demagogue on 3/4/2007 at 17:55

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The only thing I mentioned that might have been shopped was the light gem, not a single other thing. It would be the easiest thing too, because it's so discrete ... nothing to do with weird looking pixels.

Seriously: watch the video. Already by 7 seconds the light gem is bobbing all over the place (between 7-8 it disappears altogether for a few frames), at 10 seconds it hops higher than its entire height (it does that a few more times), 16, 25-29, at 42 seconds it hops sideways. Around 1:19 it actually crouches down-left and hangs there for a good while, before sneaking back up. At 1:41 it wheels around in a circle. In fact, it never stops hopping or moving; it's rare to find it stay in one place for long. And the way it moves suggests that it's someone that's often pasting it to the next frame according to the last frame so it either veers over time, hangs in the wrong place for a while, or jumps if the person is being particularly lazy with that frame, with periodic checks that put it back in the center. Even if you say it's a bug that makes it bobble, why would the bug keep it locked into the wrong place for a good amount of time, only to return it safely a few seconds later?

I just found it curious, if every other single HUD/GUI item manages to stay in place (all the SS2 ones, that is, the lightgem is the main Thief-specific HUD item I can see. There's also the blackjack, but that's an arm animation. I think ShockEd could handle it.) why the light gem alone would be hopping/veering like that. I could imagine a special executable that could run both a functional light gem and SS2 GUI/HUD where only the lightgem bobbles, but it just seemed like a more straightforward explanation was that it was in just one engine (or a kind of hybrid that covered a lot of both, but more SS2 and not a functioning lightgem) and the lightgem was just pasted in after the fact, and not very well at that.

If there is a good reason to explain why a hybrid executable or a hacked ShockEd (it's not going to be dromed, cf. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4slto0V_ks)) couldn't control the lightgem HUD placement in just this kind of way, then I'll be happy to concede the point. I'm not saying it's inconceivable. Just suspect.

demagogue on 3/4/2007 at 19:01

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Well, okay, if you want to be a smartass about it.
But that doesn't answer whether I'm right or wrong in my thinking.

Aekeron on 4/4/2007 at 14:20

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But how do we know you didn't photoshop the video editing stuff? 0.o

demagogue on 4/4/2007 at 18:14

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"Jitter artefacts" on an animated logo, huh? :weird:
Well, that's the sort of thing I was thinking about...* :erg:

Awesome job, anyway, whatever the hell you did. :thumb:





* Assuming you aren't just screwing with us again (did you do that because it looked more "hacked in"? Or are you just messing with my head by playing along with my idea?): I said shopped but meant this kind of video editing (in the same sense that people say Google/googled even when they're using Yahoo) ... also probably because I mess around with animations in Animation Shop so much and don't have real video editing software. So it's the program I think about for pasting independently-made things into frames of a movie. So I had the right idea at its core. It's the same concept, smartass semantics aside.

Aekeron on 5/4/2007 at 08:49

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Indeed. I knew it was a fake from the start - the paper mache lines gave it away.