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So first off, I'd like to take this moment to introduce myself to the forums: Hi, I'm Nyxojaele- I live in Canada and have a boring job, and in my free time, I've found myself spending copious amounts of time developing video games and whatnot, instead of playing them. My computer knowledge is entirely self-taught, and I like FFVI too much to be considered healthy. Anything else you wanna know, feel free to ask^^

So I've been wandering in and out of the CoN forums for quite some time now, so it was naturally the first place I thought of for this post.

<EDIT>
THIS GAME IS CURRENTLY NOT INTENDED TO BE RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC. I DO NOT KNOW IF IT -EVER- WILL BE. MY LAWYER AND I ARE LOOKING INTO IT, AND WHEN WE HAVE A FINAL DECISION ON THIS, YOU WILL BE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO KNOW ABOUT IT, POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE. CURRENTLY, THE SITUATION IS GIVING ME REASON TO LEAN TOWARDS _NOT_ RELEASING IT.

I HAVE NO DESIRE TO PISS OFF SQUARE-ENIX (I LOVE THEM!), SO I'M TRYING MY BEST TO MAKE SURE THAT ALL OF THEIR INTERESTS ARE LOOKED AFTER, -BEFORE- MY OWN. I RESPECT THEM A GREAT DEAL, AND HOPE THEY ARE WILLING TO TREAT ME WITH A SIMILAR AMOUNT OF RESPECT.

ALSO NOTE THAT MY CURRENT GOAL IS TO ONLY MAKE A SMALL PORTION OF THE GAME. I'M THINKING SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES UP "UP UNTIL FIGARO CASTLE", OR THEREABOUTS.
</EDIT>

<EDIT2>
I've decided that I'm going to start accepting outside help in a limited capacity- since I seriously want to finish this, I'm going to focus my own efforts entirely on the programming aspect- which'll mean that I'll need some outside
help for other things.

Basic NDA/Disclaimer that must be agreed to if you want to help (a more detailed one will be available on request, after I've put it together...)

* Recognize that this project is still intended to NOT be publicly released unless we receive explicit permission from Square-Enix themselves. I reserve the right to be in control of communications in this aspect- with feedback from other group members.
* No outside advertising for this project that hasn't passed by the Nyxojaele filter. I still maintain this as my own personal project, so I don't want somebody else going on about it behind my back.
* Works for this project shall be entirely original and created specifically for this project. You still retain your rights to the works, but are not permitted to use them for "other projects" (personal portfolios etc are fine). Additionally, full credit will be given for all works. Please note that it is not acceptable for ANY works to be downloaded from elsewhere- they must all be original works to which you hold the rights.

Positions where help is specifically desired right now:

* Concept art- Skilled art that maintains the same "feel" as the original game held is desired. Taking influence from (although not duplicating) Amano-sama's art is perfectly fine. Attention to detail is a must.
* Sound effects- High resolution recording of sound effects is desired- we can downsample later, but can never upsample for an increase in quality. Creativity is a must- how else can one create sound effects? Proficiency with an audio alteration program a plus.
* 3D models- Skill in both high poly-count & low poly-count in-game models. Cinematic poly-count model skills a plus, but nowhere near necessary. Cinematics will only be added to the game if a sufficient skillset can be acquired for the team.
* 3D levels- Architectural eye a must. Ability to create full 3d models of the original locations found in game- attention to detail a plus, but since this may be on PSP, we might have to budget our poly-counts.
* Texture artist- Skill with high quality, low/medium resolution textures- we don't want to be using up boatloads of memory for just textures.
* GUI artist- Good looking yet simple GUI element graphics are needed- probably on a "skin" basis. That is, there will be more than one GUI "skin" available for the player to select, as is Final Fantasy tradition.

These are just the currently desired positions for the project- if there's something else you think you can offer that will benefit FFVI3D, then please post here and let me know and I'll see if it's a viable option.
</EDIT2>

Since shortly before Xmas, I've devoted my game development time to a new project-- I'm remaking FFVI in 3D, using a freely available, well-maintained 3D engine. I have no desire whatsoever to ever market this or anything, but I'm hoping for a commercial quality game here, folks^_^v

Short of any research I'm doing into things, virtually everything is being done by myself. I do all the programming, 3d modelling, GUI graphics, etc.. The only things that aren't done by me (currently, this may change!) is the textures used for the characters, which are ripped straight out of the FMVs that came with the FFAnthologies re-release of FFVI, so as to preserve as much quality of the original characters as possible. Anything I couldn't pull out of those videos, I've made by hand myself. And altho there currently isn't any sound as of right now, the current plan is to remake as many of the sounds as possible, myself, and use the original (or orchestra!) music from various FFVI CDs... possibly going so far as to redoing the music entirely in my own (not drastic!) flavour.

