Final Fantasy 7 Engine update. [Screenshots]

hal-kun · Post by **hal-kun** » Thu Nov 30, 2006 9:55 am

It has been a few months do I'd thought I do another update on the new FF7 engine that's rolling along. I posted here before, but as that was kind of out of date, I decided to start a new thread.

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. This program is currently being hacked togeather by a small community of programmers from all around the world, including Sweden, Thiland, Russia, the U.K., france, and the U.S.

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.

Where can I get more information?
Sev told me I should have a website, so I made one. It's located below. I highly suggest reading the FAQ there.
http://q-gears.sourceforge.net

Anyway, with that out of the way.... NEW SCREENSHOTS!

Debug room

Midgar Station

You meet Barret here

On our way to the first reactor.

Outside the reactor.

Now a few with the layers all togeather.....

Also, finialy, the battle screen...

(Ok, so we haven't implemented that yet... we're working on it)

You will notice a few things. The pictures that look corrupted above had only the background layer rendered. The upper layers were 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.

Another thing you will notice are 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.

I could use some help getting the word out about this project. I could use a few more developers or hackers to help with the project.

I'm open for comments and questions as well...

Vinterstum · Post by **Vinterstum** » Thu Nov 30, 2006 10:00 pm

Impressive progress in a very short time, well done

.

saulob · Post by **saulob** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 4:09 am

A M A Z I N G !

Dark-Star · Post by **Dark-Star** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 10:15 am

That's really amazing progress you've made there. Congrats!

It's always nice to see game engine reimplementations reach a state of maturity. Please post more screenshots in the future

BTW, could you say a little bit about the relation between Q-Gears and the Wiki on qhimm.com? I once thought that Q-Gears is simply the Wiki stuffed into a working engine, i.e. all reverse engineering happens on the Wiki and Q-Gears implements it. However, somewone recently removed the links to the Wiki from REWiki[1] and Wikipedia[2], with a note saying "...not directly related to the project".

[1] http://rewiki.regengedanken.de/w/index. ... oldid=1910
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... d=86360533

Post by **sev** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 12:18 pm

Vinterstum wrote:Impressive progress in a very short time, well done .

Heh. Not that short time. It took over seven years for hal-kun to write all those specs. And then putting them into code goes pretty straightforward.

Eugene

hal-kun · Post by **hal-kun** » Sat Dec 02, 2006 2:52 am

Dark-Star wrote: BTW, could you say a little bit about the relation between Q-Gears and the Wiki on qhimm.com? I once thought that Q-Gears is simply the Wiki stuffed into a working engine, i.e. all reverse engineering happens on the Wiki and Q-Gears implements it. However, somewone recently removed the links to the Wiki from REWiki[1] and Wikipedia[2], with a note saying "...not directly related to the project".

Qhimm.com is where we have done all the reversing of Square games. "Gears" (the reference document) was my idea that I did as a project. After I nearly lost it in a hard drive crash, a wiki was created to allow a centeral place for Square game internals to be placed. When I created Q-gears during the summer, I decided to spin it off as it's own project, away from qhimm.com. This is mostly because Qhimm, who is the guy who really started this all, works at a high-profile company who has recently became very close to a particular next-gen console maker.

Years ago qhimm.com was just a place were squaresoft hackers could hang out and chat in a forum. Now it's a bit of a Squaresoft "hack centeral" I still need a lot of his "web presense" to host the Q-gears supporting technologies. (Forums, wiki). However, as Q-gears matures, I need to move away from that crutch as not to put Qhimm in a bad situation with his employer, where he can run into nasty non-compeate clauses.

JamesWoodcock · Post by **JamesWoodcock** » Sat Dec 02, 2006 4:47 pm

If this game engine does see the light of day in a form where we can play, I have already taken the XG Midi music and recorded so could possibly be used in the game as external ogg files, I just need to get them to loop.

Jorpho · Post by **Jorpho** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 9:43 pm

Yowza. I, too, thought this kind of progress was years away.

Freddo · Post by **Freddo** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 9:38 am

Wow

That's quite awesome of you. Well done!

Iago · Post by **Iago** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 9:34 pm

Seriously, this is brilliant!

Well done for doing this, I'd love to do the same with some of my games. Hell, if I wasn't such a noob I'd implement an engine for every game I've ever played!

saulob · Post by **saulob** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 12:04 am

Where's the author (hal-kun) ???

I tried to contact him on his email, on his forum, on his page.. and nothing

My God..

BJWanlund · Post by **BJWanlund** » Sat Mar 10, 2007 8:45 pm

Holy cow!

I might be coerced into getting the PSX version of FF7 if I were to play it on PC...(of course I was planning on getting a PSP, putting the custom firmware on, and creating the FF7 file while giving the finger to Sony in the process).

Maybe my friend who is a FF7 fanatic could help...(she's female, btw)

BJ

hal-kun · Post by **hal-kun** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 2:25 am

I've updated my homepage for those who want to see the progress of Q-Gears.

We have movie and 3d model support now...

The project page is below...
http://q-gears.sourceforge.net/

I've been busy switching jobs. The project isn't dead ^_^

Larson · Post by **Larson** » Tue Mar 27, 2007 7:16 am

hal-kun wrote:I've been busy switching jobs. The project isn't dead ^_^

It certainly doesn't look dead. I've never seen such amazing progress ever. Are you really human?

cappuchok · Post by **cappuchok** » Tue Mar 27, 2007 9:34 am

Wow, this looks really promising. You mentioned that when it's completed this might be possible to use as a framework for running other (newer) Square games - I hope this means that it might be possible to run Chrono Cross natively on a PC, that'd be awesome.