In Depth: Hyper Reality's Creative Process

 The first pieces that led to the creation of 'Hyper Reality' trace back to late august, early september of this year when I played Capture the Flag within Quake III Arena a few times a week. I used to prefer a Team Deathmatch or Free-For-All match, but during the past few weeks I became to seriously like and appreciate 'Capture The Flag'. So much so that it became my favorite game mode in just a few weeks. A significant contributor to this shift is the website 'quakejs.com'. One day I jokingly googled if it was possible to play Quake III from a internet browser, simply because I was too lazy to switch onto a different computer. It turned out that 'quakejs' had created a Javascript port of Vanilla Quake III Arena and the CPMA mod. The website offers possibilities to play offline against bots, or to play online on a select number of custom-made servers. Guess which server was almost always full? Right. The Capture the Flag server. One reason why I used to dread playing online was the steep learning curve of the game. While I have been playing Quake III since 2007, I still have much to learn before I am able to be considered a good player at this game. But when I dived into the online community of quakejs, I felt right at home. The majority of players were obviously much better than me, but it provided me with a challenge without ever feeling unfair. I felt determined to keep playing after a kill. Interestingly, quakejs seems to attract a tight community of players who often log-on as I often was able to spot the same players every few days. While the servers are often deserted during the day, they are often packed during the night. It was a very enjoyable experience and I still find myself joining a few games every so often.

While I bounced back and forth between playing CTF on QuakeJS and CPMA on my personal copy of Quake III, I wondered how cool it would be to see a capture the flag match from a lot of different perspectives. I wondered if it would raise the 'spectacle' of the match, and if it would create a higher sense of immersion if someone would watch it. While playing a CTF match, a player is only able to hear the progress of the match through the game's audio queues, such as "your team has the enemy flag", or "red flag returned", or "blue scores". Capture the Flag was sort of limited in that regard, as you do not have any idea what occurs around you elsewhere on the map. This line of thought made me consider to record a demo of a Capture the Flag match, and to find out if it was possible to render multiple viewpoints at the same time. The purpose to create this video was mainly an experiment at first. I wanted to see if this match style was worth portraying. I ended up creating a single demo of Capture the Flag on a custom map I found on LVLWorld called 'Ironwood', by Pat Howard. After playing two warmup rounds of 5 minutes, I played a single match of 15 minutes, and placed the harder-CPMA bots on almost full difficulty. It was a close match in which my team won 3-2; scoring the liberating goal 30 seconds before overtime would start. As I was satisfied with the end result, I ended up uploading the demo on the Internet Gaming Movie Database, or IGMDB a few weeks later. Individuals can upload their demos on this particular website from a range of games, such as Quake IV, Quake III, Wolfenstein, Left 4 Dead, and Counterstrike. The demo renderer will automatically create a video, upload it to YouTube, and apply motion graphics and video effects to the video. The demo in question can be found underneath. Interestingly, if you take a look at the votes, the majority of people who have watched the video have downvoted it. Probably due to my lack of skills, bot play,  predictability or lack of spectacle?  

 

After watching the end result on IGMDB for a number of times, I decided to use this particular demo for creating footage for 'Hyper Reality'. I started thinking about the deeper layers of Hyper Reality and capture two different point of views of the match to experiment with. Initially, my first thought was: chaos. Audiovisual chaos. A second thought was that it almost looked at a modern e-sports match in which sometimes multiple point of views of players are shown on the screen. While linking the two, I figured: why not push it up to another level? Let's create a point of view of all the players in the demo. I did a short literature research online on media consumption and came across the terms 'Hyper Reality' by Baudrillard for instance, and some papers about media consumption. I came to terms how much we are affected and influenced by different media at the same time. Personally, it feels almost as if you are forced to consume as many different moving images at the same time as possible. Some of these notions made it into the final idea of Hyper Reality, together with the 'Masters of Flags' tournament, a fictive tournament that served as the backbone and main incentive for this game to be broadcasted. I created a logo in Adobe Illustrator, transformed it into a 3D logo within Cinema 4D, and motion tracked it with Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects to create the introduction leader portrayed in the film.

 I thought I was ready to start production and happily started rendering within Quake III Movie Makers Edition. My initial idea was to create a point of view shot for all 11 players, 4-6 chase cams, and around 4 static cams across the map. Considering that every render brought approximately 23.000 frames to the table as each render was approximately 16 minutes, I started to experience some problems halfway through. My hard drive became clogged and I figured out a serious limitation of the game. When capturing a standard demo, only entities and objects near the player were rendered as the game normally expects the demo to be played within the game's vanilla demo player in first person. The game did not expect for modders to create camera mods in which third person point of views were possible. While I shifted to capturing the different botplay runs, I found out that the camera would often shift back to my own player due to a lack of information within the demo at that time. The game did simply not record that data as you are normally not supposed to shift between first person point of view perspectives if you were to use the built in demo player in Quake III. This was a serious drawback and it took me a week or so until I found out the solution: Multi-View Demo's.

Multi-View Demo's were a game feature implemented by a number of mods. The CPMA mod I used for casual play contained MVD's as well. While capturing an MVD, two computers are required in order to both play the game and record gameplay. I ended up deleting all of the footage I had created thusfar (I was halfway through), and decided to start all over again from scratch. I used one computer to set up the game within the same level, divided the teams, and initiated the '/mvd' command. When doing so, the game would capture every single data and input by all players within the map simultaneously. I proceeded to play the game as normal on my second computer and sometimes monitor the many different point of views being presented on my other screen. After two failed attempts, due to initiating the command before a restart of the map which cancelled out the capture, I finally was successful. The next few weeks revolved around the painstaking process of capturing all of the footage again. Once this was finally completed, I gained interest in VHS video, and thought it was an extremely interesting phenomenon to place some of these postmodern phenomena, serving as a 'skeleton', within a analog 'modern' skin as the game itself was released during this so-called analog era. It took approximately a few days for me to successfully edit the film, as my NLE had loads of trouble playing these many point of views at the same time. The rendering process took around 10 hours to complete. 

 The last thing I would like to mention are the chase-cams; a third person camera that follows the player throughout the map, as seen above. Sometimes, the camera would suffer from serious glitches during movement. This was actually another limitation of the game, as the camera within Q3MME had trouble keeping up with the player for some reason. This was not added in post-production and was actually a bug. 

A last-last thing I would like to mention, as you have been reading my blog so patiently, is that during production of 'Hyper Reality', I have captured loads of footage for another Quake III project as well. This project is currently halfway through post-production. I will be posting more information about this particular project soon. After this next project is completed, I will be focusing on other games again, as the past few projects I created all revolve around Quake III Arena. Until the next update!