V-Gears/README.md

V-Gears

What is V-Gears?

V-Gears is a free implementation of the game Final Fantasy 7 engine, designed to work with the original game data.

It's designed to run the original game data on modern operating systems, making the game playable without the need of emulators.

It's free software, and it's designed to be cross-platform. It, of course, doesn't include any copyrighted data from the original game, but it provides an installer to get the required data from your own PC copy of the game.

It's a continuation of q-gears, which is an enormous project started by some great people many years ago, with the same purpose as this, but which unfortunately became stalled.

Gallery

Note that, while these are actual screenshots of V-Gears, none of the images, sprites, textures, backgrounds, etc are part of the project. They have been extracted locally from an original Final Fantasy VII game, and are in no way distributed here.

Field maps:

|Cloud model|Dialogs|Animations| |--|--|--| |||| |Climbing|Mid-jump!|Materia| |||| |Transparencies|Timers|Choices| ||||

Battle:

|Battle UI|Battle Flow| |--|--| |||

Menus:

|Begin|Main|Name| |--|--|--| |||| |Items|Key Items|Equip| |||| |Materia||| ||||

Installer:

|Installer|Advanced| |--|--| |||

Debug Tools

|Field maps|Walkmesh|Console| |--|--|--| ||||

What is it's current state?

Well, let's call it a work in progress... of a work in progress.

Things that work	Things that don't
A few field maps	Most field maps
Some menus	Some other menus
Sound (mostly)	Battle mechanics.
Saving / Loading	The world map, also in general
Timers	Minigames
	Party switching
	Shops
	Alternate controllable characters
	Many other things

If the question was "How deep into the game can I play?", then the answer is

Until there. Whitout cheats, and without using the developer console, it's not possible to get to the next wagon. The dialogs start looping there.

But don't worry! The engine is not fixed sequentially, or map by map. Once a fix is implememnted, it applies to all maps at once, anb big chunck of the game are unlocked after each fix.

In the meantime...

If it picked your curiosity, you can check out the history behind the project. Or, if you want to try it for yourself, maybe the build and installaton guides are a good place to start.

Or even better, if you want to see this done and want to contribute, clone the repo, read the style guide and have a go at it!