Return of the Tsunamix - Mods & Talking about all things FFVII

00:00:00We have an English guest with us today. So I thought we'd jump over to English and then I'll invite Peter to the discussion. Hello! Very different back then, and a lot has happened both in the project and also on the general Final Fantasy VII heaven, if you want to say that, or what the Square Enix company as a whole has done with it. So we thought it would be super nice to do a recap on all of those things, and that's basically why we're here today. Yeah. So with that, we welcome the man, the myth, the legend, Synarmix, into the... discussion yeah good to be here yeah so nice to be invited back on a second time yeah it's been three years so it's a past overdue to do like a recap of your amazing project but in those days you always have to start with the question how are you are you safe and all all that stuff i am i'm doing fantastic uh with my full-time job being streaming anyway at this

00:01:50At a particular point in time, life hasn't changed all that much. I didn't have to go outside and do a nine-to-five job, so everything that's going on right now hasn't affected me too much. I do miss going outside, but... Although, things could be said that people are kind of... becoming streamer themselves in life like they're forced to do what a lot of streamers are already doing like working from home having a lot of connections through the the internet doing like skype and discord meetings all that stuff that is like everyday life to streamers and video content creators that's kind of like everyone's life now yeah it really is which is pretty cool but yeah super fun to have you back and i think you're actually our first recurring guest yeah

00:02:38on the show, which is pretty cool. Very nice. I hope that's how it goes. Oh, yeah. It's pretty huge. So just to kick us off, due to that, probably many of our listeners don't know who you are and what you do and so on. You could just give a little bit of recap on what you do. Yeah, for sure. My name is Tsunomics. I've pretty much built my entire career so far around making mods for Final Fantasy 7, specifically. I do aim to go into 8 and 9 shortly. We have something in the background waiting to be released at a later date that should hopefully push that forward a little bit. I stream on Twitch. I have YouTube and Twitter and all your basic stuff. And I've slowly been building my own community.

00:03:32around the aspect of creating mods for Final Fantasy VII. I've made lots of friends, and it's just been fantastic. Even if none of my work ever actually finishes and gets anywhere, I'll be happy that the journey alone allowed me to meet lots of new and interesting people, and I've had a lot of fun doing it. Yeah, for sure. When we last spoke of you, you had just started Echo S. I think it was... You had released the first demo of the voice coverage. Yeah. And from there, of course, there happens lots of new things. But if we begin at that point, is the voice coverage project still a major thing, or has that been a little bit pushed back to what has happened with the development of that? Well, it's still alive and kicking. It's very strong.

00:04:28Granted, it's been three years since we last spoke, as you said. And at that point in time, I released the demo. And as much as I hate it, to this day, we still haven't technically got any further. But the reason mainly for that is because so many other things keep happening. Like we've started other projects and we've finished those projects and like new technology keeps coming out. Like the FFNX driver, which I'm sure we'll speak about at some point. And with Seventh Heaven coming out, so many things to take my attention away from Echo S. And at that point in time, Echo S was going to be like a full remaster mod in itself. And you'd be able to turn all of the different aspects on and off, like new music and sound effects and 3D models and all these different things. But then as we've started to get bigger and more people know our name,

00:05:24it becomes more risky to have things like the 3D models, for example. They've always been a little bit of a gray area, like legally speaking, because they're ripped content from other games. But even though we're not the ones ripping them from the game, it's still dangerous to re-release them. So Echo S now is going to only be a voiceover mod and everything else is now its own projects. Anything else that is code-related will be considered DLC. They're totally free. Nothing will ever cost anything when we make something. But they'll be like additions, just add-on packs. Yeah. Yeah, I do like that you're not really casting any shadow over that project. But what's the name for the project for Final Fantasy VIII?

00:06:18they have kind of, you are supposed to give something to the Patreon in order to download the package. Lunatic Pandora. Yeah, exactly. That's really like a shifty area in my view. The content, the original content is without a doubt under the umbrella of Square Enix. And when you build another product on the legacy of that, I mean, I can only see... a lot of potential lore problems creeping up. So, I mean, I think it's probably a good idea to stay well away of that, if possible. And that seems like that's just what you guys are doing, which sounds a lot more sound. It's even more so now that the remake is out. Square Enix are very protective over just the title Final Fantasy VII. Not even just the remake specifically, but everything attached to it is now at the front of their minds and they're watching.

00:07:17oh yeah every move yeah that that was happening with like we i followed very closely a long-term project called another metroid 2 remake and this guy spent eight years building this remake and then he happened to release it at the same time as nintendo released their remake like three months later and he was sacked at like two weeks the mod or the remake was there and then it was forced to shut down. So yeah, I think it's yeah, you should be careful at this point because they can, yeah. Specifically I think because not only is Final Fantasy 7 like front and foremost right now, they're trying to build like a new extended world on that branch that's well, at least the conclusion that many people have reached, like with the ending of the remake and there are at least going to be one or two more games, but maybe also side branches. And this would probably be a living franchise for like, I would say like the next decade at least. So I think, yeah, having to work in the shadow of that, I think it's just good advice. Be humble and do your own thing, but not even pushing it as something more than like a...

00:08:38a project of love or something like uh something that's important to you as a person and not to get rich or anything like that which seems to be exactly what you said uh in the introduction like even if you never get to finish any of it like the process in itself has been like super cool yeah it really has it's been an incredible journey like i i never thought that i'd ever be on podcasts alone let alone achieve anything that anybody would see and be like oh that looks cool i'm going to download it you know that feeling is really awesome and you also had a brief moment of being an esporter also i did for a short period of time yeah i was i was sponsored by a brand new game that came out on steam funnily enough

00:09:28Yesterday was their one-year anniversary. Oh, really? Yeah. That was really interesting. And when it came out, they did a tournament. I think it was for like $5,000. And the manager of my team actually won. Okay, that's nice. Which is incredible. Yeah, that's cool. And just to give a little bit of background, it was kind of like turn-based arena combat game of some sort. It was, yeah. Two teams of three. It was PvP, turn-based. It's actually an incredible game. I think it just needed expanded on a little bit. I feel like they got excited and they were like, okay, we're at a position where we can release this right now. And they took that step instead of creating a little bit more content. Yeah, I think that happens a lot, especially when you have something that's starting to look really good.

00:10:23Like, say, okay, we actually got something here, and wouldn't it be cool to get it out there and start working it in the prod environment, like, with people actually using it? But it's a crowded space, so I think that's super risky. If you don't have, like, a solid follow-up, that first, like, burst of interest might just pewter away, and you're stuck with, like, a half-finished product or, like, a bare-bones product. For me, at least, that game in particular, it was the sort of game where you could download... You'd really enjoy it for a week, and then you'd be like, okay, I've done everything. There's nothing for me to do. Yeah, that's like a good basic setup, but nothing much to do once you're through that initial burst. Yeah, they needed that thing that, for example, League of Legends has that is basically the same map all over again.

00:11:16They have so many layers of things that you can do and so many characters and so on that people stick with it 10 years later. Yeah, exactly. It's hard to do. It's super hard to do any version of games as a service, which is kind of what you have to do when you're into that genre because people aren't really content with just five basic maps anymore. It has to be like, so that was this. month's content? What's next month's content? When is the new map coming? When do we have new skins for our 10 characters and stuff? So it's probably super hard to be competitive in that genre these days. It would be. Just to loop back a little bit to the remake, what are your opinions generally about the remake? Because that was supposed from the beginning to

00:12:08Take away, I remember reading on the Quim forum that people, that Team Avalanche was about to give up. Many mothers saying that this is it. Now the remake is out there, but time has told that that's not really the story. But now when it's released, what are your thoughts on it? I could sit and talk about the remake for hours. Honestly, I think it's nothing but good. Because if the remake would have been a direct one-for-one, which is what most of the population actually wanted, it would have killed us. Because it would have been a one-for-one. We wouldn't need to mod anymore. But because it's quite vastly different, it's done nothing but supply us new content that we can imitate in the game. We could recreate the remake in the original story-wise, graphical-wise, audio-wise.

