AVALANCHE is not supported by Square Enix, and is not officially related to the Final Fantasy franchise in any way.
All images and original media from Final Fantasy VII are copyright their original owners.
Contents
1. Getting Started
1.1. Installation
AVALANCHE comes distributed in a zip file. To extract it, it is recommended that you use a popular decompression solution, such as WinRAR. Make sure that you extract the zip file with its directory structure intact, so that you have a hierarchy of folders underneath "rcube.exe" (included in the zip file). These folders should include "rcgame", "rcgame\assets", and so on.
Once you have correctly extracted the contents of the zip file, you may run rcube.exe wherever you happened to extract it, and the R-Cube intro dialog will appear:
R-Cube Engine titles use an entirely contained system for storing user data such as configuration options and savegames. So, when you wish to uninstall AVALANCHE, all you need to do is delete the folder you extracted it to.
1.2. Controller Settings
AVALANCHE allows a number of controller options, accessable by clicking the Configuration option in the R-Cube intro dialog:
An Xbox 360 controller is highly recommended for playing AVALANCHE. If you have a 360 controller connected, you can click the 360 preset button in the lower right corner of the Configuration dialog in order to automatically set up the controller bindings. You must do this before attempting to play the game with your 360 controller. For compatibility reasons, AVALANCHE defaults to a keyboard-mouse control scheme.
Throughout the game, AVALANCHE uses several icons (in menus and instructional dialog) to represent some of these key bindings. The icons and their meaning are as follows:
Charge
Movement (Forward/Left/Back/Right)
Item
Punch
Kick
Jump
For mouse control, the left button defaults to Punch, the right button to Kick, and the middle button to Item. The mouse wheel scrolls through inventory items. The default 360 controller layout is as follows:
Additionally, if your controller does not have analog triggers for cycling items, you can bind buttons to emulate the functionality. To do this, first you need to figure out the button numbers. Open the Configuration dialog, and push the button on your device that you wish to bind. The status box at the bottom should read "You are pushing JB##", where ## is the button number, such as 94, 95, etc. Remember that number, and open your rcgame/engine.cfg file in a text editor such as notepad.exe. You will see "buttonTrigLeft" and "buttonTrigRight" are both set to "0". Change them to the number of the buttons you want to act as your left and right triggers for inventory cycling. So, for example, if the status box earlier listed "JB94" when you pressed the desired button for cycling inventory back, set the value of "buttonTrigLeft" to "94".
If you notice that your analog stick's up/down seems to control the camera's right/left and vice versa, you can set the "joyRightSwap" value to "1" instead of "0" in the rcgame/engine.cfg file, and this should remedy the problem.
1.3. Performance Settings
AVALANCHE is designed to be played at a solid 60 frames per second. However, not all machines will be able to achieve this target framerate. Because of this, AVALANCHE allows for time-based frame compensation and other techniques to make gameplay continue to appear smooth and responsive at lower framerates. However, it is still recommended that you tweak your settings as necessary, in order to run as closely as possible to the target framerate of 60 frames per second.
It is recommended to first try disabling HDR, shadows, and character shadowmaps when attempting to increase performance. In most cases, you will also be bound by your video hardware's fillrate more than anything else, so running at a lower resolution will most likely make a drastic difference in your framerate. Disabling per pixel lighting is a possible last resort, but it is not recommended. The game will not appear as intended, and lighting or other rendering issues may be present. If disabling shadows, HDR, anisotropic filtering, and FSAA is not enough to increase your framerate, see the performance troubleshooting section in this manual.
When playing the game without HDR, colors may also not appear as intended. HDR allows for a much wider color spectrum, and certain assets have been made with that in mind.
2. Characters and Story
AVALANCHE features characters and environments seen in Final Fantasy VII, and takes place shortly after the events of the first game in the Final Fantasy VII series. It has come to light that a hidden mako reactor continues to operate, now outside of the control of ShinRa. Cloud, Barrett, and Tifa take on the task of stopping the reactor, with Rufus gone missing. The player takes on the role of Tifa, with a large arsenal of special attacks and unique items at their disposal.
3. Getting Into the Game
3.1. Singleplayer
When choosing the singleplayer option from the R-Cube intro screen, you will be led to the in-game title screen, where you may choose to start a new game, or continue from an existing savegame. You will have to select new game if it's your first time playing. You will be given an opportunity to save your game after the introductory mission.
3.2. Multiplayer
When choosing the multiplayer option from the R-Cube intro screen, you will be greeted with the multiplayer dialog:
You should fill the "Name" field in with your personal player name, whatever you would like it to be. It should be something unique, as it will be used to keep track of your persistent versus scores on your server or the host server that you join.