My current goal with this project is to have a fully functional game for the first 1hr of gameplay MINIMUM. That means that anything that a player would logically expect to be able to do (and more!) in FFVI in the first hour, or thereabouts.. which means I'm going to have my work cut out for me as far as content goes once I get the programming in place;; Anything beyond the first hour, I will consider a bonus, and definately a worthy secondary goal.

Also worth noting is 2 more things: 1 being that I want the player to have the option to play in as classic a style as possible, for the old-school inclined, but also the option to play in a more up-to-date 3-dimensional manner, with moving cameras for cinematics, chase cams, and physics effects for some of the battle stuff. The other being, that I want all the internal calculations to be as accurate as possible as well, so I'm modelling those algorithms off of the original maths used, as posted in a couple of the major FFVI rom hacking documents released by prominent names on the subject.

So, those are the details, now for part of the reasoning behind this post (besides this being the first official announcement of this project that I've made..) I'd like to formally request some feedback on this project, in a general sense, as well as any helpful pointers as to where I might look, or who I might talk to, about a lot of the theoretical & internal information about the game.

I've already acquired myself FF3usME.exe for viewing a lot of the info, found complete in game world maps of both WoB and WoR, and have bookmarks of most of the really major sites about hacking the rom (such as Master Zed, Lord J, etc.. I'd have to hop onto my other computer to get a complete listing), and have my own personal notes about various aspects of the game as well.

I'm pretty confident about my resources, but I'm open to anything I may have missed, possibly some obscure ones.. But mostly what I'm looking for is some feedback/thoughts on the subject of my project.

Thanks~

ps. As a sidenote, I've been toying with the idea of possibly upkeeping a blog or something about the progress of this project, but I'm not sure if I'd be wasting my time or not. Thoughts on that?

This post has been edited by nyxojaele on 11th December 2007 23:35

Welcome to CoN!

As a seasoned programmer myself, I know better than to give much thought to any project until sufficient proof of both its developement and its eventual completion have been shown. Sorry man; I know all about ambitious projects. So post up some screenshots. 'Till then, you're just showing off an idea, not a project.

I think you should keep this quiet. Square is well-known for terminating these kinds of projects (RIP Chrono Trigger remake...). If you've put considerable effort into this, it would be a shame to see your work pitted against a legal threat.

What is the game being developed in? (Language/API) What is the engine you're using? How much experience do you have programming? Got any other finished projects to show off so we'd know what to expect? (Sorry if I sound criticising/doubtful towards a concept for a project; I hail from GameDev.net ;P ) I'm interested in some information on the mechanics behind your project. It's a shame you're not coding your own engine, though...

For resources, you'll no doubt get plenty of help if you ask specific questions. A few of us here have some solid ROM hacking experience and consider FF3usME to be ridiculously outdated, so chances are you'd be able to acquire any missing data you'd rather not fill in by yourself if you need it. And as I've mentionned before, I've been programming for quite some time so if you hit a snag along the way I'll be glad to help (workin' on a project of my own, though it's not FF-related in my case )

Good luck, and don't be afraid to ask. CoN is a generally friendly place (I'm by no means any close to being representative of the average level of friendliness on this message board, by the way, so don't worry. lol) so you can expect helpful and prompt assistance.

--------------------

"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Thank you thank you.

Yah, I understand your thoughts about lack of proof, but I want to hold back on too much of the screenshot-iness until I have something more visual to show off. most of my programming thus far has been more internal stuff, such as game states, multi-camera managers, custom file format loaders, and implementing a GUI worth seeing, as well as various other minor tasts such as loading screens, the title screen (which doesn't look too bad right now, considering it's temprorary-- maybe I'll post a shot of that, at least...), and a heightmap renderer for the overworld map.