00:13:06It just supplies us with more things to do, and it hasn't took anything away from us. In fact, there are more people now looking to play the original FF7 with mods than there ever has been. It's incredible. My own Discord and the Quim Discord, I've noticed that both of them, since the remake came out, both servers have been gaining new members every day at a much higher rate than before it released. Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot more attention on it, and it's fantastic. Do you agree with the path that Square Enix has chosen with it to not only expand on the story, but actually twist the story and make it... We don't know for sure where it will take us, but it's different, at least. I'm going to assume it's safe for spoilers here. Yeah, I mean, if you tune into this show, I think you have to be ready for some spoilers here and there, so feel free to say whatever. But yeah, I was ecstatic at the way the remake came out. For the longest time, I was unsure of whether I was going to get the game, because I only had a computer.

00:14:25And I was at the point where I was like, it's going to cost me 300 euro to buy a PlayStation and then 100 euro to buy the game. And this is the only game I'm going to have because I'm not interested in any others. So is this game worth 400 euro to me? And eventually I was like, you know what? It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. This is what we've been waiting for. I'm going to go ahead and do it. And I'm so glad that I did. So that's probably the highest praise you could say. It was worth getting the console for it. Yeah, exactly. And I see so many people are controversial about the new story and stuff. And the only thing I can say really is that at no other point in your life will you be able to experience something you already love for the first time a second time. Yeah. You know, playing Final Fantasy VII for the first time ever a second time was an amazing experience. Yeah.

00:15:21And I walked into it knowing that, so I wasn't disappointed. That's the thing, though. I would stretch and say that most of people who got it day one were people who have already played the original and who loved the original. And almost everyone I've heard talking about it or talked to directly have been like, you know what? It was equally as good as I remember the first playthrough because we have all rose-tinted glasses at this point. We remember the good things. But when people say that this experience equals that, and the only thing I've heard some controversy about is the ending. People are not really sure how to think about it. A lot of people are more like, oh, we'll see where this goes. But I don't think I've heard anyone who hated it. Everyone's been either loving it or being super impressed at least. And that's pretty cool. Yeah. From what I can tell.

00:16:18The most common opinion is I loved every bit about the game except the last half an hour. Yeah, like the truckload dumping where they just poured content and theories and stuff on you. It could have been handled a bit more smooth. I'll give them that for sure. Because it was like, oh my God, a lot of stuff happened. I have to process this. But I still think when you think about the person responsible for this project, it's the brain. Like the real brain behind Kingdom Hearts. And what is that entire trilogy about? It's time travel, different versions, different universes. I'm not super surprised, now that I know how they handled it in Final Fantasy VII Remake, that a lot of that stuff seeps in. Because I'm thinking that he probably wanted to do that for the last 10 years.

00:17:09And he's just been waiting to get his hands on this franchise so he can do it. I think also that he might have drawn some inspirations from, I hope, but that's more me, I dream of that he gets some inspirations from Chrono Trigger or Chrono Cross or stuff like that, that he will bring in some of those. I mean, it's not beyond the possibility of, like, it's probably even... the most likely inspiration, like in-house. A lot of the people that have done those games are still around. That's one of the cool things about Square Enix, that even to this day, a lot of the talent is still around. I'm not sure you could take any other company of that size and say the same thing, because a lot of people usually go other places and start up new studios, but Square Enix and maybe Nintendo, I'm not super sure, but they have a lot of their main talent still, which is pretty cool.

00:18:07It's really cool to think that the remake was created by the same people that created the original and a combination of people that grew up with the original. Yeah, that is actually pretty cool. It's just perfect. And I guess also that many things that they are now incorporating was stuff that they had to cut anyhow when they created the original. So basically, the new content is maybe really, it's new new, so to speak, that it is. Things that they might have thought of the first time around anyhow. Yeah, they did say that there was a lot of stuff they wanted to put in the original and couldn't. And they were disappointed about it, so now is their opportunity to bring it back. Yeah. But what I find quite interesting is... Granted, the original game didn't express it very well. At least in English, because of the bad translations and stuff. But if you've ever played, for example, the Reunion mod...

00:19:01which is a retranslation of Japanese to modern day English so you can understand the story a little better. There were a few things that happened in the remake that people are taking as new content when it actually wasn't. For example, in the first reactor, when you escape and Shinra then decides we'll blow up our own reactor, a lot of people are angry about that. realistically that is actually what happened even though you don't see it in the original you go down to the basement of the avalanche hideout and you speak to jesse and she says was the explosion supposed to be that big i think maybe i did something wrong and then the president does mention something about framing you and wu-tai yeah i remember yeah so that was probably a subplot that they

00:19:53had there all along. It was probably a bit harder to spot because you had to be thorough and think about it. But I think, as far as I can tell, that particular piece of storyline was the same. They just had the video content for it this time around and like expanded dialogue. And Jesse was much more of a prominent figure as well. So maybe that's why a lot of people reacted to it because she was, to be fair, not a big character in the original game. She was there for sure, but... We didn't really know her. And I guess a lot of people probably didn't care as much either. I was very happy with the expansion to... Oh, yeah. Oh, so good. I mean, you could... Now that we know these people a bit better, the connection to their cause makes more sense. Other than like, why would we care about a couple of diehard environmental terrorists? Now we know that they have their own reason and where they live and the people they care and love.

00:20:52that was super good that they added i thought yeah it made the flight full that much more you know yeah what do you think about the art style because uh things that i got that i thought it was a little bit um not bad but it was a little bit surprising is that i thought that for example the slums would be more of neon lights and a little bit more of like this cyberpunk feeling that Final Fantasy has going, especially in the Midgar area. Now it's more like grayish, dirty, and so on. It's supposed to be dirty, but I felt in the original that it was a little bit more vibrant and more electric, so to speak. I actually quite liked the way it turned out. We don't tend to have areas. I know areas like that do exist in real life, but I've never personally experienced one of those, and you don't really see them on TV either. And if you do, they're usually sets and they're fake. But when I put myself into the world of Final Fantasy VII and living in Midgar, it does feel like that's exactly how it would be.

00:22:05would be like a lot of the houses that you see they're not even made out of bricks or wood they're just kind of sheet metal that they've lent against each other and up you know it's just a shelter from the rain it's really not a house it's more of a shantytown to be honest yeah i mean granted war market was a bit different i'm guessing like war market brings in money so they're able to do a bit more with that but yeah with the whole story being like shinra is the bad guy look what they do to us and then you see the slums you're like i i can i can get in this i i can feel it yeah i 100 agree with everything you just said i've seen the the shanty towns in like big big cities in india and they captured that feeling perfectly there's a lot of people basically living beneath the feet of middle class and upper class people that

00:22:59never think about them, never see them. But there's like an entire world down there that has its own vibe and people go through their daily lives, maybe not even getting in contact with other people. And I thought they captured that Chantetown feeling perfectly. And also Walmart, if there's a place that would be a little bit more spruced up, a little bit classier, maybe also seedier in some sense. That would be that area. And I think it was super good that they had the neon lights and the bars and the crowded, semi-creepy areas with slum people and villainous people. That also made the slums more like of a normal area. It just happens to be people where poor people live. But even they get to go to the dangerous area, which was Wall Market, which I thought was really cool. Yeah. And with the NPCs in particular, I noticed that...

