Thursday, October 4, 2012
Save City of Heroes: a Second Incorrect Meme
The above is a video of the Atlas Park protest, right? Wrong.
One of the pieces of misinformation that has been going around is the inclusion of the above video in discussing the Save City of Heroes campaign, the implication being that this video is footage of one of the Atlas Park protests that have been ongoing in the game. It isn't.
This video, created by the genius of Leandro Pardini, is a proof-of-concept video he put together for his City of Heroes demo file crowd assembly script. On the official forums, he asked people to send in their costume files so they could be added to the demo video. And as you can see, it came out very impressively!
One small problem. Those reporting on the closure of City of Heroes, and many people not connected with the Save City of Heroes campaign took the video to be of the Atlas Park protest that had recently taken place, not realizing the amazing but true origins and purpose of the video, and those who did understand, made no effort that their readers knew that this video wasn't of the protest nor was it connected with Save City of Heroes, but was a personal project of one very creative player. D'oh!
To clarify, the Save City of Heroes campaign never misrepresented the video. That was done by various gaming sites, YouTube channels and Tweeters. Basically, those who didn't know the game well, but heard about the closing, saw this video come out around that time, and made the erroneous connection.
Still, it is an amazing video and Leandro Pardini is one amazing City of Heroes player!
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I just found the blog, and I need to clarify some things.
ReplyDeleteThe post where I asked people to send their costumes was for another video I was working on, which I just finished and posted yesterday, City of Heroes Remains. That request was never linked to the Unity Rally, and in the end I didn't use any of the costume files I requested, either on the crowd video or the final version of Remains, which is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLtqCR6-n3Y
When the Unity Rally happened, I was logged on to the Virtue server and I hopped around the zones using the /demorecord command to capture the crowds of people that were online at the time. There were 33 instances of Atlas Park in Virtue, about a dozen on Freedom, and I got demo files of smaller crowds in Justice and other servers.
I then extracted the characters from all those demos in order to create the crowd montage. Every character in the video is a character that logged in for the protest -- but of course, not all of them at the same time. The game client couldn't handle it.
There's an exception; I was asked by a redname to include all their NPC characters in front of the crowd. This includes some 50 NPCs both linked to developers and not. However, I did not include them in the count. The video shows about 3700 characters that were logged in for the protest, plus about 50 NPC characters.
Thanks for the clarification, Leandro!
DeleteIt's not a video of the protest/rally as I said, but does depict many of those who took part in the protest (using data gathered by yourself, not data that was sent to you via the forums) in addition to NPCs, and uses your crowd script tech to achieve the final results, is that correct?