Really important question I could use help on with game development.

-202

Author

April 19, 2011 01:25 AM

I was wondering if it's possible to create a game like this with DirectX 9, C++ and that's it. Here is a clip of the game as an example:

[media]

[/media]

By "create" I mean from scratch, writing the engine, modelling the low-poly characters, animations, sounds, music, etc. I know it will take at least 3 years to do it all...

But is it really possible?

And by create I mean re-create as in making it EXACTLY the way it is shown in the video, so watch the video carefully and tell me if it's possible, please.

Thanks in advance!

NOTE: DirectX 9 and C++ ONLY! Nothing else, except the modelling programs, etc. Can it be DONE is the question, and be exactly the same as shown, character wise, camera movement, animation display. Can DirectX 9 really handle things that efficiently?

And an answer like "Yes, ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE!" won't help. I would like some elaborating on the details, preferably.

Thanks though, in advance.

Ravyne

14,306

April 19, 2011 01:39 AM

[color="#C0C0C0"]You know that's a playstation game right? Yes, the first one.

As seemingly uselesss as the "Yes, anything is possible" answer is -- it also happens to be the precise answer to the question you've asked. In fact, they got by on the original playstation with much. much less than even the worst Direct3D 9-level card would allow you to do. The playstation architecture is entirely unique and built for games, of course, but it was a system with a 32bit processor running less than 40 Mhz, had 4 megabytes of RAM, and a GPU that wasn't even capable of perspective-correct texturing.

FF7 was released on the PC also, minimum specs were (for a fairly sloppy port, and accounting for additional layers of abstraction (OS, 3D API):

[font="arial"][color="#C0C0C0"]Windows 95 compatible system[/font]
[font="arial"][color="#C0C0C0"]DirectX 5.0[/font]
[font="arial"][color="#C0C0C0"]Intel Pentium 133 (recommended Pentium 200)[/font]
[font="arial"][color="#C0C0C0"]4 megs Video Card (8 megs 3D accelerator recommended)[/font]
[font="arial"][color="#C0C0C0"]32 megs of RAM[/font]
[font="arial"][color="#C0C0C0"]4x CD-ROM[/font]
[font="arial"][color="#C0C0C0"]DirectX 5.0 compatible sound card (AWE64 or XG-MIDI compatible recommended)[/font]

[color="#C0C0C0"]
[font="arial"]So, there you have it, I guess. Direct3D 9 is overkill, Direct3D 5 is all you really need.[/font]
[font="arial"] [/font]
[font="arial"] [/font]
[font="arial"]If the question you really meant to ask was "How would I recreate these animations, effects and visuals in a modern way using Direct3D 9?" then I suggest you do some research into typical modern techniques, and post appropriate follow-up questions to the appropriate forums here.[/font]

throw table_exception("(? ???)? ? ???");

Hodgman

52,717

April 19, 2011 01:46 AM

By "create" I mean from scratch, writing the engine, modelling the low-poly characters, animations, sounds, music, etc.

Well the modelling, animation, sound, music, etc... will all be done in other DCC tools (modelling programs, etc).

I know it will take at least 3 years to do it all...But is it really possible?[/quote]How do you have a 3 year time-line but not have the feasibility down? Is that 3 years with a 20 man team, or 3 man-years? What's the distribution of those man-hours between art and programming?
NOTE: DirectX 9 and C++ ONLY! Nothing else, except the modelling programs, etc. Can it be DONE is the question, and be exactly the same as shown, character wise, camera movement, animation display. Can DirectX 9 really handle things that efficiently?[/quote]DirectX 9 is just the layer we use to talk to the hardware; almost every PC game engine is built on top of DirectX. Every Xbox game is built on top of DirectX, so yes, it's efficient enough.

. 22 Racing Series .

SimonForsman

7,644

April 19, 2011 01:47 AM

I was wondering if it's possible to create a game like this with DirectX 9, C++ and that's it. Here is a clip of the game as an example:

[media]
[/media]

By "create" I mean from scratch, writing the engine, modelling the low-poly characters, animations, sounds, music, etc. I know it will take at least 3 years to do it all...

But is it really possible?

And by create I mean re-create as in making it EXACTLY the way it is shown in the video, so watch the video carefully and tell me if it's possible, please.

Thanks in advance!

NOTE: DirectX 9 and C++ ONLY! Nothing else, except the modelling programs, etc. Can it be DONE is the question, and be exactly the same as shown, character wise, camera movement, animation display. Can DirectX 9 really handle things that efficiently?

And an answer like "Yes, ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE!" won't help. I would like some elaborating on the details, preferably.

Thanks though, in advance.