If you choose to host, the process of going into the game will be the same as singleplayer. You can also load up a savegame rather than starting a new game. Once you are hosting, other players will be able to join by inputting your domain name or IP. Remember to make sure that you have the port (default TCP 2119) forwarded correctly through any firewalls or routers.
If you choose to join, you will be prompted to select a saved game. If you choose to do so, your character information will be uploaded to the host, and you will be able to use your character and all items from the save in cooperative and versus modes.
Once in a multiplayer game, two more hologram pads will be visible in the lifestream hub. One will allow you and another player to enter into the versus arena for one on one combat, and the other will list the current versus scores. If the host uses the Mako Forge to save the game while in multiplayer mode, the scores will remain saved for future sessions.
4. Playing the Game
4.1. Mako Forge
The Mako Forge is accessable after the intro mission. You may use it in order to save your game, enhance stats and abilities, and forge new items with your collection of unrefined mako.
4.2. Game Screen
Mako Charges - This represents the number of Mako Charges you have currently accumulated, with the maximum being 4. You must obtain special Charge Move abilities in order to accumulate and use these charges. Charge Moves can be obtained at the Mako Forge.
Hitpoint Gauge - The hitpoint gauge represents your hitpoints. Black area is damage taken, and green area is your remaining health. Once the bar is emptied, Tifa will die, and you be taken back to the last checkpoint.
Item - This is your currently equipped inventory item. Some items are usable with the item button, and others act as simple modifiers that change stats or cause other effects while equipped. The equipped item can be changed in the in-game menu, or by using the mouse scrollwheel or gamepad shoulder triggers.
Mako Stash - This represents your collection of unrefined mako. Unrefined mako can be utilized at the Mako Forge.
Charge Meter - This meter increases as you deal damage, and decreases when you stop dealing damage or take damage. Your dexterity stat affects the growth of this meter. Mako Charges will only replenish themselves while your Charge Meter is active, and the higher the meter has grown, the quicker your charges will replenish.
Lock-on Pointer - This will appear above an enemy that you have actively targeted with the Target button. This allows you to perform a wider range of specific combos and directional attacks on the targeted enemy.
4.3. Game Menu
The in-game menu is accessable by pushing Escape, or whatever the Menu button is bound to in your control configuration. From the in-game menu, you can equip items and re-sort your inventory (for more optimal access when cycling outside of the menu), view your abilities, check your stats, and exit the game. The stats listed on the left side of the screen have the following meanings:
HP - Hitpoints, and max hitpoints. This stat can be upgraded at the Mako Forge.
Charges - Mako Charges, and max Mako Charges. The maximum number of charges can be increased by obtaining new Charge Move abilities.
Strength - Strength affects the overall damage that Tifa is able to deal, with her attacks and weapons. The stat can be upgraded at the Mako Forge.
Defense - Defense affects the damage done when Tifa is hurt. The stat can be upgraded at the Mako Forge.
Dexterity - Dexterity affects the growth of the Charge Meter, as well as recovery times and various other behaviors. The stat can be upgraded at the Mako Forge.
Luck - Luck affects item drop rates and other random chance events. The stat can be upgraded at the Mako Forge.
4.4. Basic Moves
Tifa has a wide range of basic moves and chains, in addition to her unlockable abilities. Information on unlockable abilities can be viewed in the ability description, at either the Mako Forge or in-game menu (after the ability is obtained). Some of Tifa's standard moves are as follows. Moves which indicate that must be pushed in a certain direction require that the Target Lock button is also held down (to prevent Tifa from turning in the direction of movement).
Roll - Hold left or right and push
Backflip - Hold back and push
Punch Combo - , , , ,
Quick Finish - , , forward +
Flying Uppercut - , , back +
Kickback - , ,
Axe Kick - , , forward +
Mixer - , , back + ,
Juggler - , , back + , , , back +
Standing Uppercut - , , back +
Final Crusher (requires Flurry, Ground Crush, Meteor Kick, and an equipped melee weapon) - , , , , , , , back + , , , forward + ,
These are just a few of dozens of possible chains and combos. Experiment, and find your own playing style.
4.5. Hints
AVALANCHE can be a challenging game. But don't give up! Here are a few gameplay hints that will help your adventure progress a bit more smoothly.
Upgrade Stats - Be sure to return to the Mako Forge to enhance your stats often, especially your strength and defense. These stats will make all the difference in how well you do early on in the game.
Harvest Mako - Returning to previous areas to harvest Mako can be extremely helpful. Remember to boost your dexterity stat for harvesting purposes. In addition to giving you faster Mako Charge replenish rates, the Charge Meter affected by your dexterity can also act as a mako multiplier. If the bar is full, you may harvest up to 8 times the normal amount of mako from fallen enemies.
