least one engineer joined partway
through the project. On FFVIII, Fong
says it was only five programmers,
but they finished the port in about a
year, slightly faster than FFVII.
(There are five software engineers
and two senior software engineers,
including Fong, listed in the credits.)
Porting Japanese PlayStation
games, at the time, was no easy task
- language was a serious barrier, and
3D graphics accelerators were in
their infancy on PC. Here’s Fong
describing the development process:
“As far as tools, we were just using
Visual C++ and Direct3D 5 at the
making interaction feel very
responsive, while the rest of the
Battle System screen refreshed at a
much lower rate.
“Different programmers did have
areas that they were responsible for:
worldmap,fieldsystem (ie, the
pre-renderedarea screens), UI
system,battlesystem, mini games,
toget as much of the
em’scode compiled and
thedata assets (models,
pre-rendered field
undsand FMV) were
heoriginal PS versions.
bviously for low level
emsthat interfaced with
hardware (eg, rendering,
und, FMV) we had to
eplace with PC-specific
versions trying to mimic
theoriginal functionality.
Something that the
leprogrammers were
dowas to meticulously
hememory usage. This
heircode to make certain
nsabout resource
suchas specific regions
moryfor character
d they were able to do
hanging colour look-up
palette) and manage
lystreaming of data, like
mmoning effects while
racter was playing the
g animation. We had to
e engineer what they
TOP: Each discipline
of the game was
assigned to a
programmer,
including minigames.
LEFT:Thebattle
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particularly
time. The Playstation
architecture was
obviously differentand
some of the code was
written specificallytot
advantage of that hardw
platform. For example,
UI programmer hadso
challenges becausethe
Battle System UI updat
up directly to the Vsync
update just the UI port
screen (bottom), somet
hardware allowed you
enabled the originalUI
screen to be updatedat
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etc.Wetried
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I recallthe
omeunique
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