Hmm I say we must vote for anything that goes in. Here are some exemples:

2 Teams: 0
NPC's (Non Playable Characters) usage: 0
Related to story: 0
Short Funny Jokes: 0

Say what you vote for and I'll note it in each post and if you have something else to vote on say it and I'll add it as well.
I will vote after a few votes have been done.

2 teams: nah
NPC usage: yeh
related to JJ story: nah
short funny jokes: initally, so yeh

pageclaim in the name of.. well, just pageclaim.

Ok i will just vote:

2 teams: 1 (me)
NPC's usage: 1
Related to story: 0
Short funny jokes: 1

Voted: q4live, Jerrythabest.
And don't forget, if there is something you want voted on, say it and i will include it.

2 teams: not necessary
NPC usage: hard, but worth it
Related to story: not necessary
Short funny jokes: yes

Sweet idea. Let us follow my train of thought into the realm of the real...

If this is to be a serious project (which I would love), we should pay attention to some important thoughts before getting too carried away in the 'fun parts' of developing it:

1) It must be something that people outside of the current JJ2 world can relate to in order for it to be interesting (put on your marketing cap).
2) We must have commitment from contributors. Ambition and excitement are nice, but commitment is necessary for real achievements like this.
3) We must have the technical means to accomplish video and sound recording and editing, artistic drawing and effects, and other components.

My suggestions about these points:
1) Let's select a target audience first. What types of things can they relate to? Perhaps young teenage to college-age, mostly male, from any country, since they are also the target audience of JJ2.
2) We'll need video people, audio people, writers, artists, editors, and public relations people. There are plenty of American and British players who would be willing to volunteer their English audio (including myself).
3)For starters, I also have an unused, legal copy of Camtasia (by TechSmith), a video screen-capture and editing software package. Also, I highly recommend Audacity for audio recording. It's free and effective .

Other suggestions:
- Don't make a Red vs. Blue ripoff, even though it is a cool series. Ripoffs just never are quite as good. Original content is attractive.
- Keep the relationships and characters the same, but allow the plot to flow freely.
- Take special care to invent interesting plots, involving both physical and emotional conflict. If anyone is talented at storytelling or writing, this is you!
- Don't submit the work to any TV channels or places where it would be mass-publicized until it has had time to mature (at least wait until several fully-edited episodes that the community here enjoys are complete).
- Keep it FREE. After all, the goal is to widen and enrich the JJ2 community, not make money. If it really becomes successful someday, any incoming money would be in the form of advertisement or a third party, not the consumers. That's just the way online projects like this work.

Hopefully I don't sound too critical, because I don't mean to be. I just hope that this will take off with sound guidelines. It would be sweet if this becomes successful. I'd love to help out!

I say lets leave it easy:

- No NPC's, if we just stick to PC's (Playable Characters) we could easily make about a weekly or one every two weeks, with NPC's it'll take much longer and it would affect the gameplay, giving the illusion that NPC's are actually PC's.
- Not story related: viewers who don't know the game won't know what you are talking about, so a seperate story must be made.
- Short, random jokes are fine, as long as everyone will understand the jokes.
- If the game should gain populairity by it the best way is to show the gameplay with a nice own stroyline and in a funny way. The gameplay can only be shown through battles, but those battles can still be original.
- A site will be needed to support it, so people can find the episodes all in one place, and possibly a link to where you can download the game.
- At least one map would do for some time, but eventually a new map must be made with different layouts to be able to give it enough room to develop, and to prevent a monochrome view of the game.

Ok I think I've said enough long sentences by now. I hope this is the direction we are going, because it is possibly the best.

Originally Posted by Biohazard UOI

Sweet idea. Let us follow my train of thought into the realm of the real...

If this is to be a serious project (which I would love), we should pay attention to some important thoughts before getting too carried away in the 'fun parts' of developing it:

1) It must be something that people outside of the current JJ2 world can relate to in order for it to be interesting (put on your marketing cap).
2) We must have commitment from contributors. Ambition and excitement are nice, but commitment is necessary for real achievements like this.
3) We must have the technical means to accomplish video and sound recording and editing, artistic drawing and effects, and other components.

My suggestions about these points:
1) Let's select a target audience first. What types of things can they relate to? Perhaps young teenage to college-age, mostly male, from any country, since they are also the target audience of JJ2.
2) We'll need video people, audio people, writers, artists, editors, and public relations people. There are plenty of American and British players who would be willing to volunteer their English audio (including myself).
3)For starters, I also have an unused, legal copy of Camtasia (by TechSmith), a video screen-capture and editing software package. Also, I highly recommend Audacity for audio recording. It's free and effective .