00:23:50Granted, in the original, there's only so much you can do. But with the remake, walking around the town, I don't know if many people have done this, but if you watch an NPC, obviously they have scripted patterns that they're going to follow. But it's kind of interesting to watch what they do because none of them really have peaceful lives. Every one of them has a job, no matter what age they are, really. And even if that job isn't something they're getting paid for... It's just, oh, I'm going to pick up the litter around the town, or I'm going to move this pile of rubbish over there. And they did kind of capture that quite well. Everybody's moving around. You can see the struggle that they're going through just to survive on a daily basis. But at the same time, none of them actually seemed sad. No, you're right. It was just their life. They don't know anything else. They did have.

00:24:40What do you think about, because you have done or are doing a voice coverage project, do you think, what's your feeling when you start hearing the voices of characters that you have actually recorded and done a lot of work with? Was it like, oh, this is the sound it should be, or this was spot on? Interestingly enough, there's two different things that I can think of, the things that come to mind there. The first one being that As we know, all of the voice actors from the original, like the Advent Children, Dirge of Service, Crisis Core, all of the voice actors were recast. None of them are original. And what was quite funny was even with the trailers before the game was released, I would hear the characters' new voices and think, you know what, I actually prefer my actor than the new one. Like Sephiroth, for example. I still haven't quite gotten used to the new Sephiroth's voice.

00:25:37And I will forever always prefer mine. But I've like, because I'm effectively a director at this point, because I'm working with all these voice actors and they're looking for me for direction. And even though I have no professional experience doing that, playing the remake has helped me significantly with that because I've seen it done professionally now. And one scene in particular was chapter two in the remake where you've just blown up the reactor, you've escaped and you're trying to get to the train. Every NPC you walk past, you can just hear the fear in their voice. And like the children were crying and they were asking like, when are we going to go home? And is daddy okay? And stuff like that. And it really made me think it's like, you can convey everything in just your voice. You really don't need actions to get a story across like that. Not if it's done well, no.

00:26:33I completely agree. It made me think that even with difficulty, of course, but a blind person could play FF7 and still feel the same experience just through voice acting. Yeah. That's kind of interesting. But as you said, due to the remake, you have got a lot of new people that has... getting interesting in all the mods and so on and I guess that this was also not just lucky timing that 7th Heaven 2.0 was released because and that's for people who's not knowing what it is I will let you talk more about it but it's basically a package program for handling mods in a completely new way to what it was in the beginning so Could you talk a little bit about 7.7 2.0 and what it is and how you use it? Yeah, for sure. 7.7 2.0, frankly, it was groundbreaking. And it really did come at the perfect time. The UI changes alone, the way it looks, being able to customize it. The old one, to me, it always felt like it should have been run on Windows XP. It was old looking and it didn't feel very nice. It was all clunky.

00:27:55and the new one you know it's nice and pretty you can customize it and that alone the way a program looks can make you think a bad program is a good one oh yeah it like presentations a big deal and obviously it's not just pretty to look at it does so many amazing things it makes the user experience so much easier and it's but yeah it's got so many new features it makes modding so much easier It's just a straight-up installer. You run the EXE, you choose where to install it, and you're basically done. You'll download the mods that you enjoy, and you can click play, and the game just works. You don't have to do your load order manually anymore because it's got an auto-sort button, and even the catalog with all the mods in it got an update as well, bringing us all a fresh new experience, and it was fantastic.

00:28:48Yeah, and I can vouch for it personally that it is a lot easier if you have the Steam version with 2.0 than it was back in the days. Because nowadays you don't need, especially because normally if you just install Steam, it will install it in what you call it, a path where you need admin access and so on. And now it just copies it to... see something and it's just as long as you have it installed on steam it's just one click and it's you're good to go yeah exactly it's and i remember that you released a couple of years ago like an introduction how to get seven heaven to work with the 1.0 and i think it's like 30 minutes of copying files editing config files and a lot of stuff just to to make it to make it work

00:29:45Yeah, the original tutorial was about the same length as the new one, except the whole video was how to get it to work. Whereas the new one is about two minutes of how to get it to work and then loads of explanation of all the new features it has. You can literally do it in two minutes. And I think that's a really good change. The modding scene, I... could imagine at least for a person who hasn't really experienced it, could be a little bit daunting to get into. It's hard to know what to do and how to do it. So if that first step is a small one, you only need to download this program and most of the things will be sorted out for you. That'll probably bring in a lot of new people that wouldn't even think about modding their games because they're kind of afraid to break it, to be honest. But now two minutes intro and then you're good to go and you can see what you're doing. I think that's like a huge step forward.

00:30:38Yeah, you should see the sheer amount of comments that the video gets every day. People saying, oh, I tried 1.56 and I couldn't get it to work, so I gave up, but this is amazing and I can finally do it. I'm talking every single day, comments like that are coming through and it just, it's fantastic. Yeah, that's like the highest praise you can get. People who gave up are coming back in. That's just the type of people you want to get back in there. They've probably been waiting to... see what we're all talking about. But the technical aspect of it was too daunting for them, and now they can finally get in on it. So that's really nice. I should say in advance, though, just for anybody that's listening, I didn't actually have anything to do with the creation of 7th Heaven 2.0. Unabom was the person that made 7th Heaven 2.0. And because I got early access to it pretty much just because of who I am, basically.

00:31:35I loved the program so much and I said, everybody needs to know about this. So I offered him my platform to help advertise it and get it out to the world as best as I possibly could. So I don't deserve any praise for how good that program is. The only thing you can really praise me for is if you happen to have found it because of my channel. You basically helped to spread the love for it, which is super cool. Unicorn did a fantastic job making that program. Definitely. And if I remember correctly, you did the initial stream where the beta keys were handed out and then Strife90, he was doing like a follow-up stream. Yeah, me and Strife90. He's the manager of the Sunamods team as well. It was fantastic. We had so many people come by. It was amazing. Yeah. That was what you call like the hype train was real.

00:32:30It really was. It was actually a thing. It was. Yeah, it was. But when I first went to Unabomb and I said to him, I think what we should do is we'll do a big celebratory stream and we'll give out early access keys because we need people to beta test this thing before release day. And he was like, no, no, I'm not ready. I'm way too nervous. This is the first thing I've ever made. And I don't know if it's ready yet. And I pushed him, and I pushed him, and eventually he gave in. And he was like, all right, fine. I'll put my trust in you. If anything goes wrong, it's your fault. And I was like, that's fine. That's fine. And as soon as that happened, he was like, that was amazing. He just felt so proud of himself. That's super cool that he actually had only positive things to say afterwards. That's nice. Yeah. And I think also that if you...

00:33:24like to do something small for him personally or then i know because i asked him after directly that he has like a paypal account if you ask him on discord he will probably be super happy if you like to like donate a few bucks or something like that yeah yeah because the program's entirely free he put lots of time into it which obviously he didn't have to and Loads and loads of people are enjoying it. So definitely, it's nice to have your hard work be used at all. But if people donate towards something you've made, it's an even greater feeling. Most definitely. And in conjunction now with the 2.0 was released, there were a few other mods also that got a lot of attention. I'm thinking of, for example, the randomizer.

