I hereby hand an academy award to Jesta for a truely epic comedy/tradegy.
Oh my, I'm so glad Jesta found such an entertaining way to rant on...and on ..and on ...and on!! http://www.veforums.com/smile.gif
Also noticed in Somegirl and Gabeybaby made a guest appearence in your latest piece of work. I suppose someone has to argue violently with you for that honour.
Anyway good job and my suggestion for your next piece (probably entitled Nerf Wars where an unlikely chewbacca is armed with an apparently dangerous foam projectile weapon)
that you may get some original voice overs in, perhaps from the guys/girl around here!
Tell you what Shivoa and me can do the voice of the architypal evil English guys who try to subducate the whole universe ....hows that grab ya!!! http://www.veforums.com/smile.gif

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[---Illuminatus Admin Of Sacgamers---]

I know wav files are very large.. yet you managed to put all those clips in along with the music in a mere 3500kb... Were those clips 11khz mono 8bit or something?

I think the only clips that were 11khz mono 8bit were the clips that were used for the gods speeches. Other than that, the music and the other clips were all 22khz mono 8bit.

I was originally planning on releasing a version with higher quality (because most of the clips were 22khz stereo 16bit/8bit and the music was all 44khz stereo 16bit), but after I tried both versions I found that it was almost impossible to hear the difference since there was so much going on in the cutscene.

And while we are talking about the sound clips, another thing you might want to know is that since the music was pretty loud, I had to increase the volume of just about all of the sound clips otherwise it would have been nearly impossible to hear them. When you tell Scapex to play a sound clip while another one is already playing, it causes the one that is already playing to fade a little. But in the case of the music files, it was still pretty loud even when it was faded, so I had no choice but to increase the volume of just about all of the sound clips. That's why some of them may sound a little too loud when you play them individually inside of Scapex.

The down side is, you can usually hear static or something else in the background of the sound clips that you wouldn't hear normally unless you set your speaker volume all the way up.

Ah well, that was something I couldn't avoid unless I decreased the volume of the music, but I thought the music was more important so I did it the other way around.

/me grimaces and commends Jesta

Wow... I havent been following the flame wars but I am impressed with scapex's movie creating abilities!

The one quam I had was with how discursive it all was (like the gos just popping in to say quotes...)

also it would have been funnier if you somehow used the actual voices of the gods for cuts either by having them say things out of place (e.g. Stratos' "mmm-mm-mn-mm-mm-mm" right after a raunchy scene) or if you could with audio tools take diferent parts of quotes and put em together (that would be hard though). Oh! wasn't the voice of stratos in some horror movie? if so maybe you could use that?

all in all I would have to say my fav scene was the opening troll dance... (it reminded me of the Super Smash Bros comercial)

keep up the good work!

Oldies are funny. Especially when heard in the context of battle. Pretty funny, Jesta, but I was confused by the ending. I guess I just haven't been here long enough to understand it. Keep up the good work.

TheMad

Great movie jesta...i found the somegirl bashing to be pretty damn funny =)

Procrustes: The clip you heard of Stratos was from the movie Dogma. When the god interlude was over, and you hear the Troll say, "Kiss me before you go, for I love you," that sound clip was from Tim Curry (the actor who did the voice of Stratos) in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

After I looked at the flashback scene a few times, I didn't know why I threw that in there either at first. I was really just testing the gods' different videos (they have 3 different ones..happy angry and normal) with a sound clip that I felt was approriate for each god, and was planning on taking them out after testing them, but then after I watched the cutscene like that, I realized that it added a lot of humor to the thing, so I stuck with it just to suddenly take you off the "serious attitude" of the cutscene. If you saw how this thing was a week ago, you wouldn't have been laughing at all. There was some stuff that I got rid of because it wasn't funny at all and was down right offensive, made the whole thing feel like a serious and sick cutscene. So in other words, that expermineting I did with the sudden god interlude was what gave me the whole idea to make the whole thing humorous.

It just got to a point where the ratio of humor to seriousness was 10 to 90, and that is not the type of person I am or what I wanted to see, and after I tested out those spontaneous god clips, it gave me the idea to edit the whole thing and fill it with wise cracks and jokes in order to get rid of the gloomy serious tone it had before. The revenge portion of the cutscene really doesn't have much humor in it at all, and I left it the way it was to show you that I was aiming for 90% humor and 10% seriousness.

If the Sacrifice campaign were more like Giants single player, I would have liked it a lot more. Giants had a slight touch of serious in it and was majority humor, while Sacrifice was vice versa.

Now that I think about it some more, the best reason why I left the god interlude in there was probably to inform you not to take the Troll's situation that seriously. (Like finding out your special someone is cheating on you and then getting the idea of killing off his/her family for revenge, if you know what I mean, hehe.. http://www.veforums.com/wink.gif)

Hell, I know a ton of things that I could have done to make it better, but I got to a point where I was tired of deciding what to put in and what to get rid of, and after watching this verison, it turned out to have the equal balance of everything that I wanted, so I decided to release it and call it a day. I wanted several flashbacks instead of just one (including a wedding scene between the Sylph and the Troll), but I had to take size into consideration since you have to remember this is a nonplayable map, and I thought making the map any bigger than it currently is was just not fair for people who weren't really interested in a cutscene in the first place.

To tell you the truth, this cutscene was really just an inspirational type of thing about fun. I mean, if I really wanted to make an epic long 20 meg movie that showed the chronology of their relationship, I probably would have, but this cutscene was something I was doing on the side while playing Sacrifice and coming to these forums, so I chose the 7 minute ad approach. At one point in time, and I even mentioned this to everyone last week or so, the community on this forum completely "disrupted" (or is it disgusted?) me from even wanting to do anymore cutscenes at all, but then when I finally got over that crap (or did I? http://www.veforums.com/tongue.gif), I decided to completely toss out some of those small extra things I was going to do in the cutscene, and replaced them with the forum bashing footage just to show people what I thought about the whole situation from a week or two ago.

So this might explain to you why you get the feeling that some of the content on the cutscene seems like it "could have been better" ..... or maybe a better choice of words would have been, "stripped away by some forum issues I had to address." http://www.veforums.com/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by Jesta (edited 01-27-2001).]

LoL, that thing cracked me up.

Jesta, you could do some real nice movies in Scapex http://www.veforums.com/smile.gif

/me hands Jesta and Academy Award

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"Would that guy just shut the hell up. Talk about
an ego. You give him the opportunity to do the
credits, and look what happens. Crap, pure crap." - Charlotte

This deservers a bump. To the top, I say!