As far as keeping it quiet is concerned, I'm not OVERLY concern (although I don't want to be cocky about it...) As I said, I've no desire to be marketing this in any way (as I have no rights to .... pretty much anything), and even if they do manage to put a stop to it publically, I'm determined enough on this project to continue to develop it for myself, if nothing else. Thanks for the warning tho- didn't know about the Chrono Trigger remake...( but it kinda rings a bell... )

As far as the considerable work is concerned, it's a free-time project, so it's after work and on weekends and such... so I guess you could consider that a considerable amount of time, especially when it gets more to the 6-months-since-starting mark.

I'm programming in C++, and partway thru the beginning of my project setup, I ported over from VC++6.0 to VC++Express. (I'm aware of some quirks about how to distribute executables from that environment, no need to warn me on that, heh^^)

Understandable, I lurked on gamedev.net for quite some time, myself-- I probably saw you around *grin*

What sort of info on the mechanics are you interested in?

I -was- working on my own 3D engine with my last project, and it was coming along nicely enough, but I quickly (if you define quickly as 2 years) found out that if I ever wanted to actually get to work on my _GAME_, I couldn't be focusing so much on the engine. And if I didn't focus enough on the engine, it wouldn't be capable of doing what I want it to. End result, use a currently-maintained free engine. My engine of choice: Ogre. It's only a rendering engine, not an entire game engine, which is exactly what I want.

Yah, for the information, I suppose I'll have to hold back on specific questions until I actually come to the snags I can forsee myself coming upon at some point. So until then... heh heh

Although, one thing I was curious about recently, is where EXACTLY are the boundaries for the different "zones" of enemy formations on the world maps(s)? I've seen small (read: minimap) versions, but I'd like something like an overlay on top of a 1:1 worldmap... Like I said, I want this to be retardedly accurate, as far as the internals go. I'm even going so far as to program in the original glitches such as psycho cyan, etc.. (But I'll be including an option to "patch" them up, which will by default be on)

My programming background, in 1 sentence: I started programming myself back in highschool, but the teacher knew nothing about it and thus was unable to teach me anything in the class, and as such, I was left to my own methods, so since then I've been making many small projects and whatnot, mostly for personal reasons/family/friends, and whatnot, so as to improve my skills up until the point where I am at today, which would be the age of 24, and having various small apps/games/etc finished (and more unfinished) distributed to various friends & garbage cans, and really aren't very available anymore, not that I care very much, as this is definately my most important project to date. (Okay, so it was 1 _LONG_ sentence)

Now, let's see what I can do about a screeny or 3...

/*Seeing as my code is currently in a state of broken-ness, as I implement a new camera system, I'm going to resort to a couple of old shots from late Dec/early-mid Jan that I had taken for a friend on MSN... nothing special, but you can see some of what was there at the time (it's improved- trust me!)

This one would be my temporary title screen (I say temporary, because I need to tweak/overhaul some of the graphics, but it's basically there..). This does the same thing the original did, with the clouds scrolling, and the random lightning flashing occassionally, then the title grows.*/

Blah nevermind, CoN won't let me upload for some reason-- complains about incorrect format or too large, but it's a 44kb jpg. No time to upload it externally right now, so later I'll have some shots for you okay?

This sounds like a huge project. I'm also disinclined to believe in it until I see some proof of its existence.

--------------------

Veni, vidi, dormivi.

Use Imageshack to upload your screenshots. It is fast and gives you the link in several different formats for boards. Handy site.

I can't wait to see what develops of this.

--------------------

Is PJ

Never used imageshack before-- I love how easy it is to use!

Anyways, here's that shot of the titlescreen that I had mentioned before:


And another shot of my heightmapped terrain. This terrain is created entirely from a single 2 dimensional image. Also note that although you can't see it in static images, the terrain is "paged"-- for those of you who don't know what that means, paged landscape is a term used to describe landscape that's divided into pieces, and only the pieces that are close to the camera are loaded. So as you move the camera forward, terrain 100" behind you unloads, while terrain 100" in front of you loads. Very useful. It also has LOD (level of detail) morphing. So as the terrain gets closer to you, there's more detail visible to it, and in never "pops" between detail levels.. it programmatically morphs between the detail levels.