Other suggestions:
- Don't make a Red vs. Blue ripoff, even though it is a cool series. Ripoffs just never are quite as good. Original content is attractive.
- Keep the relationships and characters the same, but allow the plot to flow freely.
- Take special care to invent interesting plots, involving both physical and emotional conflict. If anyone is talented at storytelling or writing, this is you!
- Don't submit the work to any TV channels or places where it would be mass-publicized until it has had time to mature (at least wait until several fully-edited episodes that the community here enjoys are complete).
- Keep it FREE. After all, the goal is to widen and enrich the JJ2 community, not make money. If it really becomes successful someday, any incoming money would be in the form of advertisement or a third party, not the consumers. That's just the way online projects like this work.

Hopefully I don't sound too critical, because I don't mean to be. I just hope that this will take off with sound guidelines. It would be sweet if this becomes successful. I'd love to help out!

I completely agree on every single point in that post. I'm not going to repeat them and say why I agree, just read my previous posts. Most interesting in your post is that it tells us we've got our first voice.

Originally Posted by q4live

I say lets leave it easy:

- No NPC's, if we just stick to PC's (Playable Characters) we could easily make about a weekly or one every two weeks, with NPC's it'll take much longer and it would affect the gameplay, giving the illusion that NPC's are actually PC's.

Although you have a point here I'm pretty sure only 3 characters will make a really sucky story. It may take more time to use NPC's, but the result will be a lot better IMHO. Releasing something with the same three characters every other week is more boring than releasing an episode where more effort has been put in every month.

Originally Posted by q4live

- Not story related: viewers who don't know the game won't know what you are talking about, so a seperate story must be made.

Agreed. Though once again we must not change the character relations.

Originally Posted by q4live

- Short, random jokes are fine, as long as everyone will understand the jokes.

True.

Originally Posted by q4live

- If the game should gain populairity by it the best way is to show the gameplay with a nice own stroyline and in a funny way. The gameplay can only be shown through battles, but those battles can still be original.

Not true; the game as far more than just battles. Members of LTP may stand up and start talking now.

Originally Posted by q4live

- A site will be needed to support it, so people can find the episodes all in one place, and possibly a link to where you can download the game.

I'm willing to sacrifice my time once more to make a website. It's something like a hobby. ;p

Originally Posted by q4live

- At least one map would do for some time, but eventually a new map must be made with different layouts to be able to give it enough room to develop, and to prevent a monochrome view of the game.

True. Glad we got JCS and plenty of people knowing how to use eyecandy. We can even have a different map each week but I wouldn't know why.

Originally Posted by q4live

Ok I think I've said enough long sentences by now. I hope this is the direction we are going, because it is possibly the best.

Never say your ideas are best, a combination of everyone's ideas will give the best result for everyone.

Come on, last post was 8 days ago, so I think I'm going to think up of a subject that will make it go again. Here are some ideas:

- The best characters would posibly be typical stereotypes. (1)
- Using PC's ould posibly be better than using NPC's, so it wuold be posible to make an weekly episode. (2)

These are meant as just phrases, not personal opinions, so if you agree on the first say something like this:

(1) aye

And disagree like this:

(1) nay

If you have something that can be added, copy the list and make it a three, or whatever number we are on.

Btw, as far as removing the status bars from the screen, just crop the top and bottom off the video to make it more of a wide-screen proportion, which is good for movies anyways.

Doing that will make it even smaller than JJ2's maximum resolution of only 640x480 pixels.

And once again I'm saying it's far better to make one good episode each two or three weeks instead of a simple Jazz/Spaz dialogue every week. So (2) nay.

Here's one of the stupidest and most obvoius ideas i've thought up yet:

We could not even use JJ2 at all!
All we would need to do is copy a few tiles into a Windows Movie Maker or Flash or something and pull the animations using SD and BAM! We got a video. Instead of prodding around Jazz Jackrabbit 2 using loads of triggers and destruct sceneries just pull the animations off of SD.

Note: To do character movements it would be highly recommended to pay attention to the character's transitions. In other words, when Jazz stops moving, he just doesn't suddenly STOP! He slows down to a walk or skids to a stop. So you would want to pay attention to animation transitions. The address for 1.23's character animation is 5A4F14 if i searched that right. I'm too lazy to figure out 1.24's so find that yourself!

Note2: This is a stupid idea I realize. I don't mean use flash for EVERY episode, just use it for certain parts of the episode when Jazz Jackrabbit 2 limits you on abilities.

Note3: I think you people are getting your hopes up way too high. Everybody's like "zOMG ppl are going to watch this is and join the community! We will be huge! WOOT!" But in reality this will probably be a fun little community activity, not a big major Blockbuster hit. Keep that in mind.

