Signs of Progress
I am a prototype junkie. I love work in progress. I love demo tapes for music, early shots of movies or TV shows, and test builds and betas of video games and other software. I love seeing things progress, and what they have looked like during their progress. It's one of the things I like to collect.
I have saved copies of the early teaser site for "Project GU", before the actual .hack GU was first announced. I have copies of every video released for it, and the prototype trailer for that as well, which was their pitch for the game to the investors. I also love that they created a novel series based on the storyline from the prototype, which ended up being different then where the games ended up. I followed versions of Vista from early in 2004 through PDC and WinHEC builds running on our test machines at my work at that time, as well as participating in all of the betas, and watched it progress from the Longhorn of back then to the Vista we all know now. I've seen sites dedicated to the collecting of test builds and prototypes of video games, with the grandest of that being the release earlier this year of a massive dump from the Sega USA QA archives, releasing a ton of progress builds of a ton of games from that time. I have other miscellaneous game trailers lying around in my folders, which show a difference between some aspects of an original game trailer and the final game we came to know.
The progress of history is just as important as any one point, having a look at what led up to something can give even more insight then the item itself. This is why I love resources such as the Internet Archive, and other things that enable the progress of history. And I will use them as well, using the resources at hand to document and exemplify progress, the current item in question being Spiral Island. I have two videos on YouTube so far showing off the map editor, one for the early work, and one for the current state, and I will start showing off actual Spiral Island stuff soon. Not much, because I don't want to spoil things, but enough that progress can be documented, and I can release a much larger demonstration of progress once the development is finished.
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As a side note, for some reason it didn't automatically activate one of my timed entries for the post mortem, and after I manually activated it it wouldn't go into the right order, so I had to delete the last few entries and repost them. That is why they all are dated today.
Tags: software spiral_island video_games
Finite Infinity - GU
I was also playing around with the idea for one more chapter, brining it together with GU, though I hadn't planned this one out very much. As it was to go, several years later they got the full games from the zone in destiNATION, and so they decided to run through it with Harvester to reassign the player characters to new people who had those personalities, since everyone was now much older then the gap between QUARRANTINE and GU. At this point the Matrix was now run by a committe, and Morganna and Aura were heads of The World. They update it to follow the R:2 storyline, and watch as it plays through. While waiting between 2 and 3, Morganna is looking through a guide book, and notices there was some inconsistencies between the original English translation of the first games, which is what the Harvester used to build originally, and some of the information for the series, but whenever she went to compare it in the actual information, someone had already corrected it. An area of the Matrix then suddenly stops responding, and The Anaconda goes to investigate it, to discover it is the hospital where Alkaid was checked into in her coma. Corbenik is there, and he then destroys Alkaid's RSI. He scrambles Zion to make a quick rescue of her body, they recover her but aren't able reconnect her to the Matrix. They decide to try and merge her Alkaid character data into her mind, replacing her RSI data for the Matrix with her character.
In the mean time more and more discrepancies come up, and they try tracking down what happened to the original people Harvester had profiled as fitting in the roles. They find everyone but one, Sora, who completely vanished from the Matrix shortly after being freed from Skeith's wand. Skeith, Haseo in Avatar Skeith form, and Atoli in Avatar Innis form go to try and fight Corbenik, and during the battle they trace the ID's and discover that Harvester didn't reassign the role to another person, but had instead given it back to the same character. In the battle, Corbenik reveals this to Haseo, and he goes into shock comparing who he was before, and what he had done when integrated with Skeith originally, to who he was now.
That was pretty much all I had covered for that storyline. I didn't have any plan on who Corbenik was working for, or how this would end. I planned on bringing Morganna into play by giving her a Spirit weapon as well, and some other interactions between primarily Haseo, Atoli, Skeith, and Innis.
Tags: ties_to_infinity
Finite Infinity - Machine Revolution Part 2
After the fight, Reone regains all of her memory from before the Second Reniassance, everything that happened from the beginning of the Chobits series to where she was taken offline trying to destroy the last remaining X-PUN chip in the former Piffle Princess assets before the Machines could get a hold of it. The Anaconda then recovers his RSI and reconnects, regaining all his memories, and the memory of a program he had written to fully use the hacking chip, and decides to put his human body back into cryogenic stasis and return to his Persocom form, so he has access to his X-PUN chip.
