Attention! About the series.

[SinfulSoul]

In the Gundam Wing series, they started each episode with a brief narration to explain major events of importance. It helped set the mood and allowed description of setting. It also proved motives and such, but the most important thing it did was explain politics briefly without boring the viewers with mindless arguing that in the full spectrum of things had little impact. The impact on politics in this RP is made through a large collection of discussions. A brief narration with appropriate intro music and a simple background is all that is needed, and you immediately fix your problems. You can briefly narrate all the events you wish and be free to begin where ever you want. I think it would make sense to begin from the first conflict that made its way here.

The first conflict occured with the announcement that Earth had a Gundam during the time of peace. The development of a gundam on Earth spurred panic throughout the colonies, and through heated unsuccessful diplomacy between the Earth Nations and the Colonies, both sides began to build arms. Eventually an Earthling terrorist made an attack on one of the colonies and fled to Earth. The Colonies sent a team of Taurus suits along with three colony leaders: Zhelir (L04 leader), Kaden (L05 leader), and at the time the sole supreme leader of the colonies, General Sin. They persued the terrorist down to Earth and were ambushed. (Insert first battle scene here) They captured the terrorist, brought him back to the Colonies alive, strapped him to an unstable ship, and sent him on a one way course to Africa where he would crash land into a thriving military base that had nearly completed construction. The terrorist survived.

A brief narration stating the first half of my paragraph above would be sufficient in explaining the events that led into the first battle. The only additions you would need to make is start with an exact date and then reword what I just said to make it sound better.

In terms of script, the general rule of thumb is that the more you can say without actually showing anything new is when you reach optimal efficiency, the least amount of work, and still make it appear of high quality. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. With formalities finally completed in the first... Maybe 30 seconds of the strip, you can instantly capture the attention of the viewer with an immersion into battle.

Sorry if I had a mind dump on you guys. Just throwing in my two cents. I hate pennies anyway.

[FutureKiyoshi]

Something on those lines was what I was thinking just never could think how to word it right for naration anyway.

[Remæus]

Episodes 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 ... Then start from 1.

Each .1 .2 being a side story explanation... 1.1, 3.5 ... blah blah.

Because every character deserves a few minutes dedicated to them.

Kinda like a biography.

-=Shrugs=-

[FutureKiyoshi]

actually the .1,.2 etc system would be good if we ever want to go back to events that might have happened to some new character being introduced during that episode.

[SinfulSoul]

I like that idea. It's like software version numbers, except for episodes. Beginning at 0.1 and allowing brief intros for major characters (our main fictional counterpart) allows for wide detail in creativity and future expansion. Cool beans.

Had you considered anything along the lines of Machinima? If we can find an appropriate engine and pre-made model, it might make things easier. Or at the very least, it might make the 0.X episodes easier.

[FutureKiyoshi]

As far as I know all of the models were up to a point up to Eric, but now he's got Pafto to help with that as the modelling head. So I don't know.

I mostly want to focus on taking whats here and putting it in a more logical form that might flow a bit better (though really alot of the stuff here should flow pretty find) into a written script with directorial cues here and there.

Mia and Lori were, and I'm guessing still are, working on the character art.

*edit*
Bah hit the submit button when I didn't mean to. If we used something like a FPS or other game like Machimina uses, as Sin suggested, to do this it would be much easier in some cases but I do not know if thats what Eric wants or not.

[SinfulSoul]

I'm not suggesting we use Machinima for the whole thing. Just merely using it for portions of our bios and side stories. For example, City of Heroes / Villians offers a huge variety of character customization. If you wanted to recreate your character, it would be simple to act out a brief scene in a game with your customized character and some voice overs. Same can be done in Guild Wars, or a wide variety of FPS games with tweaked model. Maybe consider tweaking a model in Jedi Knights: Jedi Academy.

I'm just throwing ideas out there. What I am talking about might be complete absurd, but I liked the way people are doing Machinima nowadays. I thought this might cut down on production time and still offer quality that is still suitable for a brief side-episode.

[FutureKiyoshi]

If I was good with doing that kind of stuff I wouldn't mind trying to do that for the backstory stuff for Kiyoshi showing the early days of him and cloud and what lead to that whole crappy solar cannon story arch in the RP recently. But I'm not. Voice acting I've already planned to voice Kiyoshi and maybe a few more of my characters.

[Remæus]

The machinima idea is great. Our trouble would be finding a game that is moddable and has cellshading.

I must also mention that we're working on a game using the Irrlicht Engine... but that's completely from scratch.

Look up cellshading options in all fields... games... renderers... whatever. I'd love to find an easier way.

[SinfulSoul]

Will Battlefield 2 work? I'm fairly sure they already have kits available to mod virtually anything in the game just like they did with the old BF1942 line. BF2 has Cell Shading if I remember correctly. Their player models look pretty good too, and since it's more modern combat it might better fit this more modern style of play.

The other one I would recommend is Counter Strike Source, but I don't remember if it has Cell Shading or not. My guess would be that it doesn't.

[Remæus]

BF2 with Cellshading? Do you have any screenshots?

[SinfulSoul]

I don't. My video card doesn't support cell shading (I have one shitty ass video card compared to today's market). But I wouldn't mind going out and buying a 7800 and a copy of BF2 to find out. I remember back when the demo of BF2 was available, I wasn't able to run the game and received an error about having a video card that doesn't support cell shading. I used a mod to eliminate the need of cell shading in the game, but it turned out 80% of my screen became a light blue color and through the 20% that I could see while playing the game were essentially the same thing as pixilated blocks.

That, and that I've read a lot of gaming forums that have discussed BF2's need for cell shaders.

[Smokabowl]

I think what everybody means is they like the authoritative look of Gundam Seed/Wing. As in every other series they bitch, cry, and talk too much. Waay too fucking much, and so I propose once I get 5 members together for a my own PMC faction anybody who cries = insta head shot.