Current state.

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Akari, You made me have to put on new pants with your latest update.
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Here's a mop?
I should talk with the guys on TA have them export one background in 3d and do a demo. I'd die of heart failure if that happened though haha.
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Hmmm well I don't exactly know what that would do. If you look at the images Akari posted carefully, do you see those white and red lines? That is the walk mesh. The background is in 2d. I believe in only one location is there are actual 3d objects as part of the background that move. That would be the Midgard train yard. I don't recall how those are put in there off hand either. All the other places are 2d hand draw backgrounds. The reason I'm mentioning this is, how do you plan to support a large volume of 3d data in FF7 background system? It wasn't designed with that in mind so you might have some difficulty getting such backgrounds to work. The cameras are mostly static so the 2d drawings worked well in the original game.

The back ground format is well known, I don't know about the 3d content. The models in the field scene are contained in an associated BSX file (PSX) then the field palettes are contained in a file called FIELD.TDB (again PSX). That being said it would be extremely complicated to add that information especially if it had textures. Coloured vertices scale nicely but textures require a lot of tweaking and more importantly this is additional data the engine has to read from some place (FIELD.TDB). That means that the game data ends up being edited to be more than just replacing a background tile map. That has it's limits too but not nearly as much as a single file containing all the palette data. It has to work with the original binary executable (Team Avalanche's goal at least).  On the PC side data the wiki is a bit weak in terms of how the data is stored (although it should be there because people have been beating on it).

In simpler words, it's doable but not particularly practical and unlikely to work with the PC version of the game (or the PSX for that matter).

Cyb
 
It would be for the purpose of scaling, Not camera movement. Camera's would still be static. Guessing that's still out of the question though huh?
 
It would be for the purpose of scaling, Not camera movement. Camera's would still be static. Guessing that's still out of the question though huh?
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I think having fully 3d fields would be amazing for that exact reason, when cyberman brought up talk of 3d this was what initially popped in my head

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Good job so far on qgears, I impatiently await the new demo :)
 
Now that I have a look at it, the configuration seems predominantly oriented toward using windows, looks like I may have to make some modifications.
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I use windows so If there can be some improvements that not breaks whole thing it will be great.

Erstwhile looks like a few things are hard coded, my guess is you did that because you wanted to see the bloody thing work after all that time spent?
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I don't remember any hardcoded things. Examples? Maybe it's for test purpose?

Audio core is under works (looks that way) have you considered timidity for sequence playing?
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Audio not completed. I plan to use some library that can play mp3/ogg.

tinyxml woo hoo. Nifty I always used xmlparser but its C++ builder specific so ... it did not work under Linux. Using a full xml parser probably would be ridiculous too.
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Pugixml is a lot faster but tiny not so bad too. And it covers all things I need.

I see all the utils have there own cbp files too. Interesting, the way it's set up likely take a while to build the whole thing and I probably would have to do it by loading each code blocks project in and compiling looks like.
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Extractors no works independantly. In future maybe I unite them as one large extractor that converts all ffvii data to q-gears and human readable format.

I should talk with the guys on TA have them export one background in 3d and do a demo. I'd die of heart failure if that happened though haha.
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If they optimize their models then we could use them directly in game.
 
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I use windows so If there can be some improvements that not breaks whole thing it will be great.
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Makes sense, I'll let you know if I get things working under linux using code blocks. If I can I make it work with cmake or do the traditional iconfig or some sort of autoconfig variant. First is always getting it to compile.
I don't remember any hardcoded things. Examples? Maybe it's for test purpose?
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It appears the window settings are 1280x720 in the code for example? That's not a big deal to make configurable really LOL. Hence "you probably just wanted the thing to work".
Audio not completed. I plan to use some library that can play mp3/ogg.
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I thought that would be the case, hmmm ogg has better resolution and is license free.
Pugixml is a lot faster but tiny not so bad too. And it covers all things I need.
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Well I am always concerned about impact on small systems, what is faster on a BIG system is not going to likely be faster on a small system. A perfect example is MS vista design was built on monster 64 bit systems and not tested on the most likely systems it would be on. This is the most common mistake people make. I have a monster system but I don't code to rely on it. I examine everything to be sure it has the least impact. I plan to port Q-gears to my beagle board which has 128M of ram and an SD card for booting and software. It can support up to 1280x720x16bpp, 3d graphics, real time audio, and video decoding. So I figure if it can run Q-gears, then Q-gears is portable enough. I am currently tweaking PCSX to run under it, always something I guess.
Extractors no works independantly. In future maybe I unite them as one large extractor that converts all ffvii data to q-gears and human readable format.
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Well actually I was thinking from more a typical unix style package install perspective, where you make everything including the utilities all at once, and then install with the correct permissions etc.

