Thats what I mean by exact.

Do you plan on using the Screenshot Effect Tool for the framebuffer battle swirl?

Ah I had forgotten about that! Yes that definitely something that I'd like to include at some point. I'd have to write my own program that generates the effect, but its definitely doable. Its unfortunate that there are no english instructions, and I'm not sure if Cherry intends on translating them so thats more or less the thing thats preventing me from investigating it further.

Edit: I remember why I didn't end up looking much into this: "RPG Maker 2003 version 1.05 or higher are not supported."

I'm looking forward to play this, Mr. Vanit. Good luck on your project.

Looks amazing Vanit. As a huuuuuuge fan of FF7 I'm really excited for the demo release. Are you worried at all though? About Square or Sony removing the game from being downloaded once it's finished? Even though it is a fan made game, if it's still going to be EXACT like you've been promising, you might have some legality issues to deal with.

I'm not really worried as they've been pretty inconsistent with what fan projects they've decided to shut down. Even if they do issue a C&D, I would've made enough of a dent in the production of the remake that I'd be satisfied, and I'd still have something to put in my port folio.

That's true. Any more news on that demo?

End of this week when I'm done with my mid-semester assessment for uni I'll be releasing a demo!

I've been busy the last few weeks finishing off the basic animations for Cloud's battle sprite. It takes so long because I'm recreating his battle animation frame for frame so it appears as it did in the original... which makes for A LOT of work. So far I've got the idle pose (normal and near death), death, attacking/crit attack, magic cast, item throw, take damage, and victory poses done - I just have to implement limits in the battle menu and do the animation for Braver and that'll be that. Just between those animations Cloud's battle sprite sheet is at about 90ish sprites at the moment, and it'll probably be 110-120 when I've done Braver.

Love the work! great job. can't wait!

Thanks for the support! I can't wait either. I've been focused on the custom systems for so long I'm seriously itching to produce some gameplay. Lately I've been losing sleep over what the proper intro is going to look like - I've got it all story boarded I just have to draw the assets. The demo I'm releasing later this week will just be a very limited taste of the potential this project has, and I'm hoping that people like what they see when I get it into their hands.

I'm not really one for FF7. I've actually played nearly all of them and this wasn't a big one for me. I dunno.

HOWEVER, I am absolutely astonished by the amount of detail you're putting into this remake. I've yet to see any fan-based original/remakes that even come close to what FF really is. If you ever do complete this game, I would be honored to give it a shot Maybe 2-D is all I need to fall in love with FF7 haha

Mmmmmm... Final Fantasy VII remake. Or demake? Its seems playfull. Good.
P.S. I have Final Fantasy VII: Dark Cloud (RPG Maker 2000), russian game with english text, and more bugs! XD
P.P.S. It's not my game.

Hey Vanit what do you plan on doing about the CG cutscenes?

I'll be doing 2D interpretations of those cutscenes. For example the intro will be pretty much the same, the stars at the start, a close up of Aeris, angle change to the street, zoom out a bit and then cut to a sprite of Midgar (I'm looking forward to drawing this), zoom out, FF7 logo, flashes of the train, zoom into the reactor - it'll all be there.

Sounds interesting, can't wait to seem some of your work

I was thinking in make a FF7 demake with FF6 style (using the SDK in progress) but i haven't got good
skills for spriting, (for make good maps yes)




I was thinking in make a FF7 demake with FF6 style (using the SDK in progress) but i haven't got good
skills for spriting, (for make good maps yes, i can help you if you want, you can send me a pm or
my msn is e_shadowx@hotmail.com

PD: its was doble-posting for a error or something

Final fantasy 7 is one of my favourite all time games, this remake looks visually stunning for an amateur 2d designer, so very well done, I ache to play a demo, I await your intro cut scene with great excitement! again, Very well done!

@gadesx, I've merged your double post. It might have been an error, but the posts were seven minutes apart.