Like I said, I've only been working on it since just before Xmas, so really I don't have much yet;; I have a shot of my GUI showing off Terra speaking, but the terrain in the background (and the 3d model of terra) are kinda screwed up looking, cause they were a little broken at the time. Once I get my current code into a more workable state, I'll take a shot of terra talking for you guys tho, so you can see my speech window.. even if you can't see it in "action" (it fades & grows as it appears, just like the originals... and you see the text scroll in at a configurable speed)

Not bad. What's powering this? OpenGL or Direct3D? I doubt it'd be an older library like Glide... Looks pretty decent, though your terrain textures could probably use a little more detail (not that I'm complaining; the tradeoff between size and quality is a pretty difficult one to decide on when it comes to textures.) Planning on implanting a skybox/sphere/dome? The sky looks a little bland (but like you said, this is early work so some polishing off is to be expected..)

What are you using for music? MIDI? If you're interested, I know of a library that plays SPCs so you could have the real in-game music (problem is that it eats up the sound card; I believe it reserves all available sound channels just for the SPC playback, so you'd be screwed with sound effects. Luckily the source comes with it.) For the love of all that is holy, don't use MP3/OGG: at over 1 meg per song and 60-some songs in the game, this would be a terrifyingly big project to download (and that excludes graphic data, models, game data, etc..)

I use FMOD for my project. We have a very talented composer working on the project and the music format I settled on (both due to the size/quality tradeoff and the fact it's what our composer natively works on) is MOD. Works great, really, and FMOD is a pretty spiffy lib to boot! Alternatively, there's OpenAL but AFAIK it doesn't play MOD so...

Looks like a nice start. Have you considered using the original sprites instead of models, though? Implanting a sprite system in 3D is a piece of cake and it has a very enjoyable oldschool look and feel. On the other hand, you need at least 32x48 sprites (2x the resolution the SNES uses) to prevent ugly pixelization issues, and sprites are somewhat static.

Good luck; looks nice. Still curious what the engine you're using is though (and any middleware that might factor in), and what it allows (was the LOD part of it, or did you implant it yourself? Cool if you did; nothing worth priding yourself on if it was already there though. )

Edit: Thought I'd include a slightly dated screenshot of my project to illustrate my comment about sprites in a 3D environment...

The sprite engine has been revised since then and the black border is thinner (with edges being made slightly transluscent to give a smoother integration into the scene) but basically that's what I'm talking about.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 11th February 2006 17:51

--------------------

"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

The great thing about the Ogre Rendering engine is that it's configurable to use both OpenGL & Direct3D... I believe those screenshots were taken when I was loaded up in OpenGL mode tho.. I'm not a big fan of microsoft (but let's not get into that here...)

Actually, that terrain was a temporary one that I just threw together to have _SOMETHING_, and the end project will NOT have that particular one in it. As far as the textures go, it was using a splatting shader to put the different terrain textures on based on height in the heightmap. There's about a billion (plus or minus) other splatting modes available, but that's the one that I used for taking the screenshots. I'll decide at a later point just what it is that I'll settle on later. Maybe make it user configurable (especially if I want to use the shader).

I'm kinda shooting for a middle range/high end computer setup to play the game tho. I really detest having to limit myself because some guy on a 386 wants to play HalfLife2 on it. I'll be putting some fallback rendering techniques in for the textures and whatnot, if, for example, your video card doesn't support certain features, tho.. But those aren't implemented yet.

I'll likely be putting in a skydome, although a skyplane might happen.. We'll see. No need for a skybox tho, as the player'll never see that far down, even in the airship. I haven't even TOUCHED the sky yet tho. All I did was set the background colour to a pretty blue^^

Music: I'm thinking about using either FMOD or OpenAL, but really, that's not high on my todo list yet.. I want to make some other important things work first. If I can start using the orchestra music on various CDs, it'll likely have to be MP3 format. The download issue you mentioned isn't really of great concern for me tho.. I haven't even thought about the legalities of releasing it to the general public yet-- odds are Squenix would have my head heh heh. I'll concern myself about distributing it (if at all) when it's somewhere even remotely close to being complete-ish. As far as total project size so far: Currently it's sitting at almost 100MB, but 50MB are temporary files, so in reality, it's currently 50MB. This is with no texture compression yet, which'll be end-project once they're concrete. The majority of my other data files are 1 or 2 digit kb sizes. Although a couple of the dlls are a little heavy at 1.5MB and such... but once I've decided for sure on what I need/don't, I'll be removing some of them.