Ofcourse it can be done, graphics wise there really isn't anything you can't do with DX9, Some more advanced effects might require multiple rendering passes or that data is processed on the cpu but they can be done, The game in question FF7 was ported to the PC using DirectX 5.

Recreating any game exactly is illegal without permission from the copyright holder though and getting things to be identical is always hard.

[size="1"]I don't suffer from insanity, I'm enjoying every minute of it.
The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!

AndyHarglesis

-202

Author

April 19, 2011 02:15 AM

[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303176343' post='4800120']
I was wondering if it's possible to create a game like this with DirectX 9, C++ and that's it. Here is a clip of the game as an example:

[media]
[/media]

By "create" I mean from scratch, writing the engine, modelling the low-poly characters, animations, sounds, music, etc. I know it will take at least 3 years to do it all...

But is it really possible?

And by create I mean re-create as in making it EXACTLY the way it is shown in the video, so watch the video carefully and tell me if it's possible, please.

Thanks in advance!

NOTE: DirectX 9 and C++ ONLY! Nothing else, except the modelling programs, etc. Can it be DONE is the question, and be exactly the same as shown, character wise, camera movement, animation display. Can DirectX 9 really handle things that efficiently?

And an answer like "Yes, ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE!" won't help. I would like some elaborating on the details, preferably.

Thanks though, in advance.

Ofcourse it can be done, graphics wise there really isn't anything you can't do with DX9, Some more advanced effects might require multiple rendering passes or that data is processed on the cpu but they can be done, The game in question FF7 was ported to the PC using DirectX 5.

Recreating any game exactly is illegal without permission from the copyright holder though and getting things to be identical is always hard.
[/quote]

Not for distribution purposes I am doing it. Also, I need to know how I can simulate older-style DirectX 5 graphics, etc. in DirectX 9 so it will resemble the exact replica of FF7, no enhancements at all. Is THAT possible? How could you get a newer version of DirectX to act seemingly "old", like DirectX in the older days?

Hodgman

52,717

April 19, 2011 02:22 AM

How do you use photoshop to draw MSPaint quality artwork?

. 22 Racing Series .

SimonForsman

7,644

April 19, 2011 02:33 AM

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1303177678' post='4800133']
[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303176343' post='4800120']
I was wondering if it's possible to create a game like this with DirectX 9, C++ and that's it. Here is a clip of the game as an example:

[media]
[/media]

By "create" I mean from scratch, writing the engine, modelling the low-poly characters, animations, sounds, music, etc. I know it will take at least 3 years to do it all...

But is it really possible?

And by create I mean re-create as in making it EXACTLY the way it is shown in the video, so watch the video carefully and tell me if it's possible, please.

Thanks in advance!

NOTE: DirectX 9 and C++ ONLY! Nothing else, except the modelling programs, etc. Can it be DONE is the question, and be exactly the same as shown, character wise, camera movement, animation display. Can DirectX 9 really handle things that efficiently?

And an answer like "Yes, ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE!" won't help. I would like some elaborating on the details, preferably.

Thanks though, in advance.

Ofcourse it can be done, graphics wise there really isn't anything you can't do with DX9, Some more advanced effects might require multiple rendering passes or that data is processed on the cpu but they can be done, The game in question FF7 was ported to the PC using DirectX 5.

Recreating any game exactly is illegal without permission from the copyright holder though and getting things to be identical is always hard.
[/quote]

Not for distribution purposes I am doing it. Also, I need to know how I can simulate older-style DirectX 5 graphics, etc. in DirectX 9 so it will resemble the exact replica of FF7, no enhancements at all. Is THAT possible? How could you get a newer version of DirectX to act seemingly "old", like DirectX in the older days?

[/quote]

Thats really not an issue, DirectX itself has no impact on the quality of the graphics(The hardware features exposed by newer DX versions allow you to certain things in a far more efficient manner which in turn allows you to increase the quality but given a fast enough system you could get the exact same quality with an older API (The things the API doesn't let you do on the GPU you can always do on the CPU))), To make a game look old i'd start by using low resolution texture and models and a fairly simple texture filtering model (I'm guessing FF7 uses linear filtering which was fairly common at that time), Then its simply a case of not using any advanced shader effects (in the DX5 days almost everything was done using blending, multiple render passes and the stencil buffer, all of which are available in DX9 aswell (I'd recommend that you use shaders anyway though, they don't magically change the way things look but lets you do alot more in a single render pass and cuts out alot of the unnecessary passing of data back and forth between cpu and gpu))

[size="1"]I don't suffer from insanity, I'm enjoying every minute of it.
The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!