00:34:21that was featured by streamers like Caleb, Heart42, I think his name is, and a few others. And, of course, the new threat mod and your own scavenger mod. Yeah. Yeah, it was an exciting time. A lot of things seemed to have happened all at one time. The randomizer was huge. People have been waiting for a randomizer for FF7 for the longest time. like on 10 years maybe now. And David Sheaf managed to pull that out out of nowhere. There was no advertising. There was no hints that he was working on it. It just dropped one day. Everybody was like, oh my God, this is the best thing I've ever seen. It's super cool. And I think that if something will be featured on, for example, Games Don't Quick or any other speedrun thing,

00:35:18gatherings, then it will be the randomizer because people kind of love the randomizers there, especially for like Link to the Past or whatever, Metroid or whatever randomizer that is out there. Yeah, yeah. A lot of games do have speedrunning categories for randomizers. I'm not entirely sure if they're all forced to use the same seed to make it fair, but I don't know. But either way, that's something you can still do in this one or not. I think 50% of the randomizer we have right now for FF7, it's technically a lie. If you have the model randomizer on and you get into the first encounter of the game, you could come across a Tonberry and Jenova, but technically they're not actually a Tonberry and Jenova. They just look that way. Yeah, otherwise it would be a very short run. He's able to have any stats.

00:36:16grow with you, so no matter what enemy you come across, it will be a fair fight. But they'll always have the damage and the moveset of the enemy they're replacing. So it's just a skin. It's just a skin, basically. That's all it is. But eventually, I think he'll crack it and we'll get a real one. But talking about game-changing modifications, so to speak, not only the graphical and the sound and so on, you have completed your scavenger mode. And that's a little bit different. Yeah, you can describe it. The scavenger mode. Scavenger mode, yeah. That one's quite interesting, actually. The way the scavenger mode came to be was... I watch a streamer on Twitch called Death Unites Us, or he also goes by 48 Productions on YouTube. A lot of people probably know of the names, but whenever me and him started talking and we became friends and he understood that I could create mods for FF7, he pretty much said to me, I've had this idea for the longest time and I would love it if you could help me make it. And I was like, you know what? You're a big name. I can benefit too, so I'm in. Yep.

00:37:36Weirdly enough, the idea he came up with is already kind of in the game. We've just made a way to enforce it. It's that you can only use the equipment, the items, or the materia that you find in a dungeon. And by dungeon, what I mean is sort of like a section of the game. Kind of like the chapters in the remake. And every time you finish one of those chapters, you are stripped back to your initial equipment, you lose all your money, you lose all your gil, your sword will go back to being the buster sword and you'll have the bronze bangle on for every character. And you're just left with new game, basically. But you keep your limits and your levels and stuff like that. And you also keep three copies of the steel materia, the morph materia, and the enemy skill materia.

00:38:27So you can use those to try and steal from enemies and morph enemies to get more items to keep you alive. And it was interesting because whenever he said he thought about this, he noticed that many times in the game, you'll find a new weapon on the ground right before a boss or an armor on the ground or a steal from something right before a boss that will actually help you with that boss. And not just because that weapon or armor is stronger, it's... it's almost like it's designed that way. Like if you're going to fight a lightning enemy, a lightning boss in the next screen, you'll randomly find an armor that will have 50% lightning absorption. And you're like, well, that's a coincidence. Like with Geen Attack, the screen right before Geen Attack, you turn left a little bit, you get a chest and it's got an X potion in it. And that X potion is a guaranteed 100% insta-kill.

00:39:24on that boss. It's the game's way of saying, if you need a hand, I've got you. And we just enforced that rule and made it a bit more obvious. But was it tricky? Did you need to do something in order to make it, what do you call it, possible to beat it? Or was it by design that as long as you have these the steal and the morph and so on, you are always kind of able to survive. Or did you need to make any modifications in order to make it possible? No, it was totally possible from the get-go. In fact, people have made challenges where they've done the entire game without even shopping at all. So all of their potions, they'll steal from enemies or they'll win from enemies or they'll morph or it'll just be rewards for winning a fight.

00:40:20And I thought to myself that that was an insane idea because you lose your gill as well every time you hit a checkpoint. You've got no cure materia, you've got no potions, you've got nothing. So one bad fight will cost you your game. And there are people out there that have done it without even shopping. And you only get one cure materia in the entire game. There's always like this super hardcore grouping. They always show up. It's kind of cool. And there as well. You may or may not know this, but there's a mechanic in FF7 where the final boss is actually harder depending on how many characters you've got to level 99, as well as if you've used Knights of the Round. Oh, wow. That's actually true even for Final Fantasy VI. Kefka is much harder depending on how many people you are in your group and what level they have and so on and so forth. Yeah, and also what skill sets he has.

00:41:19magic heavy or physical heavy and stuff like that which is probably it's it's a cool thing although in that game you can still pretty much break the last boss fight if you level everyone up to like their maximum level but they had the the thinking was there already in six yeah and yeah people have managed to complete scavenger without shopping every character level 99 and using the knights of the round so If you know what you're doing, it's possible no matter what challenge you're doing. Yeah, but even for them, it's probably a super fun challenge. Otherwise, they wouldn't probably do it at all if they didn't enjoy it immensely. Yeah, more than likely. If you're not willing to put the time into it, then you're not going to get anywhere. For someone that just wants to see what it is, is there a playthrough on YouTube or anywhere you can see what it is before you try it out yourself?

00:42:16Yeah, Death has a playthrough on his YouTube channel for 8 Productions. I don't have one myself. In fact, even though I created the entire mod, I'm yet to actually play it. I just created it, sent it off, he tested it, it was like, yep, it's done, let's release it, and I haven't touched it since. That could be like a cool self-challenge to do at some future point in time. But before we go into the future, because I know you're eager to talk about the new NX Drive and so on, the current state with what you call it, your current mods, what are the big mods that you're working out at this point and what they do and so forth? Okay. So obviously my main one is Echo S. As slow as it is and... The fact that it only contains voice acting right now. But it has started moving again, which is nice. One of the tough things about doing it was that we rely on hundreds of different people to create this mod together because of the voice actors. And they're from all over the world. They have different time schedules. Some of them work. And now there's all of this stuff going on around the world. And it's been difficult. But it's progressing a little bit now. And everybody's...

00:43:42Even the managers of my team right now, they're all getting together and saying, right, let's get this mod done because it's been three years and we've done nothing. So that is a go for the time being. The next one is a really interesting one. And I haven't really put too much information about this anywhere. In fact, people on my stream have seen it, but that's about it. But there's a new one that I'm creating called Timekeeper. And what this does is I've added realistic time into Final Fantasy VII. It's not like a one for one. So one minute in real life is a one minute in there because you could complete the game in about eight hours and you wouldn't see any of the effects. So I think one minute is equal to about five minutes in the game. Right. And you can open your watch at any time and it'll tell you what time it is, but it will also tell you what day it is.

00:44:40What month it is. And I don't think I've bothered with years, actually. But it will tell you that it's like Tuesday the 14th of October, for example. And it could be 7.14 p.m. All right. And what's interesting with it is it's opened me up to so many new things I can do. Like the sun does actually set. It does get darker and it does get brighter. And the color of the sky will change depending on what time of day it is. And it also works on the world map as well, which is really, really cool. And what I can do with these, because they work on variables, and these variables are things that I can call at any time for anything I want. So we're also in the process. This one isn't going to be built in directly. Again, it's going to be like a DLC sort of thing for it. But we're going to create a difficulty mod for it where if you travel at night,

00:45:37you're going to wish you hadn't. Oh, so everything ramps up in difficulty or something like that? Yeah. Okay. Think of it sort of like if you're playing the game during the day, it's vanilla. But if you play it at night, it's suddenly new for it. Ah, okay. And you'll be able to sleep at inns and you'll be able to pass the time. You can sleep from anywhere between zero and 12 hours at an inn and it will pass the time if you don't want to travel at night. Another few things that it's capable of doing is when it gets to a certain time of day, say 6 p.m., the shops will all close and those people will go home like they do in real life. When it gets to midnight, all the pubs will close. And I think once it gets to about 11 p.m. maybe, all of the NPCs will lock their houses and they'll go to bed. So you can't go in and raid anybody's houses or anything like that. The only thing that's going to be left open is the pubs. Not the pubs, the inns.

