Been thinking of bringing Final Fantasy 7 into SCUMM

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hal-kun
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Been thinking of bringing Final Fantasy 7 into SCUMM

Post by hal-kun »

Hi all...

After seeing that you guys merged in Return to Zork and FreeSCI, I've been thinking of merging in my own own project as well...

For the past 10 years I, along with a bunch of international programmers have been reverse-engineering Final Fantasy 7 (Along with other Square games). A somewhat workable engine has been produced, but I think it can probably gain a little more traction being part of SCUMM.

Now, I know that dropping the thing into /engines is probably out of the question, as the engine I have probably going to need a rewrite. I noticed that SCUMM doesn't seem to have much support for 3D graphics as of yet... I would like opinions on this. Is there a "null" engine I can start with so I can experiment? A programmer's guide to SCUMM maybe?

(===Edit== -> I just found the wiki)

I'm most likely going to start with the PSX dataset first, but this is all up in the air. I'm just testing the waters so to speak.
KuroShiro
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Post by KuroShiro »

Well, scummVM's target is 2d adventure games only atm, so I would imagine the answer would be "no" to a 3d jRPG. A cross-platform engine for old Square games would be pretty cool though, so I certainly hope this project does gain some traction!

Edit: Looked at your website and I have to say it looks quite good. I don't think it fits within the framework of scummVM but as a standalone thing it looks like it has the potential to be pretty awesome in the future if work continues.
Last edited by KuroShiro on Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
zorbid
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Post by zorbid »

Furthermore, I don't think that QGears fits in ScummVM from a technical point of view. They will not reimplement the original engine, they are creating a new one inspired bit it instead.

Most resource will be statically converted to modern formats (e.g. 3D models to the OGRE3D format), and the scripts will be translated to Lua (I hope they do so prgrammatically).
hal-kun
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Post by hal-kun »

Actually, I'm not a fan of that method, (it was done by another programmer's behest) and would rather take the raw PSX data. Its the reason why I'm contemplating a reimplementation on my own.
fingolfin
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Post by fingolfin »

No 3D engines are going to admitted into ScummVM, sorry.
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md5
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Post by md5 »

Well, I guess that the residual subproject might be an option, but that still needs work to accept new engines, and it's far from complete.
Threepwood
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Post by Threepwood »

why not (officially) start scumm3d?
zorbid
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Post by zorbid »

It's not really a problem of official or not official, but a problem of finding people motivated to work on it.

Kal Hun may bring some new blood to the project :-)
fingolfin
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Post by fingolfin »

Residual is not really going to help much with that, the project is written with only Grim in mind -- even adding support for Monkey Island 4, which uses the same engine, wouldn't be that easy. Adding another 3D adventure engine to it would at this stage be more work than working on that new engine as a stand-alone project.

That said, it could be done, of course. The most important part for that is one or multiple dedicated and capable developers working on it. WIthout that, it's a pipedream and nothing else. And you won't magically attract these people by adding this into Residual, believe me. (People tend to think that adding an engine to ScummVM automatically will give it some kind of boost or bonus. This is wrong. Several engines which languish in a non-working state in our repository prove that. That it worked relatively well for (Free)SCI is simply caused by the fact that there already were developers on the team who were actively interested in working on this, plus existing FreeSCI devs help.)
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maximus
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Post by maximus »

Even if q-gears won't work as part of scummvm, I hope you keep working on it as its own project. The PC port really was a piece of (expletive deleted) :P
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fydo
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Post by fydo »

April fools? :)
zorbid
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Post by zorbid »

April fools?
I don't think so. hal-kun is the main (only?) author of the Gears project (not QGears), which documents the FF7 internals.
hal-kun
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Post by hal-kun »

No April Fools, I'm just seeing if it's a good idea. My timing is just bad...
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