x10

all I can say is wow on the pics.

Very nice looking and sounding Mav'. I've never played FF but I am quite fond of RPGs so this should be fun.
I'm willing to do skins if you'll have me. I'll start working on an Al Bhed today.
Which one do you want?

1,2,3,4,5 or 6?
And if you need any other skins just let me know the basic idea and I'll get it done for you.
Will you be doing an open, closed or none at all beta?
Can't wait.

@ M.Saitek: Any (or a couple different) version/s of those would work. They're probably going to both be NPCs as well as units. And I'll probably do most of the beta testing myself, since it'll involve checking some of the "secrets" of the map. However, I'll most likely have an alpha that'll require testers sometime down the road. (Primarily to make sure the story can be played through fairly well.)

I'm kind of interested in how the "new members to the party" system works. Because I had an idea: maybe if you lose one or more members of your party, you could go to an "inn" somewhere remote on the map, where a script could be placed inside that restores you to full health, and respawns any lost party members.

This assumes, of course, that either the "party" system is A: the other members follow you around, or B: the other members are seperate selectable units that become unselectable once they are defeated. What do you think of the inn idea?

Also: While OFM was awesome, it didnt have an actual "storyline" in terms of character interaction and dialaouge. The main dude never say a word in the whole thing, and the things the other characters said was purely functional- by that, I mean, no real substance or personality showed through, it was just clues or instructions to help advance the mission. Maybe, have a guy or team of guys help you write an actual scenario instead of just "here are some tasks, do them," and then "CONGRATS! mission accomplished."

If this map turns out to be a hit, maybe you could build maps made based on other games as well. FF7 and LoZ would be good ones to start with- Most of the signifigant characters and weapons are already availible.

no ofience to anyone else but i think that this is the most beautiful map ive seen yet for bf2. It remins me of farcry, but better. I Wish good things on the creator/s of this map. I would also like to throw my name in the hat for beta testing if you will need any more testers.

(i have not more to say)

@Frisbeetarian (from earlier): I was originally against it, but I did a 180 and decided that one of the objectives would involve going inside the temple (it'll be how you get your third party member). That means you'll go inside the temple (which'll be a significantly larger area than the temple building, because I'm teleporting you there instead of taking you inside, solve some puzzles, get exp and a party member. It should be fun.

@ Ateas: Right now, the way the party system works is very BF2-ish. Adding new members to your party means that when you get to a save sphere, you can switch from the member you're currently using to a member you've unlocked. I'll look into making a character unselectable if they die, but I think it'll flow better, gamewise, if I just make "deaths" as party deaths instead of character deaths.

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Here's another opportunity for someone to get involved with this, if they want. I've been tossing around the idea of having NPCs in Besaid Village (3rd screenshot), but like the Al Bhed mentioned earlier, I don't have much time to work on skins. If someone wants to tackle making skins for some, I'd be much obliged. (Preferably, a couple different versions.) For ideas, you could make Crusader skins, Blitzball player skins, or just generic people skins. Go wild!

Cool on the first part, that should be interesting.
Also, are you implying that the saves sphere model is just taking the place of the CP model? And if so, are you going to have the glow on them as you would in the game when you accessed the spheres?

@ Maveritchell, Have you confirmed if the cliff's shadowvolume work yet?
If not, I'll need to tweak them in XSI.

@Caleb: Sent you a PM about that a while ago, dunno if you got it. If you need it again, let me know.

@Frisbeetarian: Basically, yes. The save sphere is taking the place of CPs. It does have a faint blue glow, but it's not going to light up when you access it like it did in FFX (simply because there's no way to do that, lol.)

In other news... I figured out how to get new music ingame! That means instead of listening to "Jedi Rocks" or Figrin D'an & the Modal Nodes, you get to listen to ingame music from Final Fantasy. And of course, when you win...

Are you going to try to implement some kind of save function? Its no fun going 5/6 threw a long fun story mode and then have to start over again.

Maveritchell wrote:In other news... I figured out how to get new music ingame! That means instead of listening to "Jedi Rocks" or Figrin D'an & the Modal Nodes, you get to listen to ingame music from Final Fantasy. And of course, when you win...

Wow...

Syth wrote:Are you going to try to implement some kind of save function? Its no fun going 5/6 threw a long fun story mode and then have to start over again.

The only option for saving would be to have a choice at the start of the map. Like "Enter the region on the right to load an old game or enter the region on your left to start a new one". Left would take you to the start of a new game.

Right would take you to a part of the map where there would be a bunch of targets that represented characters A-Z and 1-9. You would then shoot targets in a code that would be generated when you enter the "save sphere" like jhdf9s83, with each character representing a property of your unit.

This is not my original idea, Archer first though of it for Bf2 I think, but the full idea is from certain Warcraft 3 RPG type mods.
I think that it would be a good idea.
I'll post some WIP screenshots sometime soon of the skin I'm working on.

Or it could be like that dice square he had on the Ralltiir: Swoop Circuit map. You could even have 2 CPs to spawn at in the begging- one "New Game" cp and one "Enter the code" cp.

Or you could use the interface.

If you go to ?:\BF2_ModTools\data_???\Common\hud and open 1playerhud.hud in a text editor, you can see a list of interface elements you can load up. I think the actual interface elements are in the assets too, I forget where, possible in that folder.

I once popped up a simple yes no dialogue, but never put any real effort into finding out how to get it to return values to the LUA.

Heres the code I used : ShowSelectionTextPopup("ifs_yesno")

I'm not sure if the contents of the brackets are what I used exactly.

I'm not sure if anyones messed around with this stuff before, but theres some exploring to be done with interface mods.
The thing about interface modding is that you need to know how to munge .hud files. So, I modified munge_world (putting the modded hud file in data/worlds) to like like this: Edit: It turns out that config munge munges these .hud files, which, looking at the reqs, are called hudtransformers.

@ Syth, Saitek, & Ace: Saving is an interesting concept, and Syth was actually pretty close when he mentioned Ralltiir. I actually did the dice thing as part of a concept test to see if I could create an ingame interface. However, short of doing an actual interface mod like Ace mentioned, I doubt I'll do a "saving system" of sorts. The reason for this is twofold: one, I think creating an interface ingame along the lines of objects to kill or buttons to step on would be cluttering the scenery and remove the immersion from the level and two, because I simply like the idea of having an RPG you have to play through without quitting. Think of it like an early Mario platformer.

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Update:
-I've completed the coding through getting to the village (3rd screenshot), going into the temple, acquiring your last main character, and the first major event of the story. This equates to about 20 minutes (that's obviously highly dependent on how long it takes the player to finish puzzles and objectives) of gameplay - or roughly the length of a decent-length conquest game.
-There are three main characters in your party. I mentioned the first, Tidus, earlier. Additionally, there is one bonus character who may join your party under certain conditions. All of these characters may be "met" during the first 20-ish minutes of the game.

Oh, also, I suppose I can put up another teaser picture:

Cool, dodgeball

Looks like Wakka and a blitzball.

To me it looks like some flaming red ball with horns... and about to get hit with a blue magic ball?

I wanna cast magic missle

What I said makes sense if you think about the final fantasy world, and yes I understand that's a bomb. I guess since this is BF2 and not FFX, the characters and the fiends can attack at the same time. It's cool that you have magic working.