The Project We’ve Been Waiting 11,000 Years For

Introduction

Hey everyone! For anyone who isn’t already familiar with me, I’m Monoxide, the developer working on the Legend of Dragoon PC port. I’ve been working on the project for the past two years (11,000 years might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s felt like it at times.) The goal of the project is to port Legend of Dragoon to modern platforms (PC, mobile, etc.), with no emulation, using real game assets for a 100% faithful experience.

Introductions aside, I’d like to talk about some exciting milestones we’ve hit recently. As of writing this, the first disk is fully playable, and other disks are mostly playable too with a few caveats. We’ve also made a lot of progress on fixing graphical glitches (along with some fun graphics experiments – more on that in a bit). It’s been a long road to get here, which I think I can sum up with a single gif:

And yes, that was the actual frame rate when I first got submap rendering “working”.

New Livestream Series

Starting on the 23rd of September we’ll be hosting a weekly livestream where DrewUniverse plays through the first disk on the PC port while we discuss things like the highs and the lows of the project, and what to expect in the future. We hope you’ll join us for an hour or two each Friday at 7:00 PM CDT. Find out when it starts in your own time zone with just one click.

Speaking of the the future…

The Future

I’ve had a lot of people ask about our plans for the future. As mentioned in the intro, the goal of the project is to create an experience 100% faithful to the original, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be some changes. For example, we’re cutting loading times down to near-zero, and there’s no limit on how many saved games you can have. We also have plans to implement quality of life changes like an in-game load game menu so you don’t have to restart the game to load a save.

We can also push the game assets to the limit, rendering them at much higher resolution than the PS1 ever dreamed of.

Oh, and the modding API, but that’s a topic for another day.

Closing

It’s been a pretty wild ride getting to this point, and I would never have made it without the help from other modders. All I can say is, I’m happy to be a part of Legend of Dragoon’s future.

If you have any questions, or just want to discuss the project, head over to #modding in the Discord server.

– Monoxide