Tethical, online FFT clone

[Cheetah]

Holy crap that is freaking awesome. Wow Lirmont, I dub this the greatest first contribution post on FFH ever.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

How will you improve the sprites, maps, and other graphics of FFT?  Make them bigger and zoom out so the detail is greater but the aspect ratio is the same?  Allow PNG?  I'm pumped about the official maps being playable, but we eventually need to be able to make our own, better, maps for legal reasons and just to make things prettier.

[Cheetah]

Good thoughts Pickle.

1) I think expanding the screen ratio over the original FFT, more like the PSP wide screen, is a great idea.
2) Bigger maps, such as expanding the current ones and making larger ones would be awesome.
3) More units, if you have more room you can have more units battling at once. Such as Tactics Ogre.

I worked really hard at finishing a completely custom map, it is tough work though. Placing the textures was definitely the most time consuming part and where I got stuck.

[Lijj]

Amazing. It looks perfect.. I can't believe how well this is flowing along.

[Kivutar]

How will you improve the sprites, maps, and other graphics of FFT?

I won't do it myself, because I am a developper, I don't excel at pixel art or 3D modeling, even if I do it sometimes when it is realy needed.
But I will do my best to make it realy easy to mod, by using simple and open formats like png, text for configuration files, etc.

Make them bigger and zoom out so the detail is greater but the aspect ratio is the same?

You don't have to do such a complicated thing to improve the detail level.
Just open one of my spritesheet with your favorite image editor, double the size of the image, do your painting, save, reload the game, and you are done.
The engine is 3D so it only cares about ratio, as long as you keep the ratio of the spritesheet, it will work out of the box.
You can do exactly the same trick to improve map textures details.

Allow PNG?

PNG is already the format used by the engine.

I'm pumped about the official maps being playable, but we eventually need to be able to make our own, better, maps for legal reasons and just to make things prettier.

I feel the same. These maps are of a great help to have a lot of use cases to code the characters moves. But If we realy want to release something one day, or just if the engine becomes more famous, there will be the legal issue.
This is a common case in game engine emulation, and the most adopted solution is to distribute the engine with no copyrighted content, but a small amount of custom content instead. So people can get started. Then we can provide all the script to extract the official data from the game, so the users that "own the real game" can rip their CD to an ISO image and extract the data using our scripts, and finaly run their own tethical server.
With this, the project will remain open source and not suable. One of us could own a server with copyrighted content in one of those states where the law is more permissive. And I believe that most of the people here are creative and will prefer to start from nothing to make various games with various looks and gameplay.

I think expanding the screen ratio over the original FFT, more like the PSP wide screen, is a great idea.

This is already the case, you can resize the window to what you want, for exemple 600x200, and you won't see fat strechted characters, you will just see more of the map on the side. Like on the PSP.

Bigger maps, such as expanding the current ones and making larger ones would be awesome.

Yes custom maps are already possible. Maps are composed of 3 things :
- the 3D model, made using blender or whatever tool you like, then exported to the .egg format
- the texture to be applied on the model : a simple png file
- a text file describing tiles, wich are walkables or not, etc
So you can create realy big maps if you want.

More units, if you have more room you can have more units battling at once. Such as Tactics Ogre.

Same here. We are not limited, you can already have as many characters on a map as you want to.
The engine was also build in the early time to allow more than 2 teams on a battle. I lost this feature during developement, cause I wanted to have something to show earlier. But I don't abondon this idea. I will do it.

I worked really hard at finishing a completely custom map, it is tough work though. Placing the textures was definitely the most time consuming part and where I got stuck.

Yes, I made a custom map too (the one you see in some of the videos), not with ganesha but with blender, modeling takes about 1 hour. Appliying the UV map is something like 2~3hours. Drawing a nice PNG texture can take many days of work.

[MasterGrand]

Well done Kivutar & All members of the Forum will support you to the end .

Good luck

[Dome]

This is so epic, that even if it was in spam I wouldn't troll it
AT ALL

Freaking epic/10

[Kivutar]

Thank all you for your encouragements.

I can not post a new video for now, but I made some progress on the official map exporter.

I modded Ganesha to export the tiles infos of a map to my server. It almost work. I need to rewrite some small parts of the code to be even closer to the original logic of official maps. The good news is that water depth will be one of the befenit of this rewrite.

Lights export have seen some progress too, but it's still not that.

@lirmont: some map exported by your code are missing polygons. I took a look at your code. Do you think it can be due to display bits, the flag that says wich part of the map become invisible according to camera angle (see point 12 of this page http://ffhacktics.com/wiki/Maps) ?

[lirmont]

If you want the full map, re-download the zip file or comment out (or add the flag "and not self.exportToOBJFile == True" to the condition) the following lines in viewer.py:

if self.use_cutaway and not vis_angle == None and not poly["vis"] == None:
   if poly["vis"][(7-vis_angle)+6] == 1:
       continue

[Kivutar]

@lirmont, thanks for this quick reply.

This code was already commented, but setting self.use_cutaway to False made the trick.

I almost managed to flip normals during the export by editing your code like this:

Code Select Expand


f.write('vn') # write vn (vertex normal direction)
f.write(' ')
f.write(str(-vertex["q"]))
f.write(' ')
f.write(str(-vertex["p"]))
f.write(' ')
f.write(str(-vertex["r"]))
f.write('\n')


Code Select Expand


f.write('f') # write f (3d object face by order vertices exist in written OBJ file)
f.write(' ')
f.write(str(r))
f.write('/')
f.write(str(r))
f.write('/')
f.write(str(r))
f.write(' ')
f.write(str(r+2))
f.write('/')
f.write(str(r+2))
f.write('/')
f.write(str(r+1))
f.write(' ')
f.write(str(r+1))
f.write('/')
f.write(str(r+1))
f.write('/')
f.write(str(r+2))
f.write('\n')


As you can see, it worked for the textured polygons, but not on the others. Do you have an idea?

[EDIT] I found it, it was the map skirt.

[Kaffe]

I didn't get that PM you promised. I feel unloved.

But I don't care. This is utter awesomeness, so even deprived of returned feelings of love, I greatly support what you're doing.

Unconditionally.

[Kivutar]

@Kaffe: Oh I'm so sorry. I've been so much excited by this map stuff that I forgot to work on the Windows installer. Don't feel unloved, I send you this PM as soon as I need your help!

EDIT: I just added the new video showing 6 exported maps. You can see some bugs in the json exporter.

[Cheetah]

Another big step Kivutar, you are making amazing progress. I am also surprised at how many of my comments had already been taken into account. Very exciting.

[lirmont]

Re-download it. The "skirt" polygons had to have vertex normal directions calculated.

[Kokojo]

Kivutar, would you like to check if your exporter works well with user-made maps? I have one I could share.

[Kivutar]

@lirmont Thanks for your precious help.

@Kokojo I would love it. Can you send it to me please? I hope it is not too hard to include in the ISO using linux, or maybe I don't have to include it at all.

[Kokojo]

http://kokojo.ffhacktics.com/

The download can be done there. You have to replace map100 files. This is the cemetary, usually.

[lirmont]

Why, yes, I do believe it is fool-proof.

[Kivutar]

The model is well exported, but the map logic is not

Take a look:

[Cheetah]

Hmm that is disappointing. I will post my custom map as well to see if it is common problem of the map editor. Mine wont be quite so pretty but it should work.