AndyHarglesis

-202

Author

April 19, 2011 05:05 AM

[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303179357' post='4800137']
[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1303177678' post='4800133']
[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303176343' post='4800120']
I was wondering if it's possible to create a game like this with DirectX 9, C++ and that's it. Here is a clip of the game as an example:

[media]
[/media]

By "create" I mean from scratch, writing the engine, modelling the low-poly characters, animations, sounds, music, etc. I know it will take at least 3 years to do it all...

But is it really possible?

And by create I mean re-create as in making it EXACTLY the way it is shown in the video, so watch the video carefully and tell me if it's possible, please.

Thanks in advance!

NOTE: DirectX 9 and C++ ONLY! Nothing else, except the modelling programs, etc. Can it be DONE is the question, and be exactly the same as shown, character wise, camera movement, animation display. Can DirectX 9 really handle things that efficiently?

And an answer like "Yes, ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE!" won't help. I would like some elaborating on the details, preferably.

Thanks though, in advance.

Ofcourse it can be done, graphics wise there really isn't anything you can't do with DX9, Some more advanced effects might require multiple rendering passes or that data is processed on the cpu but they can be done, The game in question FF7 was ported to the PC using DirectX 5.

Recreating any game exactly is illegal without permission from the copyright holder though and getting things to be identical is always hard.
[/quote]

Not for distribution purposes I am doing it. Also, I need to know how I can simulate older-style DirectX 5 graphics, etc. in DirectX 9 so it will resemble the exact replica of FF7, no enhancements at all. Is THAT possible? How could you get a newer version of DirectX to act seemingly "old", like DirectX in the older days?

[/quote]

Thats really not an issue, DirectX itself has no impact on the quality of the graphics(The hardware features exposed by newer DX versions allow you to certain things in a far more efficient manner which in turn allows you to increase the quality but given a fast enough system you could get the exact same quality with an older API (The things the API doesn't let you do on the GPU you can always do on the CPU))), To make a game look old i'd start by using low resolution texture and models and a fairly simple texture filtering model (I'm guessing FF7 uses linear filtering which was fairly common at that time), Then its simply a case of not using any advanced shader effects (in the DX5 days almost everything was done using blending, multiple render passes and the stencil buffer, all of which are available in DX9 aswell (I'd recommend that you use shaders anyway though, they don't magically change the way things look but lets you do alot more in a single render pass and cuts out alot of the unnecessary passing of data back and forth between cpu and gpu))
[/quote]

I appreciate all the answers, but one more question:

Like in the video I posted, if you didn't see it you could watch again... I want to know how to get such a smoothly simulated look of a command window on the bottom of the screen where most of the battle control takes place. Any ideas on how to draw that, identical to the command bar in FF7? I'm kind of confused there...

SimonForsman

7,644

April 19, 2011 03:48 PM

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1303180396' post='4800143']
[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303179357' post='4800137']
[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1303177678' post='4800133']
[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303176343' post='4800120']
I was wondering if it's possible to create a game like this with DirectX 9, C++ and that's it. Here is a clip of the game as an example:

[media]
[/media]

By "create" I mean from scratch, writing the engine, modelling the low-poly characters, animations, sounds, music, etc. I know it will take at least 3 years to do it all...

But is it really possible?

And by create I mean re-create as in making it EXACTLY the way it is shown in the video, so watch the video carefully and tell me if it's possible, please.

Thanks in advance!

NOTE: DirectX 9 and C++ ONLY! Nothing else, except the modelling programs, etc. Can it be DONE is the question, and be exactly the same as shown, character wise, camera movement, animation display. Can DirectX 9 really handle things that efficiently?

And an answer like "Yes, ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE!" won't help. I would like some elaborating on the details, preferably.

Thanks though, in advance.

Ofcourse it can be done, graphics wise there really isn't anything you can't do with DX9, Some more advanced effects might require multiple rendering passes or that data is processed on the cpu but they can be done, The game in question FF7 was ported to the PC using DirectX 5.

Recreating any game exactly is illegal without permission from the copyright holder though and getting things to be identical is always hard.
[/quote]

Not for distribution purposes I am doing it. Also, I need to know how I can simulate older-style DirectX 5 graphics, etc. in DirectX 9 so it will resemble the exact replica of FF7, no enhancements at all. Is THAT possible? How could you get a newer version of DirectX to act seemingly "old", like DirectX in the older days?

