Final Fantasy Hacktics

Here's a nice bit of news:

http://kotaku.com/5620258/there-could-b ... kyria-game

It's not much, but it's nice to know Sega's at least thinking about making another Valkyria Chronicles game.

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I'd started working on a map editor. Here it is!

http://gomtuu.org/fft/Ganesha/

Note that it doesn't actually edit maps yet because it's still an early version. All it does is let you zoom and rotate the map (using the mouse wheel) and click on a polygon to see where you'd have to look in the mesh file if you wanted to edit that polygon with a hex editor. While that alone might be sort of useful, I'm mostly releasing this version as a test to make sure you guys can run it. Unlike map2gl, Ganesha uses Panda3D, so the environment's a little different.

I've only released a binary version for now because it's more likely to "just work." One benefit of using Panda3D is that it's able to create an installable package with everything your Python program needs, so if you're using Windows, you can just double-click it to install it like a real program. Unfortunately, this installer is about 30MB. I do plan to release source versions (which should only be a few dozen KB or so) alongside the binary versions in the future, but getting the source version to work will involve more setup on your end.

I also want to know if this works in Parallels, so if some Mac users could try it, I'd appreciate it.

Joss Whedon's new show, Dollhouse, premieres Friday (2/13) at 9pm Eastern (and presumably Pacific) on FOX.

If you like good TV shows, be sure to check it out!

Hi, all. How's it going?

In case anybody's been wondering, I am still alive, although I haven't been working on map2gl for the past few months. I got distracted by holidays and then other video games, but now I'm actually messing around with something that's sort of related to map2gl and could help a lot.

I've been playing with Panda3D, a set of libraries for developing 3D games in Python. For quite a while, I've wanted to try making a Tactics-style game of my own, just for fun. I've spent the past few weeks working on exactly that. I've posted a few early versions in the Panda3D forums if you want to take a look. It's still very basic, but it works. (The version I posted there is Python source, so you'll need to install Panda3D to try it. Panda3D is a complete package, though; you dont't need to install a bunch of other libraries, and you don't even need to install Python separately since it's included in the Panda3D package. It should be pretty painless.)

Anway, The good news for map2gl fans is that this has given me experience with some stuff related to map editing, like the ability to select a polygon by clicking on it with the mouse. So, even though I'm not working on it directly right now, I feel a little more confident that map2gl could become an editor that would at least be easier to use than a hex editor.

Ok, I got distracted from working on mapsplit.

Klonoa (PSX) is another one of my favorite games, so a few days ago, I started trying to extract the mesh data for its levels. I haven't found the data on the CD yet (maybe it's compressed?) but I found some vertices in a memory dump. Here's a screenshot of what I've got so far.

The larger of the two dense clusters of dots on the left is the hut at the beginning of the first level, as seen here:

http://kotaku.com/5066817/klonoa-door-t ... ics-battle

The densest cluster on the far right is the cliff carved into the shape of Lephise.

Remember to vote, everybody!