00:46:34And it's kind of interesting to put this real life, this style into there. And there's going to be a few NPCs that will walk around, like Nightwalkers. They'll just take a midnight stroll and stuff like that. And another thing that I've put in is it has dynamic weather. So it will rain. You'll have high winds. It can thunder and lightning. And these things can also affect your NPCs as well. So if it starts raining... most of them might just go home. Also, most of them might pull out an umbrella, or they'll get changed and put on a raincoat. Stuff like that. And if you tie this with a 3D model mod that's got the realistic sense to it, it's going to work that much better. Yeah. That has potential to change the entire vibe of the scene, all of those changes. It does. So that's really cool to hear. I can take this stupidly far.

00:47:33If I wanted to put in new content, new quests and things like that, I can tie it to what time it is. If I wanted to be really cruel, I could say, I could put in a secret quest for the Knights of the Round materia where you have to press triangle X, L1 and select all at the same time at 20 past 1 a.m. on the 17th of January. I can do that. I'm feeling also that it could be a little bit like in Grand Theft Auto, for example, that certain quests are giving out shady dudes in the late of the night, but other ones are early morning things that need to be done and so on and so forth. Yeah, quests that can only be done during the day or done during night. For example, if I put in kill quests... I can change the battle tables so that at nighttime you'll get entirely different enemies. You'll get nocturnal enemies. And somebody could say, I need 10 teeth from this enemy that only comes out at night.

00:48:34and then you'll only be able to accomplish that mission at night. And then you get what Dragon Quest XI did really well, because that's exactly what it does. Certain enemies, you are only able to find them at night, kill them at night, and you need to do that in order to progress side quests and so on and so forth. I especially think if you introduce the mod that is a little bit of an enemy hunting side quest, And then you could really benefit of having certain enemies appear when it rains and when it's night. Something for it. Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm looking forward to having it finished. And what about your 3D model projects? You said that you're a little bit stepping that back now because of the ripped content and so forth. But are those put on ice now?

00:49:30Uh, for the time being, at least with, as you said, with the remake coming out, it's quite dangerous content to have. And especially with the Cinebots community is a big community now. We're very well known. And as much as that's a good thing, it's also a bad thing because Square Enix, I know that Square Enix know we exist because I've personally spoke to them in the past. The Night Sky Prince on YouTube has done plenty of videos about me. And there was an interview that happened with somebody at Square Enix where they spoke about the fact that members of Square Enix watch all of the Night Sky Prince's videos. And if the Night Sky Prince has made videos on me, then they know about me. So for the time being, at least, the mod for the 3D models is named the Cetra Project, but it's no longer going to be supported by our team.

00:50:26So if anybody decides they want to carry on the work and upload it themselves, that's their problem. But what do you recommend then for using... What mod do you recommend for 3D models? Well, I know it will pop up again, so it will be able to be downloaded in places. I don't know where yet, because it's still too early. But if that's not your style, then... The next best one to go for is probably Chaos. Chaos has done the main characters and all of the NPCs. They haven't done the enemies or anything battle-related other than the main characters. But they're in a stretched chibi style. So you know how the battle models and the field models looked entirely different? The field models looked like Lego, and the battle models were kind of detailed. A little bit. He's basically done all of the field models to look more like the battle models did.

00:51:24And it fits the aesthetic of the game, which is quite nice. So that's definitely the way to go outside of Etcetera Project when it eventually arrives on the internet. It's a little bit, not sad, I completely understand you, but you did so amazing work with Etcetera Project, and it looks really, really fantastic. So for those who have not tried it, it will show up somewhere, but it looks super great. Yeah. And I feel like even though somebody else will be taking over it and it won't have our name on it anymore, anyone who finds it, they'll know that a lot of the work is ours, but there'll be no actual evidence of it. And that's the bit that we're looking for. If our name's not on it, we're safe. But will this affect the... If you're thinking about Project Edge, for example, where it's a remastering of all the backgrounds,

00:52:23It's not really ripped. It's more like restored then. So that shouldn't be a problem. What's your thoughts on the Project Edge? No, Project Edge will be totally fine. He makes all of those 3D scenes from scratch himself. It's 100% custom. He just bases it on the original design. So that mod isn't going anywhere. And I cannot wait for it to be finished. His newest stuff looks phenomenal. Especially the reactor scenes that popped up yesterday. It's super cool. And I think this file count was about 78 or something like that, and it's about 600 scenes or something like that. But now the remake's out, he's got a bit more inspiration of what they actually look like from different angles and stuff, so I'd say it'll help a lot. And the benefit, too, is even though in the game it's just a 2D image...

00:53:17He created them in 3D, and he keeps them all. So eventually, what I'll be able to do is I can actually remake all of the CGI in the game by using his 3D fields and whatever character models I have at the time. That's really cool. And that can also lead us into your latest super ambitious project, where not really yours, but you're using the NX Drive that will open up a lot of new possibilities for the mod community. Well, yeah. The FFNX driver is created by TrueOdin. He's a member of my team now as well. And it's incredible. I don't really know how to put it into words, but it's compatible with 7.7 2.0, which is amazing news to begin with. Or you can use it on your own on the Steam version if you like. It's also compatible with Final Fantasy VIII, the same driver.

00:54:14So all of the effects that we get from 7, you can just stick into 8 as well, and it'll work perfectly. But some of the biggest benefits that this has, and Cetra Project is a good example of this, when you use the old driver that came with 7.7 2.0, a lot of the time you'd run into texture memory issues. Because us as modders, we're pushing the boundaries as much as we can. We're making 2K and 4K textures, and the 3D models are really high quality, and all of that stuff. But we forget that this game was made in 1997. It wasn't designed to cope with this size. And a lot of the time the driver will just, it'll panic and it will crash and your game will close. And it's extremely common. The FFNX driver won't do that anymore. Its limitations have been pushed up drastically. So if you even get a crash, you'll be lucky, in fact.

00:55:10But as well as that, if you were to reach the level of the driver crashing, it won't crash the game and it won't close you out of the game at all. It will instead just load a black texture in place of what it failed to load to begin with. So you can just change screen and everything will load again, which is really nice. That's a big improvement. It is. It's like expanded to one gig of RAM instead of like a few hundred meg or something. It was like tenfolded in extensions. Yeah, exactly. And it directly ties into the second biggest feature that it has is it now has support for DDS textures, which is the same texture format that every AAA title game uses instead of PNG files. And I don't exactly know what the difference is. I only know because they've explained it to me a little bit, so I could be totally wrong here. But from what I think...

00:56:06The DDS texture format is better because your graphics card in your computer, it's capable of reading the DDS textures much easier than it can a PNG. And one of the things it does with it is when it loads a DDS texture, it will keep it in your graphics card's memory rather than with a PNG, every time it's needed, your graphics card will load it again. So if you change screens, if you've got two screens and you keep flipping between those two screens, Every time you load that next screen, it has to reload all those PNG files. But with DTS, it loads it one time, and that's it. It's loaded until you close the game. So it basically caches everything until you end the session. So load times are faster. They're actually slightly higher quality as well, I believe, because it has something built into it called MipMap. I'm not even going to try and explain what that is, because I don't know.

