlays!
This screen below is just a test shot of a movie and the polygon overlay. (Doesn't the movie look sweet!)
EDIT: Spoiler'ed for etiquette's sake. It's a 10 year old program people.... LET IT GO!!!!! (^_^)
This actually uses the PSX discs for data...
Damn! I actually have the PC version.
Woah really? Sick. Now if I could find them...
PC supprt will come later. We are using the PSX data first because there are a crapton more copies that exist in the wild. In the end the engine will take three different formats. PSX, PC, and user-created XML. The user XML data, however, isn't compatible with the actual FF7 game. You have to make your own game if you want to add your own content.
I was involved with the Sony v. Connectix lawsuit. Sony was claiming that PSX emulators were illigeal because they used Sony's trade secrets. A few years previous, I wrote a document that documented about 75% of the PSX's internals without signing a NDA with Sony. I was going to be a rebuttal witness saying that Sony's claim of Trade Secrets were bunk because the information was available online.
Near the end of discovery, I was approached by Sony's lawyers for an interview. I lied and told them I had a lawyer, and that I wasn't supposed to talk to them.
The very next day, Sony bought the Gamestation Division of Connectix to kill the lawsuit.
What made it so vindicating was the reason why I wrote my document two years previous...
I was pissed at Sony for killing Bleem.
Now that same document cost them $11 million dollars (^_^)
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Kind of get us involved in the development process?
Is this game becoming rare, despite the fact that nearly everyone has a copy or two lying around?
Did anyone actually understand wtf was going on in that movie?
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
Ares.
Battle.net: Fireflash#1425
Steam Friend code: 45386507
Yes. eBay prices have gone through the Goddamn roof. Also, it's now a big scam item. I tried buying a copy and got ripped off for about $40.
By the way, thanks, Paypal, for charging a $25 "processing fee" on my $38 fraud claim. Fucking wonderful. It's great to have $40 practically stolen from my pocket and then get $12 back.
Where have you been? Kratos is the God of War now.
Oh and
Bleem was so cool. It's how I got my PS fix back in the day. Good job!
Wow, I'm glad I was on a collecting binge at the time. I picked up FFVII, VIII and IX at the same time. (I also found a copy of Tactics for $10.) Too bad I never got around to the anthologies. Maybe I'll just pick up IV, V and VI on the GBA instead... Then I'll be covered up to X, which I believe is where my Final Fantasy collection will end. (Unless the new Crystal Chronicles stuff delivers...)
Final Fantasy contains a wealth of my favorite gaming memories, but the more recent entries make me feel like I'm trying to bludgeon fun out of them.
Back on topic, I think this project looks cool. Is there some kind of issue with the models showing up in cinemas, though?
Cursed to live as a flower girl...
Yeah, that sounds like something Zeus would do. He is kind of a dick.
There is already a mod that replaces the models in the PC FFVII with models similar in style to FFVIII. Perhaps that will be compatible.
Here is the debug room, slightly re-coded to for our deveopment purposes...
Below is another movie overlay showing the camera pans with the movie. As you can see, brown was the "new real" a long time ago...
The picture below shows off the entity collision ranges. You will notice there are two. One is the actual bounding area of the model, and the other, larger one, is a bounding area that you can set with the internal scripting language.
The final picture is showing the bounding area and the walkmesh that the charater and items are placed on. Here you can see the outer bound is expanded and "runs along" the edge of the walkmesh to keep Cloud from walking where he isn't supposed to.
You guys have any technical questions for me? I can answer them for you.
Second. You kicked sony in the balls.
Third. Buy me car.
All in all, I approve of everything you do in life.
http://omake.ru/bakari/q-gears/index.htm
You can see how the program is slowly forming....
My god, it's full of Clouds.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
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