If they optimize their models then we could use them directly in game.
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In Q-gears it would work.
I don't know if FF7's PC engine would be able to handle it or not and also patching the existing data set is likely to be fraught with challenges.

Anything else beyond that ... Sir halkun I default too. :D

Cyb

PS: I do appreciate you persisting where many have fallen. Not everyone has the time, ability, or patience. That is much too your credit. Mine was the time (eating is an important aspect of life after school).
 
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A bit of lastest progress

2011-04-23
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* [Script] Add functions to work with entity points. [Akari]
* [Entity] Add entity points that declares position in 3d world. Need now for gateway mechanics. [Akari]

2011-04-14
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* [Debug] Add 3d triangles to debug draw to improve visualization of walkmesh.

2011-04-13
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* [Entity] Add base line trigger like triggers and gateways in FFVII. [Akari]

2011-04-08
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* [Script] Add background animation management opcodes and background script object. [Akari]
* [Background] Add background animation. [Akari]
* [Export FFVII] Add exporting of tile animation. [Akari]

2011-04-03
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* [Background] Add blending type support to correctly draw different types of tiles. [Akari]
* [Export FFVII] Add exporting of blending types. [Akari]
 
A bit of lastest progress

2011-04-23
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* [Script] Add functions to work with entity points. [Akari]
* [Entity] Add entity points that declares position in 3d world. Need now for gateway mechanics. [Akari]
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It had never occurred too me gateways would be 3d, which makes sense because what if you had several doors that visually were on top of each other but in 3d they had different depth. I'll take a look at that.
2011-04-14
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* [Debug] Add 3d triangles to debug draw to improve visualization of walkmesh.

2011-04-13
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* [Entity] Add base line trigger like triggers and gateways in FFVII. [Akari]

2011-04-08
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* [Script] Add background animation management opcodes and background script object. [Akari]
* [Background] Add background animation. [Akari]
* [Export FFVII] Add exporting of tile animation. [Akari]

2011-04-03
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* [Background] Add blending type support to correctly draw different types of tiles. [Akari]
* [Export FFVII] Add exporting of blending types. [Akari]
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You do mean 2012? Unless you can time travel (neat trick if you can).

Cyb
 
2012-04-28
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* [Content] Modify "MapChanger" entity to load player in given spawn point after map loading. [Akari]
* [Content] Add Savemap lua table to save all variables that was hold in real savemap. [Akari]
* [Entity] Set default run speed to 0.8 instead of 3.6 and default speed to 0.7 instead of 0.9. This is more like speeds in FFVII. [Akari]
* [Entity] Unite default and move idle animation. [Akari]
* [Entity] Rework inner animation state and play types handling. [Akari]
* [Content] Start of "ffvii_md1stin" scripting and markup gateways on maps "ffvii_md1stin", "ffvii_md1_1", "ffvii_md1_2". [Akari]
* [Export FFVII] Add gateway map names and spawn position exporting. [Akari]

000239y7

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I'm drooling over this... Is that sad? haha

Akari, I may have asked you this earlier and forgot, do you accept donations? Cause i'd love to buy you a cup of coffee for your contributions :D
 
Hey, Akari.  You just got another developer at your disposal. Well... err, "new" developer. I just got my first development related job and I'm still going through uni, though I'm technically on break for a few months.

I'll have to pick up C++, but that shouldn't be any harder than any other language I've had to learn on the go.

I'm going to wait until later this weekend, or maybe tonight if I can manage it, to register on source-forge and the bug tracker.  I'm also familiar enough with SVN to get myself in trouble, so I'll continue to brush up on its use at work as I have been. (we use it for our development).

If you have anything that needs being done, I'd be happy to take a whack at it with my Conformer.

Cheers,

Corigne
 
Hey, Akari.  You just got another developer at your disposal. Well... err, "new" developer. I just got my first development related job and I'm still going through uni, though I'm technically on break for a few months.

I'll have to pick up C++, but that shouldn't be any harder than any other language I've had to learn on the go.