[/quote]

Thats really not an issue, DirectX itself has no impact on the quality of the graphics(The hardware features exposed by newer DX versions allow you to certain things in a far more efficient manner which in turn allows you to increase the quality but given a fast enough system you could get the exact same quality with an older API (The things the API doesn't let you do on the GPU you can always do on the CPU))), To make a game look old i'd start by using low resolution texture and models and a fairly simple texture filtering model (I'm guessing FF7 uses linear filtering which was fairly common at that time), Then its simply a case of not using any advanced shader effects (in the DX5 days almost everything was done using blending, multiple render passes and the stencil buffer, all of which are available in DX9 aswell (I'd recommend that you use shaders anyway though, they don't magically change the way things look but lets you do alot more in a single render pass and cuts out alot of the unnecessary passing of data back and forth between cpu and gpu))
[/quote]

I appreciate all the answers, but one more question:

Like in the video I posted, if you didn't see it you could watch again... I want to know how to get such a smoothly simulated look of a command window on the bottom of the screen where most of the battle control takes place. Any ideas on how to draw that, identical to the command bar in FF7? I'm kind of confused there...
[/quote]

Textured quads are all you need for that, just like for any other GUI really. (you can use a simple scissor test to make scrolling etc easy) (that way you can just move a quad with text up to scroll down and vice versa).

Writing a complete GUI system that is easy to extend and integrate with the rest of the game engine is fairly hard, but the FF7 GUI is almost ridicilusly simple (If you are recreating a game like FF7 the GUI will be the least of your problems)

[size="1"]I don't suffer from insanity, I'm enjoying every minute of it.
The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!

MeshGearFox

158

April 19, 2011 06:36 PM

[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303189550' post='4800196']
[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1303180396' post='4800143']
[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303179357' post='4800137']
[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1303177678' post='4800133']
[quote name='AndyWonHarglesis' timestamp='1303176343' post='4800120']
I was wondering if it's possible to create a game like this with DirectX 9, C++ and that's it. Here is a clip of the game as an example:

[media]
[/media]

By "create" I mean from scratch, writing the engine, modelling the low-poly characters, animations, sounds, music, etc. I know it will take at least 3 years to do it all...

But is it really possible?

And by create I mean re-create as in making it EXACTLY the way it is shown in the video, so watch the video carefully and tell me if it's possible, please.

Thanks in advance!

NOTE: DirectX 9 and C++ ONLY! Nothing else, except the modelling programs, etc. Can it be DONE is the question, and be exactly the same as shown, character wise, camera movement, animation display. Can DirectX 9 really handle things that efficiently?

And an answer like "Yes, ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE!" won't help. I would like some elaborating on the details, preferably.

Thanks though, in advance.

Ofcourse it can be done, graphics wise there really isn't anything you can't do with DX9, Some more advanced effects might require multiple rendering passes or that data is processed on the cpu but they can be done, The game in question FF7 was ported to the PC using DirectX 5.

Recreating any game exactly is illegal without permission from the copyright holder though and getting things to be identical is always hard.
[/quote]

Not for distribution purposes I am doing it. Also, I need to know how I can simulate older-style DirectX 5 graphics, etc. in DirectX 9 so it will resemble the exact replica of FF7, no enhancements at all. Is THAT possible? How could you get a newer version of DirectX to act seemingly "old", like DirectX in the older days?

[/quote]

Thats really not an issue, DirectX itself has no impact on the quality of the graphics(The hardware features exposed by newer DX versions allow you to certain things in a far more efficient manner which in turn allows you to increase the quality but given a fast enough system you could get the exact same quality with an older API (The things the API doesn't let you do on the GPU you can always do on the CPU))), To make a game look old i'd start by using low resolution texture and models and a fairly simple texture filtering model (I'm guessing FF7 uses linear filtering which was fairly common at that time), Then its simply a case of not using any advanced shader effects (in the DX5 days almost everything was done using blending, multiple render passes and the stencil buffer, all of which are available in DX9 aswell (I'd recommend that you use shaders anyway though, they don't magically change the way things look but lets you do alot more in a single render pass and cuts out alot of the unnecessary passing of data back and forth between cpu and gpu))
[/quote]

I appreciate all the answers, but one more question:

Like in the video I posted, if you didn't see it you could watch again... I want to know how to get such a smoothly simulated look of a command window on the bottom of the screen where most of the battle control takes place. Any ideas on how to draw that, identical to the command bar in FF7? I'm kind of confused there...
[/quote]

Textured quads are all you need for that, just like for any other GUI really. (you can use a simple scissor test to make scrolling etc easy) (that way you can just move a quad with text up to scroll down and vice versa).

Writing a complete GUI system that is easy to extend and integrate with the rest of the game engine is fairly hard, but the FF7 GUI is almost ridicilusly simple (If you are recreating a game like FF7 the GUI will be the least of your problems)
[/quote]

Quote nesting is neat!

Really important question I could use help on with game development.

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Really important question I could use help on with game development.

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