Usually, my music composing has been in fruityloop, which I've quite enjoyed. But I'll worry about my music and whatnot later, when I get even within SIGHT of that bridge. v

Well, the big thing about this project being a remake in 3D is that I want it to be all in 3D. I'm toying with the idea of allowing the player to swap out models for sprites in the majority of situations, but we'll see if I actually decide to go thru with it.

I already mentioned earlier that I'm using the Ogre engine, hehe. Ogre is released under the LGPL license (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html), which basically means (and I quote) "You can get the full source for nothing, nada, zip. There IS such a thing as a free lunch."

LOD was something I'm capable of doing myself (and have in previous projects), but conveniently, it's already fully integrated in Ogre. So, no point in reinventing the wheel.

Soon, I'm hoping to implement an in-game screenshot system, possibly with timestamps (in the name), so you won't have to deal with my ship-shod image cropping skills of doom in too many more future screenshots ( ^-^)

<EDIT>Yah, I saw your website with all those shots. Looks like a fun project you have going there!</EDIT>

This post has been edited by nyxojaele on 11th February 2006 18:05

Amazing.. If you release this, I'll WORSHIP you.

I'd also like to wonder if you'd do a 3D remake for both FF4 and FF5? I'd love to see more screens for you.

Keep it up.

While I'd like to say I want to, realistically speaking, taking on the endeavour of remaking merely FFVI is more than a task, alone. There's no way I could go about remaking FFIV + FFV as well. Even tho a lot of the code will be reusable, pretty much ALL the content will have to be made from scratch, which would take very large amounts of time, unfortunately.

As it is, I don't -expect- to finish the full content of FFVI anyways. (although I'd love it if I could!) The game is just so massive, especially when we start talking about the extra stuff I'd have to include, that the original didn't have. 3D models, animations for the models + textures, 3d maps of the towns, not to mention all the things you couldn't see in a 2d top-down view game, that you will be able to in a 3d game (sky, some walls, etc..)

So in short: I'd love to, but probably not happening ( T_T)

wow, good luck with that man! I'm already worshipping you for the work done

I'm just trying to some MagiTek, and thats proving to be more trouble than its worth!

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Neneko is Neneko because Neneko couldn't be Neneko if Neneko wasn't Neneko!
--as quoted from Neneko, Mahoraba {Heartful Days}

I can stab a man with a thick paperback book thru the ribcage.

Sounds like a whole lotta works in store for you in the future.

What kinda 3d program you using for the modeling/texturing/animation/etc?

--------------------

Arts

Farts

Twarts

I'm going to have to be working on some MagiTek soon as well, seeing as it's needed for the first scenes in the game. I'm actually quite looking forward to it, as I find technology to be easier to model than organics. Been wanting to do some MagiTek for a while anyways^^

Yes, I have way too much work for me in the future-- it's great! I love doing single-person jobs like this.. it just feels so good once you've got something to show!

I'm using an old copy of Milkshape3D I got back in the days of modelling for Quake2 for my modelling/animation, and I'm using a commercial program called DeepUV for my texture UV wrapping. For the actual texture creation, I'm using photoshop7. Much of my textures for the characters are actually creatively wrapped still frames from the FMVs that came with FFVI in the anthology release. Tomorrow, I'm hoping to have some more camera options implemented, and I'll be able to take a decent shot of terra (and her speech window!) You won't be able to see it in the shot, but she's running some temporary idle animations, and she even blinks! v Anyways, I'll be shooting for tomorrow, but we'll see how that goes..

Quote (nyxojaele @ 12th February 2006 05:24)

Yes, I have way too much work for me in the future-- it's great! I love doing single-person jobs like this.. it just feels so good once you've got something to show!

Amen to that!

The hard part is managing a life, a full-time job, and a one-man effort to make a game. It's hard to scrounge up free time.

...That's why we programmers must never have a life. It is... forbidden...

And y'know... the job, well... gotta have money for coffee an' all.