Run Away - In situations where you can, don't be afraid to run away when you start getting low on health. Remember, if you die, you'll lose all of the mako you've harvested since your last use of a teleport point. It's better to cut your losses than risk it all.
Study Your Enemy - Each enemy has its own unique behaviors, and learning them will give you a powerful advantage. Likewise, you should think about which abilities you want to obtain next, based on the behaviors of the enemies you are currently fighting. For example, Thrust is a powerful tool for taking down Whole Eaters and Guard Dogs.
Bring Potions - In the combat arenas, particularly before you obtain Mako Charge Moves, potions and other usable items can be a great boon to your survival. Think about whether you want to continue upgrading your stats, or invest your mako in some more items to help you fight through to the next area.
5. Modifications
AVALANCHE has extensive support for user-created content. It also includes a sample modification, which adds an extra weapon. To access this modification, go to your rcgame folder, and rename the "examplemod" folder to "mod_example". When you run rcube.exe again after doing this, there will be a Load Mod option, and there you can activate and play the mod.
All mod folders which begin with mod_ and contain a mod.cfg file will be listed in the R-Cube Load Mod dialog. Feel free to look at the example mod, and experiment with making your own content. For more information on AVALANCHE modding, take a look at the official site.
6. Troubleshooting
6.1. Performance
If you are experiencing performance issues that are not solvable by changing normal configuration options, there are several more advanced user options that you can try. Go to your rcgame folder, and open the engine.cfg file in a text editor such as notepad.exe. This file contains a number of settable options which may help alleviate performance issues:
useJobThreads - Changing this to 0 will disable all multithreading in the engine. This will by all accounts hurt performance, but may help on single-core machines if the entire system is being bogged down by active threads.
singleplayerFrameTime - This is the singleplayer game tick rate, 16 is roughly equal to 60 frames per second (1000/60 = 16.6). Changing this to 33 will cap logic and rendering at 30FPS instead. While this is unsupported, unpredictable, and generally unwanted, it could in theory help even out extreme performance fluctuations.
soundChannels - This is set to a rather low number, under the assumption that some machines may not properly support hardware sound channel mixing. Increasing the value will lead to less sound clipping, but decreasing it could help performance further if your machine is not taking advantage of hardware mixing.
noSpecPass - Changing this to 1 disables specular passes, including combined specular light passes. This will save on fillrate, if you are fill-bound.
noParticles - Changing this to 1 disables particle systems completely. You really don't want to play like this, but it's an optional last resort.
If none of these options help, it is recommended that you check performance of other OpenGL applications and games on your system. Doom 3 is a good benchmark case for this. If you experience similar performance issues with other OpenGL applications, your problem is most likely related to your video hardware or driver configuration. You should refer to your hardware vendor for further support.
6.2. Multiplayer
If you are experiencing connectivity issues with the multiplayer portion of AVALANCHE, the first thing to do is try disabling any firewalls you are running. If this does not help, try making sure both the client and server are in front of routers or any other device that could block or throttle traffic undesirably. If you must be behind a router, make sure that the default port, TCP 2119, is forwarded to the machine hosting or joining.
If you are running under Windows Vista, make sure that rcube.exe is set to run as administrator. While this is not usually required for AVALANCHE to function fully, it has been seen to affect winsock behavior in a number of applications.
If connectivity issues persist despite verification that firewall and router software/hardware is not interfering, a last resort is to try another non-default port instead of 2119. In cases of traffic shaping or prioritizing, lower ports will often receive favor. You will need to experiment with ranges to see if the behavior of your connection changes.
If you are experiencing a lot of hitches and delays, you can open your rcgame/engine.cfg file, and increase the value of "multiplayerAckLimit" (whoever is hosting must be the one to do this). Try something like 10 or 20. However, if this value is too high, your connection may be flooded.
6.3. Visual Problems
In the case of visual issues, such as black screens, flickering, grid patterns on the screen, or otherwise unusual behavior, try disabling FSAA, HDR, and shadowmaps first. If this does not help, try disabling per pixel lighting. If this does solve the issue, make sure you are using the latest display drivers from your vendor. If you do not have a video card capable of custom fragment processing (a GeForce FX, or something after it), then per pixel lighting is not supported on your hardware. If you do have a supported card, latest drivers, and problems persist with all extra visual options disabled, you may report a bug on the official site. Make sure you include your exact video card model, as well as your current driver version(s).
If the display is too dark, and you are able to run with HDR, you can manually adjust gamma and exposure settings. Open up the engine.cfg file as described in the troubleshooting performance section, and you will have access to the following values:
hdrExposure - Increasing this value will make colors brighter and more vibrant, but more result in colors bleeding together at high intensity ranges.
hdrGamma - Increasing this will increase the brightness of the image, but may cause it to appear more washed out.