In the mean time, at this point the Architect has now fully declared war against the rebels and intent to return the Matrix to the state it was before Neo initiated the truce, and the revolution is brought into full swing. The setting moves to internal structures of the Source, to Server Prime, which is where the office of the Architect is located. He begins sending out Agents discretely to kill the dissenting programs, and they respond with a media blitz bringing it all to light. It culminates to a storming of Server Prime by persecuted Persocoms, the dissenting programs, and humans, and The Anaconda, Reone, and Freya storm the Architect's office, who had been waiting. He calls in the tour guide Lain, which was a disguise for the recreation of Chitose Hibiya, who uses her logins to disable all three of them. A backup system for The Anaconda activates, and shuts off the login protocols, allowing him to come back, where destroys the protocols for the other two as well. In the mean time, the ship had been moving to the machine city, and in the real world The Anaconda goes to the machine holding the Architect himself, and plugs into it and completely destroys the program with X-PUN, using a vulnerability he had coded into the Machine protocols years before, well before the Second Reniassance. He then releases the full details of this vulnerability out over the Matrix and destiNATION, and a new, much more mutualist symbiosis forms between the humans and the Machines.
Tags: ties_to_infinity
Not Interesting Enough?
A movie came out last Friday called Blindness, which is about a virus spreading to cause people to go blind. I had only seen about it from the TV commercials, which were talking about some government coverup for this, hinting that this was caused on purpose, possibly against people that found out information that they should not have known, but there was one person who could still see. I went and saw the movie under this premise. However, the movie didn't use this premise, instead the virus just spread, the only government involvment was a failed attempt at quarrantine to try and keep it from spreading. Every scene they used for the "government coverup" in what they showed in the TV spot was related to the quarrantine efforts, and research by the CDC trying to find a solution to the disease.
It really makes me wonder what the TV spot director was thinking. The other trailers I watched for it afterwards didn't seem to have that left field plot, just the TV spot. Did they think just an epidmeic movie would not do well? Did they think it needed more suspense for the draw? The cut for the commercial ended up with a completely different storyline then the movie, and it doesn't really make sense to me. I thought the movie was just fine, and I enjoyed it, the just general breakdown it actually portrays was more interesting to me then the spun version from the TV spot.
Tags: movies television
Finite Infinity - Machine Revolution
Interestingly enough, I had actually come up with the idea for the arena Root Town before details on the new Omega server in .hack//GU were revealed, showing that world's purpose as such.
The last chapter is where everything finally comes together. This is where the bulk of the backstory document was going to come into light, and the rebellion comes into full swing. It actually starts off with a breather after the destruction of Bob Gorilla, with The Anaconda finishing up his "Ties to Infinity" novel with the end of the previous chapter and publishing it. Then the grand opening of the new Kappa server, with a one-vs-one single elimination tournament to start it off. The Anaconda and Joe Monkey enter it, and they end up fighting each other in the final round. The Anaconda narrowly wins, and goes on to a mystery challenger, who ends up being Tri-Edge. Not having actually seen how he fights, other then from the one trailer, The Anaconda ends up being quickly worn down, but Tri-Edge leaves before the match is over so The Anaconda ends up being the winner.
Some further information comes up about the past, so The Anaconda tries to filter through his memory to discover what he needs. He uses a unique core to break up his residual self image into six fragmets, each one working independently, and watches them from outside of the Matrix. Each of the fragments takes on a different aspect of his character, and the other 5 end up being destroyed. The last fragment is the first that the rest of them discover, and they don't notice it at all, because the fragment is a Persocom working in a book store, and the entire block of area for that is the sixth fragment, a recreation of the past before the Second Reniassance. Reone ends up being pulled into another part of the Matrix, where she meets up with Orion, who is revealed to actually be the AI that The Anaconda designed to run the scan of his brain to allow him to live as a Persocom before the Second Reniassance. The information regarding that had been lost because of heavy file corruption, and he had been working on restoring it. In the mean time another AI he designed, named Xedre, had been living inside the PDA, and didn't want him to recover the memories because then her own functionality would be no longer necesssary. Orion gives her a special weapon and Reone enters Infinity Mode to fight off against Xedre.
Tags: ties_to_infinity