--------------------

"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Hahaha- well I have this gift (or a curse, if you will) to always manage to balance everything I need to do fairly well, and have plenty of energy to undergo all said things... but it comes at a cost. It costs me my sleep time. (Always the first thing to go... ~sigh~)

My "life" tends to be limited to the weekends. More specifically, saturday nights, at the bar, for like ... 2 hours. Generally speaking *grin* But shhh! Don't tell anybody, 'lest the programmer's union confiscate my computer for disloyalty *shudder*

Agreed on the job thing tho, even tho I'm not a coffee drinker-- I need the money for the BlackBlack gum (Japanese caffeinated gum) ^_^v

Update on my game: Last night I implemented Japanese support, so now the characters can talk in their native language! I'll probably take a shot of terra speaking Japanese instead of english, when I do that shot up. And right now I'm working on a keybinding mechanism that'll allow the player to remap keys if they don't like my default settings (but who wouldn't like that!?!? hehe)^^

i would play this even if you only get a demo out

so dont give up! keep workining at it!

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OSonic Rave
/ \Last Arcanum
[ ]Strike Raid
XRagnarok

Okay, here's that shot I've been delaying.. this shows off some of the interface I've done up for it that I'm rather proud of, and you get to see Terra's current form as well, with a nice lil mountain in the background.

I'm not very happy with how Terra currently looks tho, so I'll probably be redoing the model sometime soon. I want a semi-realistic look, but still anime-esque enough that the characters (and their animations) can retain some of their original style from the original game^^



Enjoy! I'm off to finish tweaking the different camera modes I just put in^^

Hmm...

for your trouble with terra: For an ex-officer of the empire recovering from amnesia (your doing only some of the beginning stuff right?), she looks a little rigid... Maybe lower the shoulders a tad and rotate the elbows? unless you have the entire body based on an editable mesh of points, no joints for the body to follow...

Of course, I'm not familiar with the program your using... And aside from the ridgity, she looks pretty awesome. Where/how did you find the material to make her clothes?



--------------------

Neneko is Neneko because Neneko couldn't be Neneko if Neneko wasn't Neneko!
--as quoted from Neneko, Mahoraba {Heartful Days}

I can stab a man with a thick paperback book thru the ribcage.

Well, I'd -like- to do more than just the beginning stuff, but for the beginning, I'll be doing the beginning stuff... to begin with. begin.

I'm actually mostly concerned with the model itself. You know, the overall look of her. As you can see, what I currently have is leaning a bit towards realism. Should I stay in that direction, or should I anime it up a bit? I'm mostly concerned about anime-ing it up a bit, because I'm thinking about some of the animations the characters do in the original game, and how downright silly they may look on a realstic-esque model. (such as bug-eyes, and their oh-so-cute laughs...) Her pose is 100% temporary and only there so she's not standing with her arms out at shoulder level (default position).

Thank you for the feedback on her regardless-- but if you have something to say about her general looks tho, I think that would be more immediately useful to me^^

The characters in game all run on skeletal animation, so to change her position, it's just a matter of positioning the bones better. The bones were just slapped into this position so she doesn't look like she's doing some gymnast landing pose while saying hi ^^

For her clothing: The dress material, I slapped together from an asian dress swatch. Her Belt and sash are actually ripped directly from a screenshot of the opening FMV, and the leggings I just threw together really quickly so she had something (_DEFINATELY_ getting done better later..) Her boots & shoulderpads are also directly ripped from a still of the opening FMV, as well as her hairpiece, earrings, face, and shoulders/neck area. Fairly heavily modified to remove FMV shadows, etc.. (since my game will have realtime raytraced shadows of it's own..) Some of the textures need to be redone, and the material scripts they use ALL need an overhaul (if for nothing else, to support lower-end graphics cards..)

As far as _HOW_ a managed to align it all right, that's a topic of it's own, and worth looking into if you're a modeller-- just look around for tutorials on "wrapping textures" or some such... There's programs dedicated to such tasks, as the generic unwrappers provided in most 3d modelling programs just aren't versatile enough.

maybe youve already said this but im curious, what program are you using to create the 3d objects for the game and what format are they?

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"Life: The deepest cut that wilt not heal. Fore it bleeds on and on as if an eternity. An endless river of blood in which death is thyne only escape. And as the tainted years pass, that escape muddles us with temptation."

Yes, I did already say this, but I'll say it again since I'm already responding^^

I'm using Milkshape3D to create the objects, but I have a custom exporter for it to export the objects to the .mesh/.material/.skeleton file formats used by the rendering engine.

My texture alignment is being done in DeepUV.

