Creating a plot for the 1.3 Community Project: ENDED

[Angstromicus]

A) VSMIT forgot.

or B) So people will be more careful with their voting

or C) So voting is faster, as things won't be as "up for grabs" after everyone's voted.

I suppose though votes could be re-counted at a certain stage in voting. I.e. blow everyone's votes into oblivion and everyone votes again for what they want.

[Retroboy]

How we handled voting for story in the original BZ2CP was through iteration. Everyone posted their concepts and a vote was held to see which held up. Then the top bunch were retained and discussed further and voting proceeded. The result was a couple that were tied so I blended them into a concept that stuck and resulted in a working framework. Then art got in there and started all sorts of interesting in-progress ideas to flesh out the resulting world. Looks like the first part of that's what sort of happening here too.

We also tried to stay more with the initial "backstory" and conceptual illustration of the races involved at the major-events level only, instead of designing an entire campaign with every event known at the beginning. This enabled people to create SP maps after the fact that could be slotted into the campaign, provided their starting and ending points meshed with the overall schedule of accomplishments that materialized later. It created the risk of disjointed storytelling, but allowed greater flexibility later and the mapmakers didn't feel like they had to be robots to some scriptwriter's wishes.


That being said:
- I'd vote against backward time travel of any sort. It's not a native concept to the previous BZ universe and can create a lot of headaches when people get into different visions and expectations of causality and paradoxes. It creates that horrible logical faultfinding Terminatoresque question "Well, if they could timetravel during situation A, why didn't they timetravel during situation B to stop A from happening?". Forward time travel is easily accomplished without invoking causality issues. Two possible substitutions are using distance, not time movement, to logically separate one foe from others until it's the right moment to bring them onto the stage (e.g. an ancient spaceship with a busted FTL drive on a 3000-year orbit drifts back into the solar system), or a cache or forcefield that freezes time within it until it's disabled or expires to reveal a new enemy or plot twist.
- Would be really good to revisit some of the original settings found in BZ1 and BZ2 as a nod to continuity and, at minimum, an opportunity to reuse existing models or assets. I still vividly recall the Mons Olympus missions on Mars and would love to see it again. Plus it closes the loop for players that might be new to the mod without spending a tremendous amount of time spelling out all the things that happened to get to where the races are today - pivotal historic events can be encountered and explained within the missions themselves as the players stumble across old wrecks or memorial plaques.
- Some concept sketches of major plot physical assets would be a good plot selling point. The art direction can help determine the race attitudes and aptitudes. As an example, you know from their appearance that the Cerberi are not the good guys, and the Hadeans' ship skins helped make them look very structured and regimented. If an artifact is central to a proposed plot, what will it generally look like? Sketches and early models can really contribute to ideas.
- Finally, the initial BZ2CP movie was a very good concept solidifier. When designing your concepts, consider how much work it would take within an initial explanatory cutscene or separate movie to actually explain to the audience what is going on enough for them to buy into the plot and game. The preamble to the first mission should be small and simple, and the work to get there light and easy to comprehend. If you have to take ten minutes of explanation to get to the point where the player can boot up a mission, that's too long.

[bb1]

The whole backwards in time paradox is what I have been shooting down this whole time without explanation and there it is for you. It is so much more mysterious to start the whole game off in the past and drop clues like "wait..wouldn't this be like this" or so on, they gradually reveal their identities to you, and near the very end you are like "...! This is THE FREAKING PAST!" At which end the game is already over... now you are stuck to the past and hear your character's final thoughts before he dies... So emotional.

As far as the movie goes...movie files need to have much greater compression before they can even be given a thought. How big was the initial movie file? 50-100MB? And the quality was (No offense intended to any creators, I know there were limitations at the time) terrible in full screen to the point it was hard for me to see what was happening. Lots of people have very high speed internet upwards of 7-10mb/s and faster, but even more are still stuck on DSL and probably lower. Big movie files look nice but are hard to distribute (a mod where 75% of the data is movie seems absurd to me unless distributed via CD or such) while small movie files are hard to watch and enjoy.

This is all considering there is no win-all compression out there, but for all I know there could be some miracle compression lying around. If so, sign me up for the cinema section as I love making rendered movies

[Clavin12]

I agree entirely about the past thing. Just saying.

[technoid]

As far as the movie goes...movie files need to have much greater compression before they can even be given a thought. How big was the initial movie file? 50-100MB? And the quality was (No offense intended to any creators, I know there were limitations at the time) terrible in full screen to the point it was hard for me to see what was happening. Lots of people have very high speed internet upwards of 7-10mb/s and faster, but even more are still stuck on DSL and probably lower. Big movie files look nice but are hard to distribute (a mod where 75% of the data is movie seems absurd to me unless distributed via CD or such) while small movie files are hard to watch and enjoy.