00:57:02But yeah, it can load all these things in, so it's going to be faster, they're better quality, and a lot of the modders right now are already converting their mods into the DDS texture format, ready for when the FFNX driver becomes the go-to thing. Can't you just make that change for the Sestra project before you put it away? I can. Whoever takes over it, they'll definitely message me at some point. And I can tell them. Just downloading the combat scenes, for example, it would drastically reduce the load time. It will. Definitely. A few other things that the NX driver does is you can play at a stupidly high resolution. Right now I have my game running at normal 4K resolution. But then it has something built into it where it can upscale your internal resolution by a factor of whatever number you put there. And right now I'm running it at 9. So I'm running my game at 4K times 9. And it is unbelievable. Especially with these new DDS textures. Like Satsuki has his SYW upscales using the AI enhancement stuff that we've all been using.

00:58:30It's so clean. Yeah. And I think also, did you say that it will support FF9 also? I'm thinking of when Moguri is releasing his upscale work. It'll support FF8. I don't know about 9 yet. But the Lunatic Pandora pack and anything that McIndus makes for FF8 will definitely benefit from it as well, yeah. Yeah. That's really great to hear. And also, if I'm reading the stuff correctly, you can make a lot of gameplay changes, like animations, and you can have controllable summons, and a lot of other stuff also. That isn't... It's not FFNX that does that. That's another thing called Sister Ray. The reason these things may be... confused if anybody that's listening happens to have come across my post on the quim farms is that a new mod manager is on the horizon and this mod manager has ffnx built into it and it also has sister ray uh not built into it but they will be built together so they can work in harmony and the descriptions can sort of mingle towards each other but sister ray is

00:59:48Again, I don't have powerful enough words to describe Sister Rae. It's ridiculous. We thought that we could do anything to this game before, but we were totally wrong. Sister Rae has took Final Fantasy VII and has put it in the palm of your hand and you can do anything you want with it. It's videos, for example, that we've used to advertise it is in-battle PHS, which is incredible. So if you've ever played Final Fantasy X, The way that game worked was you'd have your three characters in your battle, and they'd all be good at a certain thing. And if you had an enemy that none of your characters could go against, you could swap your character out for another character mid-fight and take out that enemy with the correct character, which was something you could never do in Final Fantasy VII, but now you can. So I'm excited for that to come out and for other mods like New Threat to take...

01:00:42inspiration from that because I know that if New Threat and Sister Rae got together, it would probably be the best thing that ever existed. Yeah, just getting the ideas into the right people's heads so that they start to merge. Yeah. As well as that, sorry. As well as that, some other things that Sister Rae can do is controllable summons. Again, like Final Fantasy X, when you summon an Aeon. you control it until it dies. And that's effectively in FF7 now as well. We have these new animations and stuff. We were always capable of putting new animations in, but we effectively had to replace an existing one to make the new one, or we'd have to trick the game and we'd have to hot swap things in at the right time. But this just straight up allows you to just add more, an unlimited amount by the looks of things. For example, Cloud now has a Punisher stance.

01:01:41So you can do a specific move, it will put Cloud in Punisher stance, and then he'll physically counterattack when enemies hit him. I think one thing he's looking to implement soon is if... Have you ever played Legend of Dragoon? Where if you do an attack or if someone attacks you, a button combination would appear on the screen and you had to press the buttons at the right time in order to continue. He's looking to put something like that into it now as well. So if Cloud can punish your stance and someone hits you, you'll have to press a certain button as quick as you can for Cloud to counterattack, otherwise maybe he'll miss. That's cool. That's super cool. I guess then it's going to gather me a bit more depth into the fighting. Yeah. And bear in mind that all of these features are totally optional. You're not forced to use any of them. But to my knowledge, I have heard about the Sister Ray project.

01:02:33from time to time. But for me, it's been like a little bit of a unicorn. People were talking about it. It was not really that much information on the Quim forum. But will that mean that it has been done a lot of work in the background and now it has been like popped up to be a little bit more like releasable or what has happened? I don't know exactly how far off of release it is. To be fair, you could probably release it now. But what he's doing, it's created by a guy called Quantum Pencil. But what he's doing right now is every time he finishes a new feature, his brain will go, oh, we should do this. And then he'll want to do that. And then he'll think of something else. And I don't know how long it's going to be until it's released. But for as long as he keeps thinking of new ideas, it'll probably get delayed. Yeah, that's super common, I think, with creative people. When they get going, they...

01:03:31just go on to the next cool feature and you almost always have to have another person coming on to them. Could you please release some of the stuff you've done? Because we're still here waiting. And the same applies to me. That's why here today, three years later, it hasn't moved at all. But a lot of other stuff has. Will this also affect the possibility to upscale the videos or replace with new models inside the videos or stuff like that? I'm not entirely sure, actually. I think that's more of an FFNX thing, in fact. FFNX, again, it's going to be able to add, for example, like the original sound effects and the music, we were stuck using OGG files, whereas now we can use pretty much anything we want. And the videos, we're stuck using a specific codec. And now, again, we can pretty much use anything we want. So the quality of everything is definitely due to increase.

01:04:27We could probably make all of these things 60 FPS at some point. And it just seems like it'll never end. A game has been out for 23 years and we're still excited about new things. But will the NX Drive and Sister Rain, will they be somehow merged into Seventh Heaven somehow? Or will that be that you need to have... both 7th Heaven and then add new stuff upon that? Or how will it work? I'm not entirely sure. It's more of a question for Unabom, the guy that made 7th Heaven 2.0. But FFNX will work with 7th Heaven 2.0. I don't know if he at some point will build it in, if the two creators get together and work together on it. But if things go the way that I plan them to at least, our new mod manager...

01:05:22will probably take over 7th Heaven 2.0. And our manager will have everything built into it. But will the new mod, does it have a name yet? We've got one that we've pretty much all agreed on, but we haven't announced yet. I don't mind. We're thinking of calling it Prelude. Because, effectively, Prelude is the name of the song that plays at the start of every FF game. You know, like the piano keys that just do... That's cool. Because this manager is going to be able to mod FF7, FF8, and FF9 all in one program, we couldn't name it something like Seventh Heaven because that only applies to FF7. Yeah, it has to be more like a general Final Fantasy theme. Yeah, exactly. We needed something that went for all of them. And we were thinking of something like Sid's Workshop because there's a Sid in every FF game. Yeah, true. And somebody came up with Prelude, and we were like, you know what?

01:06:21That's a good name. From one of the things with 7-Heaven was that he needed to keep track on all the updates and all the mods and have the correct versions and test them out. And what I have heard from your project is that it will be more self-contained, that the modders will be able to upload their own updates and so on and so forth. Yeah, yeah. The way that 7-Heaven 2.0 worked when it came to downloading mods, It was kind of stressful on both sides. Strife98 and Eliza were the two people, they both have their own catalog of mods. They run the two catalogs that are available in 7.7.2.0. And if I was to create a new mod right now and message one of them and say, I'd like it to be in the catalog so everybody can use it, I'd have to wait for them to reply to me, agree to do it, and then set up the mod in such a way that it...