It's actually a strange pipeline for my objects:

1) Create the 3d mesh in Milkshape3D
2) Create the texture in Photoshop7
3) Create the material/apply the texture in Milkshape3D
4) Export from Milkshape3D to .obj format
5) Import .obj file into DeepUV
6) Align textures properly
7) Save .obj file in DeepUV
8) Import .obj file in Milkshape3D
9) Save file as new updated .ms3d file (for future alterations)
10) Export to .mesh/.material/.skeleton files for use in-game.

That's roughly it. Not as bad as it sounds, once you're used to it.

Alright, I'm confused. How can you make the textures for the model before you've mapped the UV's. What do you have for reference without the mapped UV image?

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Arts

Farts

Twarts

sorry to ask.

good choice using milkshape. its easy. quick. and can produce pretty good stuff. i use it for making mods for quake 3 and TFC.

if you need any help, id be more than willing.

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"Life: The deepest cut that wilt not heal. Fore it bleeds on and on as if an eternity. An endless river of blood in which death is thyne only escape. And as the tainted years pass, that escape muddles us with temptation."

Quote ("Narratorway")

Alright, I'm confused. How can you make the textures for the model before you've mapped the UV's.

My question to you is: How can you map the UVs before making the texture? </JOKE> As far as that goes, I have enough experience making models that I have a pretty good idea of how to lay out a texture for it before mapping the UVs to it. It's pretty easy to guess, once you're used to it, actually v The majority of the time, for humanoid models, the texture layout'll be the same. Of course, occassionally I may be off on some detail or some such, and that's just a matter of tweaking the texture afterwards-- no big deal^^ I'm constantly tweaking my textures anyways, which is why it's a great idea to always use a format that DOESN'T embed textures into the 3d mesh, whenever possible.. at least, such is my humble opinion...

In the case of this project (at least so far), the textures for the characters (all 1 of them!) are ripped directly from screenshots of them in the FMVs-- here's a shot of the texture I'm using for a portion of terra currently, to help illustrate my point.



@jacemm7283: No worries about asking again- some of my posts are pretty longwinded;; Yah definately MS3D is my choice for modelling lowpoly models^^

And thank you for the offer for the help-- I'm not sure when/if I'll be accepting help for this project, but I'll note your name down in the list *nodnod*

On a semi-related note: I'm planning to go thru and [likely] completely rebuild the terra model/texture from scratch soon. We'll see how that goes later tho. Right away, I'm hoping to start implementing a Quake3 BSP loader for battles, and possibly other parts of the game. *cheer*

Question about the image, are you planning on giving Terra that greenish look to her hair or keeping it blonde like the FMV?
I like how you were able to make it green while still making it look natural and not anime-like.

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I fear my heart and fear my soul
Life goes on, it surely will,
Without me and I wonder:
Will I ever see light again?

Life goes on...

Wow, thats quite impressive. I never thought of a 3D Final Fantasy VI, but that would be hella awesome. I have worked on OpenGL in the past, an incomplete project/space simulation. I barely worked on the code, and since I had no modeling programs (like CAD or any other programs that make 3ds files).

But I like the progress, but I can imagine how hard it would be to design a world like that without generating it with a terrain generator.

But that looks nice, cept the game is really detailed it would be very hard to do.

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Who is Byblos?

@Sherick:
I'm planning on giving her the greenish hair colour. I was always a fan of that (and it's easier to tell her and Celes apart at a distance that way). Mmm green hair^^

The image I posted last is the -actual- texture file currently being used for her hair/face/upper chest, so yah, green hair. As you can see, I've already gone thru and gave it some green hair on the most part of it (still gotta work on the bangs, but this isn't decided as a final texture for it yet, so I won't waste the effort until I'm sure...)

It was pretty easy to manipulate the colours, I just used the pen tool to define an area to work in, set it as the selected area, then adjusted the variations to give it the green look^^

@byblos:
Yes, it's definately gonna be a challenge to manually do everything without a terrain generator, heh. But I'm actually -really- looking forward to building the towns/battle scenes! Because they're (at least currently planned to as...) going tobe in the Quake3 .bsp file format, so I'll be able to use QERadiant, or some flavour thereof, to create the scenes. It'll bring back memories of making levels for a mod group I was working with thru Quake2/3. *remenisces*

this may sound kinda stupid but, i would get the hard stuff out of the way first. the games mechanics and such. percentages, stats, randomness, damage calculators, level calculators etc. theres LOTS more than just that too. ive known a lot of people (but im not saying your like this) who have done all the 3d work to a game, and got to the "inner-workings" and gave up. thus all that time spent was wasted. im not trying to be bossy or anything. just a suggestion.

anyway, i hope all goes well for you in the long run.