Just be sure that whoever is doing the compressed movies, they keep the raw uncompressed originals.  This goes without saying in these times with faster/better PC's and file capacities.   I recall that people were still clamoring to see the FE trailer in an even much higher resolution, even after Chipotle rendered and supplied 3 versions of the trailer, each at a different compression level, primarily to satisfy different download rates.  My recollection is a little hazy, but I think he also stated that his PC wasn't able to render the trailer at a higher rate, or something like that.    In any case, I think that if we aren't satisfied with the compressed ingame movies, as movies themselves, then at least supply them in the highest quality possible as separate downloads, to satisfy our eye candy curiosity.    I agree, the beginning Bink movie of the FE single player (the one with the ships in space) was rather crap because of compression. 

[ScrapPool]

How we handled voting for story in the original BZ2CP was through iteration. Everyone posted their concepts and a vote was held to see which held up. Then the top bunch were retained and discussed further and voting proceeded. The result was a couple that were tied so I blended them into a concept that stuck and resulted in a working framework. Then art got in there and started all sorts of interesting in-progress ideas to flesh out the resulting world. Looks like the first part of that's what sort of happening here too.

We also tried to stay more with the initial "backstory" and conceptual illustration of the races involved at the major-events level only, instead of designing an entire campaign with every event known at the beginning. This enabled people to create SP maps after the fact that could be slotted into the campaign, provided their starting and ending points meshed with the overall schedule of accomplishments that materialized later. It created the risk of disjointed storytelling, but allowed greater flexibility later and the mapmakers didn't feel like they had to be robots to some scriptwriter's wishes.


That being said:
- I'd vote against backward time travel of any sort. It's not a native concept to the previous BZ universe and can create a lot of headaches when people get into different visions and expectations of causality and paradoxes. It creates that horrible logical faultfinding Terminatoresque question "Well, if they could timetravel during situation A, why didn't they timetravel during situation B to stop A from happening?". Forward time travel is easily accomplished without invoking causality issues. Two possible substitutions are using distance, not time movement, to logically separate one foe from others until it's the right moment to bring them onto the stage (e.g. an ancient spaceship with a busted FTL drive on a 3000-year orbit drifts back into the solar system), or a cache or forcefield that freezes time within it until it's disabled or expires to reveal a new enemy or plot twist.
- Would be really good to revisit some of the original settings found in BZ1 and BZ2 as a nod to continuity and, at minimum, an opportunity to reuse existing models or assets. I still vividly recall the Mons Olympus missions on Mars and would love to see it again. Plus it closes the loop for players that might be new to the mod without spending a tremendous amount of time spelling out all the things that happened to get to where the races are today - pivotal historic events can be encountered and explained within the missions themselves as the players stumble across old wrecks or memorial plaques.
- Some concept sketches of major plot physical assets would be a good plot selling point. The art direction can help determine the race attitudes and aptitudes. As an example, you know from their appearance that the Cerberi are not the good guys, and the Hadeans' ship skins helped make them look very structured and regimented. If an artifact is central to a proposed plot, what will it generally look like? Sketches and early models can really contribute to ideas.
- Finally, the initial BZ2CP movie was a very good concept solidifier. When designing your concepts, consider how much work it would take within an initial explanatory cutscene or separate movie to actually explain to the audience what is going on enough for them to buy into the plot and game. The preamble to the first mission should be small and simple, and the work to get there light and easy to comprehend. If you have to take ten minutes of explanation to get to the point where the player can boot up a mission, that's too long.

Well the moral of Terminator is actually quite the opposite effect you suggest. The story suggests that no matter what someone thinks once they know the situation, that is the only manner in which the events could have transpired if they were to occur at all (if they were to cause themselves to happen via time travel), ergo: one cannot say "why didn't they just go back in time and stop it all from happening?" because if they did, there would be no story, and you would never have asked that question. It finally comes together in T3.

Although this is exactly the same reason I am against time portals and "easy" time travel, instead favoring realistic/relativistic "difficult" backwards time travel. Because they inevitably lead to that credibility busting "wait, this story should never have existed because a smart alien would use time travel as a very effective weapon. it is after all, time travel."

[Clavin12]

Time travel could mean immortality.

What if they didn't create biometal but where given biometal from say...a deity?

[iron maiden]

hey, just a shot in the dark here... do you think it is possible to include some sort of playable space battle?

[Mr X]

Time travel could mean immortality.

What if they didn't create biometal but where given biometal from say...a deity?

Thats some seriously theological territory that I really don't want to get into...

[Clavin12]

It is, but it would be exciting too.

[Mr X]

I don't think we should, no offence but gods have no place in sci-fi

[AHadley]

Maybe they were given biometal by the Promethians, who they mistook for deities?

[mrtwosheds]

I don't think we should, no offence but gods have no place in sci-fi

Not remotely true, they are rare, very rare, but they are out there. Usually they are fairly localised gods, they may or may not actually exist, the ones that do tend to be very strange and not at all friendly, caring, or loving, usually a bit obsessive about whatever they are Godding it over.
In a way scifi and religion are the same thing, but only one of them admits to being fiction.

[bigbadbogie]

I don't think we should, no offence but gods have no place in sci-fi

Ever seen Battlestar Galactica?

[mrtwosheds]

No. But anyway the problem with Gods is, you can't shoot them or blow them up. So their role in a game like bz2 is going to be fairly limited, now Demons are a different matter...