I'm not sure if you're refering to me releasing an SDK, but for the moment my stance is that all my future releases will be moleboxed.

While I appreciate your offer for help, strictly speaking FF72DR has no maps and therefore no need for a mapper. I sprite my maps entirely outside of rm2k3 and insert them as a background, and then split the parts that need to overlap the player into a chipset and put collisions in. I do it this way because every map in FF7 is vastly different and contains too much detail to format it as a chipset anyway.

the SDK i refer is this: http://ff6sdk.webs.com/
ok dude, for make the upper part you can fix a picture with the upper part only and fix using variables, with chipset you need more time

for fix the complete picture of the map only with the upper part.

upper picture i usually use:


PD: about the dobleposing was a error of my mozilla while i tried edit a post.

I don't know what you're talking about or what this is in reply to. :S

I wanna say, that if you use panorama for graphics, you need a upper part (graphics that
should be upper the character) and you can put em in in chipsets or like a picture.

Yeah....... thats exactly what I said I was doing, I said this in the post you replied to. This is why I don't need a mapper, because the layout of the maps is decided by me when I sprite them.

To be honest, I haven't given this much attention until now. I'm on the fence with FFVII simply because I enjoyed it while it was on the PS, but never thought it was as great as everybody hyped it out to being. And since then, I've seen just about every incarnation of FFVII imagineable, from fangames, to sequels, to a movie... so my initial thought is it's time to move on.

But!

I decided to give your forum another look, and I was actually really impressed with the visuals. They look really nice, and the intro video of the train was really good. I'm almost inclined to say your game looks more impressive in 2D than the actual game did on the PS.

Thanks! Comments like these are what keep me going. :>

I'm still fine tuning some things before I post a video, but I thought I'd atleast show you guys the animation I came up with for Braver.

that braver animation is awsome!!

I agree with Remix; it's extremely smooth.

Oh man, this animation has so much potential, do you mind if I do an Edit on it to fix it up for ya?

I'd rather you didn't touch it sorry, I'm still learning as a pixel artist and if other people fix up my sprites I won't learn, thanks though! However, you're more than welcome to point out which bits need fixing.

Sounds good, well if you need help with sprites, just hit me up.
I find it hard to find inspiration nowadays, this just gave me a spark that's all. =D

Finally, I have a new video! I've done the animations for Cloud's victory pose, throw item, take damage, miss and Braver. Hopefully I'll have a demo out to you guys tomorrow or the day after.

Wow! That looks so beautiful!! My only advice is to give the limit break pose more casting animations instead of the rippling circles at his feet and casting magic need one as well.

Aye I intend to get something a lot closer to the real "charging" animations. I've found it hard to get them just right so they've got placeholders for now so I could get on with other things. (actually on that note if there are any pixel artists reading this that are good at effects like that, get in touch with me via pm)

This game looks incredible. I've gone through almost every nook and cranny of Final Fantasy 7, and so far this looks like an excellent transition of the game from 3D to 2D.

The animations you have with the game are spot on. Sure, they could be tweaked and changed a little to make them closer to the animations of the original game, but right now they're looking very smooth and very nice. The graphics of the game overall are very good. You have a good depth of detail in the battle background and in the characters/enemies. It might not be that far along right now, but I can't wait to see what you can do with some of the other areas of the game.

Speaking of the future of this game, I'm very interested in how you'll handle a lot of things from this game. For example, the knights of the round summon. I would hope that it would be in the completed game, but it'd certainly be a challenge to figure out how to go about implementing it into the game. Another thing I'm looking forward to if this game would be finished at some point in time would be the weapons (Ultimate/Ruby/Emerald). On that note, the underwater world map part of the game (with Emerald Weapon) would be an admirable feat to put into the game while still having it on the same terms with the original game. There are a lot of challenges in transitioning a game like this into a 2D format, but from the things you've shown us, I'm confident that you have the skill to overcome these challenges.