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"Life: The deepest cut that wilt not heal. Fore it bleeds on and on as if an eternity. An endless river of blood in which death is thyne only escape. And as the tainted years pass, that escape muddles us with temptation."

This is a little off topic but...:
I decided to look into the Milkshake 3D program (just downloaded it, haven't gotten to mess with it yet because my comp is being slow, so defragging soon...) and I just noticed/remembered my biggest downfall/flaw with 3D editing is...
the lack of photoshop...
does anyone know where I can download an older version of it for free? Or should I just go with what I've got? (Note: I've been using the school's 3DsMax7 program and already know how to make my own materials in that, but Photoshop will help me out a lot more)

Back on topic:
You said "General Tips" for Terra's character model, so here's a few.

1: More lighting. Thanks to my eyesight, its really hard to see teh character model due to the lighting. Can you send me a link of a more lit-up character (plus without the text box, can't see her legs :-P)
2: Like i said, haven't played with the program yet, but try to slim down the body more. In note to the ridgity--Give it a relaxed look, if you can.
3: The skin tone between her neck and body is noticeable. Try to find a body color that matches her face color, or vice versa. Leave the hair though, that looks great. Cheers for keeping it green!

P.S. Good idea for rebuilding the model. I use the same technique for writing essays at school.

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Neneko is Neneko because Neneko couldn't be Neneko if Neneko wasn't Neneko!
--as quoted from Neneko, Mahoraba {Heartful Days}

I can stab a man with a thick paperback book thru the ribcage.

@jacemm7283:
Actually, I have a slightly different viewpoint than you on the subject: IMHO, the "game-mechanics" portion is the EASY stuff (it's just simple math..). Especially in regards to an RPG type game, where the most complicated math you have to deal with is multiplying or dividing by 4, heh heh Regardless tho, I already have a good portion of that done already, but I decided I wanted something more visual for me to debug with, so I'm trying to get a simple viewable version of the game functioning to view things with, instead of lurking in the debugger, sifting thru variables;;

I've actually found that the hardest parts of programming the game are:

1) The 3d math for ... well, anything 3d, really. Heh. dotProducts, crossProducts, rotational trig, quaternions... a little more advanced than the [generally] adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing required by the calculations of stats/damages/etc.. Really, mathematically speaking, I'm pretty confident that FFVI is incredibly simple.

2) The "behind-the-scenes" classes & objects that allow the game to run properly, and efficiently, fully encapsulated in their own little black boxes (or at least, that's how I like my code to be...). Things such as a game state manager (it changes the rendering mode, input allowed, etc.. depending on the state you're in, such as title screen, world map, battle, town, menu, etc..), an input stack with bindable keys (so when you press a keyboard key, it checks to see if the user has changed the use of the key, then asks a stack of items what to do with it, and each item in the stack checks to see if they can use it-- if not, they pass it on to the next item in the stack), and finite state machines (typically for AI, you change variables in each "machine" as the game runs, and the machine calls an "update" every frame, and calculates what it'll do based on how the variables in it have changed).

I'm willing to go into more detail about how these things work, if anybody's interested, but I just thought I'd point out [what I consider to be] some of the more complicated parts of programming a game.

@strikerbolt:
Looks like you were typing as a was responding to jacemm7283, so I'm editing to include a response to you.

I don't know -FOR SURE-, but I seem to recall there being a free "trial edition" of photoshop, or paintshoppro, or something of that nature, available from the appropriate company's website... I could be wrong tho- I'm known for doing that^^

Yah, the lighting on the model in the world currently is screwed, because I don't have lights in the world yet, and the default brightness for the model & the terrain are completely different values. So Terra appears to be -way- too dark right now. I'll get around to those lights later.. probably much later- but I might change the default brightness level, cause that's been bugging me as well..

Not concerned about her posture yet, remember? Hehe

Actually, that skin tone difference you're seeing is a fake shadow baked onto her texture (leftover from the FMV screenshot) that I haven't taken out yet. Thank you for pointing it out tho-- if I decide to keep this texture, I'll be sure to do something about that.

This post has been edited by nyxojaele on 19th February 2006 20:34