Zodiac Engine

Zodiac Engine (also referred to as *Era Engine,* *Era Tools before the shift)* is the primary proprietary development toolkit created by *Mr. Branford* for *Chrono Trigger: The Zodiac Era* and *Chrono Trigger: Age of Omen.* It included a set of CLI and GUI for handling, creating and constructing 3D models and maps for *Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age.*

## Foundation

While it was created on the basis of following the limits of the game engine, it is actively updated periodically to improve features, such as the ability to allow extra bones from the original skeleton, custom bones names, custom materials references and additional weights. The pipeline did not consist of automation. All assets had to be prepared manually beforehand.

## Features

Era Engine operated under proprietary formats and handled standard features such as CRI/ADX audio and animation binding/editing and texture compilation. There were plugins to allow Era Tools to work with Photoshop, ZBrush and Maya (3D software). All of these programs are industry standard. Hair physics remained in the limits of the engine, and hair cards had to be optimized to mesh strands to be properly used. There is no rendering solution for hair other than the game's physics engine. Era Tools is cross-compatible with 3D assets of *Final Fantasy X,* however only for bipedal models and textures.

### Animation

Era Engine is designed to work specifically with motion data of the game. In order for an NPC or Guest character to become fully playable, they'd need to have all 21 motions in their hierarchy data; Era Engine allowed this possibility—in result allows NPCs and Guests to become full playable characters and use Limit Break commands and all weapon tier disciplines.

## Formats

Era-Engine was constructed from the ground up to have the capability to edit the game's binary formats within its workshop repository.

## Version differences

Zodiac Engine, formally known as *Era-Engine,* is the latest build of the development workshop created by Mr. Branford. Its primary additions bring new features and lift varying restrictions of model and animation data, allowing extra bones and skinned meshes to models, better optimization of hair cards and Post-Processing shader modifying.

### Character Models

Nyx, the first model tested with the Zodiac Engine, has 300 bones in his model, six times more than the 50 bones of the original character placeholder, and 332 bones via high-model, ~fourteen times more than the 29 bones of the original character placeholder; better usage of hair cards and poly mesh hair strands, four times the amount of skinned meshes, greater character and facial shading and fixes numerous bugs within the game's High Model Replace System and the processing of additional bones to the original skeleton.

### Gameplay features

*Zodiac Engine 2.0,* the latest build of Zodiac Engine, allows the modification of Quickening abilities in *Final Fantasy XII* and lua support*.* Debuting as *"Limit"* in *Chrono Trigger: The Zodiac Era,* this new limit break system features modifiable animation sequencing, and conditions triggering Concurrence sequences along with other various magic modifying capabilities.

### Environment

The engine also allows greater detail for environmental map sub-meshes, optimizing them much better than before and features such as lighting, tone mapping and gamma correction are processed more accurately.

#### Version builds

Zodiac Engine was declared finalized by Mr. Branford on November 12th, 2020, after the completion of *"The Forest of Moore".*

### Expansions

Zodiac Engine was expanded to work with *Final Fantasy IX* 3D models and was further expanded in the development of *Final Fantasy IX-0: Alexander Edition*. Exclusively, it works with other effects of *Final Fantasy IX* that were otherwise problematic and unusable by the player character, such as Kuja's Ultima ability.

## Limitations

Internal, engine-specific limitations such as polys per mesh, hair, bones and skinned meshes remained the same.