I'm going to wait until later this weekend, or maybe tonight if I can manage it, to register on source-forge and the bug tracker.  I'm also familiar enough with SVN to get myself in trouble, so I'll continue to brush up on its use at work as I have been. (we use it for our development).

If you have anything that needs being done, I'd be happy to take a whack at it with my Conformer.

Cheers,

Corigne
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As usual first advise - grab lastest version os source from merkurial, compile it, maybe compile utilites an try to understand how it works. Feel free to ask questions =)
 
As usual first advise - grab lastest version os source from merkurial, compile it, maybe compile utilites an try to understand how it works. Feel free to ask questions =)
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Will do, thanks for the response.

Cheers,

Corigne
 
2012-05-19
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* [Export FFVII] Add exporting with correct scale (must be set in export.cfg for now). [Akari]

2012-05-17
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* [Background] Add background init and resizing corrently depending on resolution. [Akari]

2012-05-16
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* [Export FFVII] Fix background depth export. [Akari]

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Very few things left to be implemented untill v0.21.

Lastest changelog:

2012-06-01
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* [Camera] Add reset of ingame FOV when switch to free cemera. [Akari]
* [Background] Add config variable to disable range limitations. [Akari]
* [Background] Range of Background2D scrolling has been exported and implemented. [Akari]

2012-05-31
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* [Content FFVII] Add md1_2 map. [Akari]
* [Camera] Camera now set and scrolled correctly in free camera mode. [Akari]
* [Background & Camera] Make background and camera correctly recalculate on resolution change. [Akari]
* [Camera] Make "camera_free" congig command instead of config variable. [Akari]
* [Entity] Add entity animation speed and related lua binds. [Akari]
* [Background & Camera] Move a ot of camera related code from Background2D to CameraManager. [Akari]

2012-05-30
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* [Content] Add start menu options for v0.21. [Akari]
* [Background] Add autoscrolling of background and camera to given position. [Akari]

2012-05-28
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* [Background & Camera] Add autoscrolling of background and camera to given entity. [Akari]

2012-05-26
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* [Export FFVII] Fix eye export (Wedge and Guard has only 1 eye). [Akari]

2012-05-22
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* [Content Field] Cleanup md1stin. [Akari]
* [Content Field] Add all posible scripts for md1_1. [Akari]
* [Content UI] Main menu now can be called from within game. it correctly pauses game if is onscreen [Akari]
* [Content UI] Start menu now correctly starts md1stin. [Akari]
* [Content Script] Add "player_lock" helper function that disables player input. [Akari]
* [Content Script] Fix spawning entity in "load_field_map_request" system function. Now it correctly assigns player entity. [Akari]
* [Camera] Remove camera states (at least for now) and add console variable "camera_free" that enables free camera mode. [Akari]
* [Entity] Add pause functionality to EntityManager and "set_paused" bind to LUA. [Akari]
* [Debug] Separate usual update and debug update. When game is on pause debug still must be drawn. [Akari]
* [Export FFVII] Fix export for offset opcode 0xC3. Make it downscaled like all others position data. [Akari]
* [Export FFVII] Fix export for turn opcode 0xB4 and 0xB5. Forgot that turns are always sybcronized in FFVII. [Akari]

2012-05-21
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* [Entity] Add player lock and same lua function "player_lock". [Akari]
 
Only .21?  I swear it looks like you're 75% complete.  Honestly these recent updates have gotten me more and more excited about this project
 
Question on the new engine, Does it have a graphics renderer/driver baked in? Or will we still be using Aalis driver? If Aali's driver, is there a way to implement a frontend for it in the game?

Also, Again, if ya need a cup of Coffee, i'd love it help haha :D
 
I am seriously stalking your mercurial page Akari, I would be honored to buy you a cup of coffee :)
 
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Only .21?  I swear it looks like you're 75% complete.  Honestly these recent updates have gotten me more and more excited about this project
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Well it supports Xenogears and FF9 and IF I get around to it FF8 as well.

You should take a look at the source code for the various included utilities to understand more fully what I mean. Akari has done a HUGE amount of work, halkun got things rolling and Akari just kept going.

Right now those are shots of just FF7.

I have been really busy the last few weeks dealing with Manchester encoding for free space optical communication so ... I haven't had much time for this sadly.

Reminds me I need to change the permissions on some directories to see if I can open the new source in Code Blocks at least that won't take long.

Cyb

Cyb
 
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