I posted in another topic some CD-quality recordings of the game music on YouTube.
Since my old account from many years ago has been lost, I felt I should reintroduce myself.
I joined long ago to share maps I hacked out of the game and converted to .MAP to load into Hammer/WorldCraft. These geometry blue prints could be used to get absolutely perfect geometry conversions so as to avoid any issues with proportions and scale.
I am a video-game developer. I was a senior graphics programmer on Final Fantasy XV at Square Enix, and before that I was an R&D programmer on Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, Phantasy Star Nova, Silent Scope: Bone Eater, and a bunch of games spanning back many years, including Ghost Recon 2, 187 Ride or Die, etc.
Rare put out many hit games that, as a child, made me want to move to England and work at Rare. I decided not to join Rare after they got bought by Microsoft, but I did move to England and make games near Twycross. I am real-life friends with some of the developers of GoldenEye 007, including one of the composers, as well as friends with several people currently at Rare.
As GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark were heavily influential on my childhood and steered me towards making video games in England, it is quite a unique joy to talk with the people who worked directly on the games and hear their stories about those days long ago.
Similarly, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII are the reasons I joined Square Enix in Japan—another childhood goal of mine was to work on a Final Fantasy game in Japan at Square (later Square Enix)—and there I did language exchanges (I helped him with English 1 day each week, he helped me with Japanese 1 day each week) with a developer on Chrono Trigger, and again it was a unique joy to hear the stories of those working directly on the games. As an example, he made the bike race in Chrono Trigger, and he said it was so cycle-intensive that all of the logic for the bike race is actually branchless.
As for my own work on Final Fantasy XV, I implemented the shadows, 50% of the clouds (there are 2 algorithms—I implemented the fluffy puffy clouds while the other algorithm does thinner wispier clouds), dynamic resolutions, and lots of optimizations. I sharpened texture mipmaps and increased the texture quality throughout the game significantly.
I also did motion captures for Noctis, Ignis, Gladiolus, and a bunch of NPC’s.
This is “me” sitting.
I have been a fan of GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark since they came out, and last time I came around it was to share ripped geometry.
I’ve made advancements on my old tool and it exports much better, simpler, and robust geometry, and can now position textures automatically.
I can share new .MAP files if there is interest, although I expect by now there is no work being done on geometry anymore.
My main share this time is the release of CD-quality recordings of the game music. If there is interest, I can send the original .WAV files (no MP3 compression, no YouTube compression) which could be used as a soundtrack for the mod.
L. Spiro