I agree on Note 3: one more reason not to put so much effort in this to have an all-new episode every week.


Also, did you finish your camera program yet, birdie?

Originally Posted by Drmoo

We could not even use JJ2 at all!

That would defeat the purpose.

LOL! I mean just use the sprites not the actual game.

Originally Posted by Drmoo

LOL! I mean just use the sprites not the actual game.

Exactly. The idea of Machinima is to use game engines to create movies. Thus, ripping sprites from Jazz 2 and animating them in flash defeats the purpose of making a Jazz 2 Machinima.

Indeed. That doesn't keep us from using any tools to put special effects into the boring world/s of JJ2 ;p

Technically spoken, Making it in flash is a different subject than what this thread is about. Some things like resolution problems, can they be hacked so you can use a higher resolution? And wouldnt it be easier to use the game, since you don't have to use flash, flash doesnt sound as fun as machinima and flash takes WAYYYYY longer to make than machinima. Added that the longer the gap between episodes, the more viewers lose interest, so it's better to try it weekly, wich can be done better with machinima

Or two-weekly ^^

There is a way to hack JJ2's resolution, if we may believe certain people here, but only one single person on this whole community knows how and he's not saying how (probably because that would screw the game for those who don't know how)

Originally Posted by Jerrythabest

Or two-weekly ^^

There is a way to hack JJ2's resolution, if we may believe certain people here, but only one single person on this whole community knows how and he's not saying how (probably because that would screw the game for those who don't know how)

I thought those screens were mock-ups.

If we can resolution hack, could we use zoom effects? I have a bit of an idea. I don't mean a jerky zoom out but a slowly zoom out type effect.

Well you'll get a pixelled zooming effect or just a change of image dimensions. You'll need vector sprites for a smooth and lossless quality zooming functionality.


Most of those higher resolution screenshots are indeed 'fabricated', but it is said that someone (I believe but am entirely not not entirely sure it was Blur) can actually change the resolution to values higher than 640x480 (and thus make the visible area larger).

Hmmm...interesting. Going back to flash, if we could take the level or whatever, if we could decompress it with zlib and make it into a...crap I can't think of the word for that type of image. An image that doesn't lose quality when zoomed out and back in. Well if we could make it into that type of image using zlib decompression, we could use flash to zoom out that way.

Also that would be an EXTREMELY interesting project. Get a GFX graphics artist to draw the sprites in vector format. That would be an interesting project but I won't talk about that here because I don't want to get everybody off topic right now.

Well, it would have to lose quality when zoomed in and out, because it is a raster image (composed of pixels) not a vector image (made of math)

If we convert it to 24 bit bitmap or something...

No... 24bit bitmap is just a different color depth for a raster image.

there's a way to convert so u can zoom out and back in without losing quality. I can't think of it right now though.

The only way is with vector images. Just take a look at TrueType fonts, they are made of vectors too. Try to type some letter in MS Word at size 1500 or so. You'll see perfectly smooth edges even though the letter (read: image) is zoomed in dramatically.


And btw, converting all the JJ2 sprites to vectors will be far too much work for this.

i'm not a noob. i know what vector and raster/bitmaps are and what the difference is. i cant think of how to word what im trying to ask. it involves zlib which i know nothing about. can we take a decompressed zlib j2l file and zoom in to 640x480 without it pixelating or is that too far to zoom in to?

Drmoo: zlib is a form of file-independent compression. I don't think it's what you're thinking of.

At the end of the day, if you take a bitmap and enlarge it ('zoom in') you can't pull the extra detail out of thin air. You either already have a higher-resolution version and fade between them (mipmapping), or you don't and hopefully use something like bicubic resampling to try to avoid pixelation.

As to the j2l file, I'm not sure what you mean by zooming in to 640x480. Bear in mind that the level described by the file could be any size, even a single tile.

uh, I finally get what drmoo means, I think he means to extract the whole level, and turn it into a bitmap, so he can zoom from one place to another.

Please keep coming up with ideas, it's been 9 days since the last post (if you read this, 9 days less). If we don't keep the ideas running without someone needed to make it go again, there could be trouble for the whole idea.

You mean you want a constant stream of ideas while Birdie hasn't even finished his camera tool? I'm glad you got a new computer with a big hard drive then ;p ...as I expect some more ideas here again

The idea sounds really cool, but you'll have to come up with some hilarious storylines, like RvB has, or The Strangerhood.

So, what's the problem? You sound pessimistic.

I, naturally am pessimistic.
it's where i'm from
(England)

I'm optimistic!!!

but are you old enough to be overly hating the govornment?

of course!

Gosh did you just answer that question? ...

Who's you?