You should try slowly increasing hdrExposure (try 1.0, then 1.1, then 1.2, and so on) until the display is bright enough for you.
If you cannot run HDR and have display brightness issues, you will have to manually adjust your display brightness and contrast. If your monitor is not capable of this, nVidia and ATi both offer global display adjustment solutions in their management software. Refer to your vendor's technical documentation for more help.
6.4. Crashes
If you are experiencing a crash or hang while playing the game, make sure all of your hardware drivers are up to date. This is especially important for sound and graphics hardware.
If problems persist with latest drivers, make sure that you have Windows set to display information when a user application crashes. If you are able to get an illegal operation dialog to appear, you should take note of the Module the crash has occurred in, as well as the offset of the crash in the module (this will be a hexadecimal number on the error box), and any thread context or register information that is listed in the error report. If you can gather this information, please use it to submit a bug report on the official site.
If you are receiving a message that says "Time wrapped, restarting", you may have to set the CPU Affinity on the process to 1 core. This will only happen on configurations that do not correctly support performance counter queries on the main thread.
If you are getting a hard freeze or cannot produce crash information, but are able to reliably reproduce the issue with a specific behavior, you may file a bug report with detailed instructions on how to reproduce the bug. Note, however, that if the crash cannot be reproduced on another machine, and you cannot provide a module and offset for the crash, then the crash will probably not be found as a result of your bug report.
7. Version History
This is version 0.4 of AVALANCHE.
0.4
- Added Endless Battle. The Endless Battle is only accessable once you have defeated Sephiroth and finished the game. In Endless Battle, Tifa is pitted against and endless stream of ever-strengthening enemies, providing a challenge even for players with maxed out stats. If you can get past 1000 kills, you get a special reward.
- New font creation and manipulation capabilities for modders.
- Fixed several problems with the unsupported vertex lighting path (thanks to TifaTalk user lparcshinoda for the bug report).
- Fixed a bug where returning from the battle arena could cause Tifa to clip into the chocobo and get stuck forever in the battle arena.
- Fixed a string pool bug in the server logic module, which could cause unintended behavior after prolonged periods.
- Fixed a problem where Tifa could potentially get herself stuck inside of forcefields (thanks to TifaTalk user Mreow for the bug report).
- Modified SDK code so that debug builds do not cause problems when used with a release-build rcube.exe.
0.3
- Fixed the "time wrapped, restarting" issue. Thanks to Midboss for testing this fix.
- Fixed a bug which would cause the player's stats and game state to be reset when dying in the battle arena immediately after loading a savegame. Thanks to MatrixKyubi777 for pointing this bug out.
- Added an engine.cfg option called "joyRightSwap", which can be set if your joystick's axises appear to be swapped (up/down is left/right, and vice versa).
- Added a -skipintro command line option, which bypasses the intro dialog.
0.2
- Fixed several input issues, and added compatibility for PS2 controllers.
0.1
- The first public distribution of AVALANCHE.
8. Credits
Design, Programming, and Technology
Rich Whitehouse
Featuring music from Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream and Nine Inch Nails.
In order of appearance:
Concept, Animation, 2D Art, Textures, Original Models, Original Sounds
Rich Whitehouse
Some sound effect samples make use of source material from the following Freesound users:
RHumphries
carrigsound
Syna-Max
inferno
FreqMan
scarbelly
Stephan Matson
Abyssmal
zerolagtime
ERH
alienbomb
HerbertBoland
aust_paul
harri
gezortenplotz
Erdie
Dalibor
hello_flowers
Halleck
LAGtheNoggin
Additional source models were provided by the following turbosquid users:
(included models may be modified, animated, weighted, or re-textured outside of original specifications)
Razor Sword (Omega, Ein-Sof)
Trixigt 3D
Buster Sword (Buster-Yesod, Buster-Kor)
Dannyboy374
Axe (Midget Force)
dexsoft
Katana (Masamune)
TogaMario
Chocobo
enryke01
Glock
lkraan
Some character animations and models were reconstructed based on original Final Fantasy VII materials and designs.
All original media and concepts from Final Fantasy VII are copyright their original owners.
Special Thanks:
Shoko Nakagawa
The original Final Fantasy VII team
Hondo
Josh Heidorn (testing/feedback)
Bryan Shaw (testing/feedback)
Mike Majernik (testing/feedback)
The end user of this software agrees to take full responsibility for any and all damages resulting from its use.
Square Enix is not associated with AVALANCHE in any way, and should not be contacted regarding its use, support issues, or subjects otherwise related to AVALANCHE.