01:07:20can be in the catalog, which means I'm having to ask them to take time out of their day to do something and then for everybody to download it through the catalog. But instead now, with the new manager, there's just going to be a little upload button built into the manager. You can click upload and you'll either be able to upload your mod directly to our shared server or you can upload it to your own Mega Drive or Google Drive and just provide it with a download link. And as soon as you click go, that link will be shared between all of the people that have the mod manager, and that mod is just available instantly. So as soon as a mod creator says, my mod's finished, you'll have it just immediately. There's no middleman. Nobody has to look after anything. Yeah, that's a big breakthrough. Yeah, that changes a lot of stuff. Yeah, especially for three games as well, with it doing seven, eight, and nine. I think if anything,

01:08:18If this mod manager does really kick off and people start using it, people that are only modding FF7 might move into modding FF8 and FF9 and vice versa. So we could end up bringing great modders from one game into another and have even more to experience and play with. Yeah, it's kind of hard not to see how it wouldn't be a synergy effect there. A lot of people coming together and it's so much easier to share. So yeah, that would probably happen to some extent. I would think, yeah. Yeah, and if you get back to the basic and your streaming career and so on, what do you see the next year? How will you evolve your streaming? Will it be the same? Will you introduce new things to it? What's your plan? This year is the year for Echo S. 100%.

01:09:11Me and the managers of the team and the voice actors, we've got together and we've pretty much said, look, we've been lazy. We've done all these other things and they're amazing and everybody loves them, but everybody knows us because of Echo S. We need to get this done. I don't think there's a single other mod available for any game that is to the extent that Echo S is. I don't think anybody's ever made a voice acting mod before. And this may be big-headed of me, but I think it'll probably be one of the biggest mods ever. Like, for any game. At least that's my hopes. There's nothing wrong with dreaming big. No. So this year is definitely going to be that. I'm hoping that this year on Twitch I'll get Partner. Granted, I haven't been streaming for the past five months, basically. But a little bit of inside information. I'm quite a lazy person.

01:10:07Because streaming is my career and I don't have to go out and I can set my own hours. I sleep in and I'm just your typical lazy person. But I don't have an office or a studio to stream in. So I'm stuck in my living room and I use the TV and I sit on the floor in front of my coffee table with my mouse and my keyboard. Setting up my lighting and my green screen is a pain in the ass because it's the living room. I have to put it up before stream and then put it all back again after I finish. The living room goes back to normal. But it was about four days ago. I bought an entire new system for my green screen and stuff where I can just have it behind me, lift it up off of the ground. It clicks and I'm ready to stream. It takes 20 seconds. And that's due to arrive in three days. So hopefully by then, with me not having to sit and be like, oh, I kind of want to stream, but I don't want to set everything up. I'll just be like, you know what? I should stream now. Just lift it up, click, click, go live, and I'm ready.

01:11:07So if you're not live, you won't have that excuse anymore. It has to be something else. Yeah, exactly. And plus, with streaming being my job, the less I do it, the less money I have. True. I definitely need to get back into it. So it's going to be a busy year, from what you say. The ECOS thing is pretty major, and it's finally getting ramped up, hopefully out the door, and also getting back in on the active streaming. Something I could wish for that I think was really interesting that you did is if you could do at some point a few more of these like you had these tutorial streams for getting people into like how to import like a new background or how to like get going with adding a new model or whatever and I think those at least for me was kind of inspirational because then

01:11:59for people that are interested in doing new mods but not know how to begin. I think those are kind of important, for example. Yeah, all of my tutorial videos on YouTube, they're eventually, well, soon-ish, they'll all be privated, and I'm going to remake them all from scratch. Because just like our podcast three years ago... My microphone was awful. And I'm a lot better at it now, so I can explain things better. And new tricks have come out since then. Like, for example, when I imported a 3D model back then, I would have to use trickery to lower the polygon count of that 3D model because it was an old game and it couldn't take a high-quality model. But one thing I can say, because it's not going anywhere, I'm not going to be releasing it.

01:12:47Just for my own satisfaction, I recently imported the Remake Barrett model. I haven't had to chop it down at all. It is identical to the Remake Barrett. It is full, like 250,000 polygons. It's loaded. It looks amazing. I've been able to bypass all the limits that FF7 previously gave me. That's really cool. to do that. Especially if I'm going to be dropping Cetra Project and leaving it on to someone else, I want to be able to make videos so that person can come back and learn from me and continue my legacy that way. Yeah, and I think especially also as we've seen with now 7.7 2.0 was a big thing, but I think the whole community could benefit. using your name to, like, when you release something, like, now it's already out there, but when New Threat was released, or the randomizer, or whatever big thing, the Moguri, when it's released, whatever, if they could use you as a springboard in order to get new stuff out there, I think it would be beneficial for all. Yeah, it was... One thing I was really surprised by...

01:14:08And I don't know how stupid this is going to sound to other people, but for me being me, granted, I'm pretty well known on the internet, but that doesn't always come into my head because in my life, I'm just me. And whenever I came up with the idea of this new mod manager and I heard about FFNX, which was still very small and whispered about because nobody really knew what it was, And I read all about it and I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And I messaged him and I said to him, so I'm making a new mod manager. Well, the Sooner Mods community is going to make a new mod manager and we'd love for FFNX to be a part of it. And I was sat here thinking, this dude's made this incredible driver. It's going to destroy 7th Heaven entirely. It's just so good. Why would he ever want to work with me? He's going to message back and he's going to be like, nah, I'm good. But what in fact happened...

01:15:07He didn't say it to me, but after we started to get to know each other a bit, he messaged me and he was like, when you first messaged me and invited me to your team, I could barely contain myself. He was like, oh my god, Tsunamats has come to me. He's offering me a position in their team. We're going to work together and do something amazing. And to read messages like that, I'm kind of like, why? I don't understand. It does kick in sometimes. When I advertise 7th Heaven, I like to believe at least that 7th Heaven 2.0 was a lot more popular because I had a role in it and I helped. That video's sitting at 46,000 views on YouTube now, which is a lot of people. It surpasses any video I've ever made, and I'd like to be able to do the same for as much as I can. If I can advertise Sister Rae and FFNX...

01:16:03And like, you'll be happy to know as well that in my new team that is making this mod manager, the guy that, well, not the guy that created the Maguri mod, but the person that's took over it, the guy's Snows, he's on our team. He's going to help us with the FF9 side of everything. Mackindus is on our team as well, who is the legend for FF8 mods. And Sega Chief is with us as well. Who is the new threat creator? So basically, you're putting together the combined dream team from all of these different projects into one think tank. Exactly. That can only go to good places in my mind. I know. It's incredible. I sit here and I'm like, I can create mods. That's something I can do. A lot of people will look to me and they'll be like, he's really smart. He can do all of these different things. But in reality, behind the scenes, I know a lot about certain things because I've looked them up.

01:16:58But anything outside of what I already know, I'm a total idiot. I wouldn't know any of it. When someone says to me, what does FFNX do? The only reason I know what it does is because I got him to give me a guide for dummies so I could explain it. And people will ask me, what is the new mod manager going to do and how does it work? And a week ago, my response to those questions was, honestly, I have no idea. I just put the people together that did know, and now they're all working together. And I'm just sat there excited about when they talk about things that I don't understand because progress is being made. Yeah, yeah. So it's more like networking, getting people to talk to each other, and then giving you a condensed briefing about what they're doing and how it works. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the connection and the linchpin for all of these things happening. So that's pretty cool.

01:17:54Slowly but surely, I'm learning inadvertently. I'm watching what they do and I'm picking up on it. Just about to put a really far-fetched idea out there, but do you think at any point, now when you have all these talents and all these people and so forth, that you should go along and make an entirely new game? We've thought about it. We definitely have. Between all of us, we definitely have the skill set required to do it. It's just a case of if we ever actually bother doing it. We're all so invested in FF7, and a few of us do make money doing it. But, you know, in the pool, the entire community regarding FF7, FF8, FF9 modding, there's only a handful of lucky people. If there's 100 modders out there, maybe 10 of them are getting paid for what they're doing.

