In Response To: ANN: Forerunner Terminal Network Archives (Louis Wu)
: This post is here to provide a little history behind the development of the
: Forerunner Terminal Network Archives .
: When Halo 3 was released, I really wanted to be able to offer a site where
: the contents of the Halo 3 terminals (which were both a loving tribute to
: Marathon and chock-full of story information) were available to all who
: needed them, in a classy format. I knew I'd have the ability to offer
: recordings of the terms themselves, in high resolution; I'd just bought a
: Blackmagic Intensity Pro card, and HD recordings from a 360 were a breeze.
: I had visions of using the Saved Films feature of Halo 3 to produce
: 'flythroughs', showing exactly how to find each terminal; the camera would
: start at the beginning of the level (or, for later terms, some
: easily-identifiable place), fly up and out of the map, traverse the
: distance from above, showing an overlaid route, and then zoom back in to
: the actual term location. This turned out to be overly ambitious, because
: of loading boundaries and soft walls... and things got busy on other
: fronts, as well.
: RvB's nico let me know that he and OboeCrazy were hard at work recording
: saved films of each of the terms, and cataloguing the differences in the
: difficulty levels; I contacted Oboe and suggested we work together. They
: recorded most of the terminals as a team, and Oboe stuck with me and
: re-recorded films that I needed copies of, for one reason or another (as
: well as doing all the easy terms on her own). By the end of October, we
: had HD versions of all 7 terms (well, 8, if you count Cortana's term), in
: as many difficulty variations as were needed to capture all the text. The
: only thing left was to build a site to house the project.
: And that's where things sat... for months. Life got busy, and this project
: always seemed to be pushed to a back burner when something else came up.
: In mid-November, Capt Spanish created some high-res vector images of the
: terminal interface; I figured I could use them to design a site. However,
: I hadn't figured out how I was going to integrate it all - so it sat. And
: sat. and sat.
: Until mid-April.
: On April 14, Capt Spanish contacted me again - he apologized for not
: explaining an upload he'd dumped in our Uploads folder. (Heh. Sometimes
: things sit in there for months, before I find time to look at them; he had
: nothing to apologize for, because I hadn't even seen it yet.) Turns out,
: he'd been working on an interface himself - it was all Flash-based, and it
: let you actually USE the terminals, as though you were in-game.
: I told him about the recording project, and asked him if he'd be willing to
: include our recordings in his interface, and have the whole shebang hosted
: here. He was thrilled; the recordings made it oh-so-much easier for him to
: check his work on the transcriptions (I can't tell you how happy I am that
: the person who chose to do this work is as particular about getting the
: details right as I am), and he was really helpful at adding extra features
: to flesh out his original design. The final product is, in my opinion,
: gorgeous. Navigation is elegant - and shouldn't be too hard to pick up.
: (When you launch the site, a white 'help' indicator flashes unobtrusively
: to point out where to go for details on finding your way around.) Content
: is spectacular; as I said, you have full access to the terminals, on the
: web, in a variety of formats; you can page through them online as though
: you were in-game, you can download HD videos of them recorded FROM the
: game, or you can grab textfiles with nicely-formatted transcriptions.
: There's even an External Resources page, with links to other
: terminal-related content (both at b.org and elsewhere).
: A thousand thanks to OboeCrazy and her crew, for the initial recordings, and
: to Capt Spanish, who brought the content back from limbo. I hope you all
: enjoy using the resource as much as we enjoyed putting it together for
: you!
That is so worth the wait. Thanks ever so much to everyone involved. I've seen all the terminals in-game but I always wanted to read the red scrolling text, and never got around to doing the video capturing myself :)
A lovely job - well done.
Ciarán.
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