Good luck working on the game, and I really hope you'll eventually be able to finish this. It'd be a terrible loss if the entirety of the game would never see the light of day. I know after I beat Final Fantasy 7 in its entirety I told myself I would never have the patience to go through all that again, but if you would be successful in this project, there's no doubt in my mind that I'd play it start to finish (this 2D version I mean).

I'm happy to announce... my first public demo, which is now available for download!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5226139/FF72DR_R1.zip (8.5mb)

The main purpose of this release is to achieve 2 things:

1) Find out if I've successfully captured the feeling of FF7 in 2D
2) Find any bugs I've missed

Please, please, please tell me if you have any thoughts on what you see! Its a very small demo with only 2 areas, but it should be enough to achieve these small goals. I should also mention there are a few things missing, like announcements in battle for items and limits are currently NYI, and the Change and Defend functions currently do nothing so you need not report these issues.

Also to clarify, this release is moleboxed as I only require black box testing at this time, so if you're keen to poke around inside this isn't the release you're after.

Psst DL link doesn't work, something about not be authorized to DL.
For free users that is.

Blast! New link posted.

Aah!! So excited to play.

Edit:
In the area where Barret says "EX-Soldier eh? Don't trust ya!"(third map I believe), you cannot leave. Did your forget the teleport or are you not suppose to be able to proceed any further? I may have missed something though.. It's been many years since I have played ff7 last.
Also:
You may have already said this but I have two questions:
1. Can you multi-target?
2. Can you dash?

Very nice, I tested almost all menus options, everything seems to work as it should.

If you need help with any sprite issues just PM me, this game is going take a while, but it looks promising.

You're not supposed to proceed any further than that.

Oh, okay then!
Well, besides my two questions in my above post, I have a couple of comments.
1. I think that you should change the map sprites. They just don't look as nice as everything else.
2. Very FF7y!

It is great. Can't wait for more.

Running is NYI at the moment, and technically the battle system doesn't support multitargeting at the moment, as you don't even get multitargeting abilities until much later I left it as low priority (for now, ofcourse!).

Pressing 0 on the numpad brings up the menu without a sound effect, and you can't close it with 0 on the numpad.
Something else to consider is how you're going to let the player quit the game. If the player doesn't know much about neither rm2k3 nor computer in general, he/she could get a problem in terms of actually quitting the game.

I think this might be a shortcoming of how rm2k3 interacts with numlock. It seems to work irrespective of if numlock is on, and if numlock is off 0 will also close the menu.

And you're right about the quitting thing, I'll need to put that in somewhere.

downloading right now, woo hoo

Vanit, this also may be a keyboard-specific issue, as different keyboards treat numpad/num-lock differently.

As far as quitting goes, just include in a readme that F12 returns to the title screen and Alt + F4 shuts down completely (standard shortcut).

I've been following this project for a while now; it's very inspiring to see it has come as far as it has. Keep it up!

PS, if you need a mirror or would like me to host a project bugtracker (I'm using flyspray for mine) do not hesitate to contact me.

I didn't really do any big bugsearching, I just want to say this is really impressive.
Looking forward to future releases.

I played through the demo and it looks really good so far. I don't really have any constructive criticism to give here. From the few minutes I played it was perfection.

I had issues downloading, so I bought a premium RS account just so I could play this.

If anyone else is having download issues, I've mirrored the file. (Vanit, if you don't want me hosting this by all means let me know and I'll remove it.)

Here are my results from my black box testing.

• You can call the menu when the red battle swirl appears, effectively canceling the encounter.
• Sometimes when you press enter while the exp bar is filling up after battle, the bar disappears.
• If you walk onto a teleport event but call the menu before you teleport, when you exit the menu you will be standing on the teleport event. (You can exploit this to bypass teleport events and walk past the allowed boundaries of maps.) I had this same issue with my running system in my own project. To fix this, I changed my 'on hero touch' events to 'collision with hero'

All in all really wonderful work. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could use Braver on myself.