City of Heroes: Shining Stars is looking for Demo Editors

The City of Heroes: Shining Stars is a fan driven project to produce an ongoing machinima series based around the Shining Stars super group collection of characters. We are in the process of producing a mini-promotional episode. However, to produce the full series in a timely manner we will require more resources then we presently have. Those resources are people.

Under the name “Raging Bull Productions,” we are working to produce this series. However, at present the entire staff of Raging Bull Products amounts to myself, Torroes Prime, and my lead writer, Lady Libby. As you can see, that creates a bit of a bottle neck in terms of work ability compared to work load.

One of the things I want to do is keep this fan-based project from developing a job mentality. This is a project we are undertaking in our free time because we want to and it’s fun. I want to try and keep that mentality as much as possible. To that end, I don’t want to overload anyone who joins us and thus we need to have more manpower to spread the work load around a bit. Instead of having one person spend 20 hours a week doing demo editing, we would like to have 10 people spend 2 hours a week to accomplish the same thing. Or even better, 20 people spending 1 hour each. Presently we are in the process of producing our promo episode and are seeking individuals interested in being Demo Editors.

Demo editing is probably the single largest part of this entire process. For those of you who have tinkered with Demo editing before, you understand how much of a time sink it can be. Now of course the big catch with demo editing is… well, we kinda can’t make the series at all without it. We’re not saying it’s more important than the Writing, the voice acting, or the sound designer, but without the demo editing, we sort of wouldn’t have anything to show. So, this is where we can really use extra manpower.

I’m not going to go in to a lot of detail about what demo editing actually is here, but I will provide the basic idea for those that don’t already know.
City of Heroes includes a ‘Demo Record’ command which when activated records everything that is occurring on the current map the player that activated the command is on. When the record completes, either through exiting the map or using the “Demostop” command, the record of everything that occurred from the start to the end is compiled into a list that is a demo file. In the demo file is a listed order of events based on a time code. Literally each line of a demo code reads “X milliseconds after the previous event, entity Y performs executes argument Z with parameters 1,2 and 3.” That file can then be used to instruct the City of Heroes Game engine to re-render what it recorded. The cool thing about this is the fact that the demo file is little more than a basic text file so we can edit it and change what was recorded and thus make the game render something different on playback. Now, we cannot use demo editing to change the way the game works merely what it rendered. Basically, if you see it happen it game, you can make it happen with Demo editing.

There is already a great library of information and guides about demo editing out there and if you want to know more about demo editing I highly recommend you check them out. The best place to check is the Paragon Wiki pages on Demo editing. I have included links below for those:

Demo Editing- How To
Demo Editing/Demo Problems and FAQs
Demo editing/Additional Information

It's a bit comparable to the animation of a animated series. The Animators take the script and story boards and create the actual animation based on those parts. The finished animation is then taken and compiled into footage where it will be edited as needed and the audio synced to.

If you want to help us by being a demo editor, but do not know demo editing, have no fear. I will gladly help you learn the process and some of the tricks I've learned over my years of playing with it.

The thing you do need to already possess is at least a rudimentary understanding of cinema terminology. if the script or story board says that there is a "Wide medium shot of Twin Shot with the Paragon City Hall framed in the back ground" you need to understand what that kind of a shot will look like in your head. I can teach you demo editing. I'm afraid I can't teach you cinematography.

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