Wednesday, July 30, 2014

EF-12...my latest obsession


This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. It's a totally free, totally customisable fighting game engine made by a guy who worked on the Tekken series. I've always wanted to make  a console-style fighting game and this framework makes that possible. I've been talking to the EF-12 creator, Masahiro Onoguchi, and he's a super cool guy. He needed some help with translation for some of his documentation and I volunteered. Having a lot of fun learning how his engine works. Pretty amazing stuff.

Here's a link to the official U.S. download for EF-12 if anyone is interested:


You can get content into EF-12 via Maya, Softimage or Blender. Basically, anything that can generate a Collada file should work.


3 comments:

Tom Moon said...

Wow, that's pretty impressive. But I wonder how many users have the time, energy and skill to do something really good with it? Maybe a lot, judging by how much time users of SOE games would spend designing and erecting buildings, costumes and weapons in such games as EQ2, Planetside 2, Free Realms and Landmark.

Surly Bird said...

It's a legit question, Tom. It is a serious pro-level engine, but is designed to be friendly to modders. Working with it reminds me of my earliest forays into game development when I was making mods for Quake, hoping to land a pro gig. There are some similarities to mods for a shooter, but since this is a fighter, there a big differences, too, naturally.

Definitely has a learning curve, but most of the difficulty has come from the language barrier and learning how to work with spreadsheets. The thing that makes it so flexible is that it so much of it is data-driven. Learning how to make changes to the data is really key to getting everything out of the fighting templates that are part of the framework.

MrGoodson2 said...

Brings me way back to an early E3. A fight game that had people in a cluster around it. Some of the first 3D. Virtua Fighter. (I had to look it up. )
It looks like fun. But it would take stick-to-it-nive-ness that I don't possess.