01:18:46And it would be nice to create one big team where we made our own game and we could all get paid for it. Because the thing is that when you have a name and a lot of famous people, so to speak, then it would be easier to create like a Kickstarter because people know who we are. And if you just create an amazing idea, then I think it will have a good shot at actually being founded. Yeah, exactly. And with us all being diehard Final Fantasy fans, you can pretty much guarantee the end result of us creating a game would be very Final Fantasy-like. Because we all know these games inside out. And it's the type of games you all want to play as well. So it would be weird to go outside of that box, considering the talent you brought in. As long as you do a turn-based, I'm fine with it. Yeah, exactly. It sounds almost too perfect, because we all know the games very well. We have the skills to do so.

01:19:42And anybody that knows who we are likes the type of game we're probably going to make before we've even made it. So it's just perfect. Could be a really cool thing. If everything aligns perfectly. Maybe in like three years when we do the next recap, maybe you have a new game then. Exactly. Yeah, you never know. I mean, it's not on the table at the minute, but... It's definitely something I would love to do. I went to college originally for games design because that's what I wanted to do. And then because I was still like 18 at the time, my brain set in. They're like, ah, you know, this is just a dream job. Get something more reliable. After actually making modding Final Fantasy VII my career, my brain turned around and said, hang on a minute. You didn't want to make games because it was a dream job. What the hell do you think you're doing now?

01:20:34This is a dream job. What are you doing? Yeah, you're basically doing it already. So, you know, that first thinking wasn't as weird as you made yourself think later on. Yeah. When it comes to Final Fantasy specifically, I think me and Makindous are the only two people that are capable of making money. Because Makindous makes a lot on his Patreon. Because his mods are fantastic. And he's basically the only person paying any attention to FFA. Yeah. Weirdly enough, yeah. As it was mentioned pretty much at the start of this podcast, he has the Lunatic Pandora pack, which you do pay for. Because at the time we were talking about the little gray areas and having paywalls and stuff on your mods. But Mackendous was really smart about it. Because all of the mods that are inside Lunatic Pandora are available for free individually on the Quimforums. What you're paying for in the Lunatic Pandora pack is just the installer. That's it. Super smart, yeah.

01:21:30yeah so he's breaking no laws he's totally clean and he's making money from it and it's he's a proprietary 7th heaven yeah he's basically built a client but he doesn't try to sell anything that he doesn't own so that's super smart but we have to go away when the your new mod manager will arrive at some point will that be a lot of business so to speak So we took this highly into consideration. With Makindus being somebody that's directly on our team and working with us, he did make it a very big point to me. He says, as much as I love the sounds of your new mod manager, I'm concerned that it's going to take away a lot of the money I earn. So we came up with the whitelist idea. And a lot of people have messaged us and have said, I'm concerned about the whitelist idea and paywalls and stuff like that. And just to clarify, a mod...

01:22:26cannot be behind a paywall if it is completed, because it is illegal. The only reason we have the whitelist, and bear in mind that people might not ever charge for their mods on the whitelist, ever. But the idea behind it is, if I'm making a new demo for Echo S, and I want to put it out to, say, 20 people for beta testing, if I set it to whitelist, I can get the ID number of those 20 people, because you make a profile on the new mod manager. I'll get their ID number, and I'll put it onto the whitelist for Echo S, and only those people will be able to download the mod, which is really nice for yourself when you're testing it as well, and just to make sure that the community doesn't get it all at once when it's broken. And for people like Makindus, what he can do is on his Patreon or in his Lunatic Pandora pack, when they pay, they'll be paying effectively for the ID number of a mod that is in beta.

01:23:25And when they've bought it, they can put the number into their manager. And Macindus will already have their ID number and set it to the whitelist already. So they can't just hand that out to other people and everybody gets it for free. But then they get beta access to his mod because they paid for it. Yeah, that sounds good. So it keeps in the fact that people can still earn money. I think people like Sega Chief, you know how much money someone like Sega Chief with New Threat 2.0? which is supposedly coming soon as well. If he put out the message on Quim and said, if everybody, like, whoever wants a beta access or early access to New Threat 2.0, it's just $1. He'll probably pay his rent that week and maybe the next week in a day. Very probably, yeah. But you can't, you know, in today's society, you can't do that. It just doesn't feel right on a forum.

01:24:20asking people, like, would you like my mod? Well, give me money. But if you do it through a whitelist in a mod manager, it doesn't feel as asshole-like, if it makes any sense. So I'm hoping more people will benefit from it as well. But, yeah, for anybody that's listening who is concerned about the whitelist and having paywalls on their mods, just know that everybody that is part of the mod manager, and myself, for example, we will always be on point checking that no completed mods will ever be on a paywall because we can get in trouble for that too yeah and another thing we'll be looking for is that if somebody creates a mod and they put it out they put it as beta their people are paying for it and they're just like it's not ready yet i'll add a new feature and i'll keep i'll keep working on it like some games on steam they stay in beta for five years yeah and you know we're gonna make sure that does not happen yeah yeah

01:25:19There will be ways to break the system, but we're going to make sure that they don't manage it. And then you could also introduce something like the Nexus mods are doing that you could charge for faster downloads and stuff like that. We could do, yeah. Because the shared storage that we're going to have is paid for by us. So with the mod creators being able to just put in their own download link as well, it's not something you're forced to do. So we could say that you could charge a subscription fee, maybe not for the mod creators, but for the people that want to use the shared server to get those faster downloads, a subscription fee of like $1.99 a month or something. And then you could also start to get paid support if people would like to get into that. Actually have tickets and all that fun, juicy stuff that you can crank up when services and so forth. But then you get a whole new job that would be a support job instead.

01:26:17Yeah. And everything, literally every feature that will ever have money involved, there will be a free alternative. 100%. So nobody's forced to do that. That's super cool. Cool. Do you have something else that you would like to state before we wrap up? Some message to the listeners? Ah. To be honest, I think I've spoke about just about everything. But if you're interested in Final Fantasy modding in general, like the Quim forums or the Quim Discord, our own Discord, definitely the places to be. They're full of nice people as well. So even if you just like talking to other Final Fantasy fans, definitely look up the Quim or the Super Mods Discord. It's always interesting. A lot of people are talking about the remake right now. It's theory season. It's great fun.

01:27:15And a lot of people are willing to teach other people, and maybe you'll find some friends, and you'll work together on things. It's just nice being a part of the community, even if you don't do anything. You're just there to be there. And don't make the rookie mistake that I did. Remember to click the Chocobos in the rules sections in order to get access to the other stuff in the additional channel. Yeah, I think both servers have that now, actually. Because there's nothing worse than being on a server with 30 chats and 20 of them you don't care about. But you're still getting dings constantly from Discord because people are talking about these sections that you have no interest in. So you just turn them off. It's a good feature for sure. Well, then we will thank you so much for having you with us. And we will hope to see you on stream in the near future then. Yeah. Sounds pretty good. But yeah.

01:28:11been super fun once again uh having a recap and shooting the breeze for one and a half hours about things we love and we'll we'll love to have you back on the show at some point in the future obviously uh but yeah big thanks and super interesting to hear about all the new mods and your upcoming projects it's exciting just to talk about i can never get bored of this stuff Well, with that said, we will wrap up for tonight and say goodbye to our listeners. And we will catch you next time in the next episode. Thank you and good night. Yeah, bye-bye.