EPT
On November 21 2023 09:24 christo161 wrote:
It would be nice if this would be translated to English also:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/huncraft-genocide/news/how-it-was-made
It would be nice if this would be translated to English also:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/huncraft-genocide/news/how-it-was-made
Was interested by this so here's a translation using chatGPT:
September 3, 2007, 14:07, Cerberus (Zoltán Halmos)
Liderc05
When we were still young, when we didn't drive cars yet, when we managed things with dial-up internet, when we didn't really understand anything, and when we were still learning what and how.
Initial Attempts (1998)
From a small campaign to something bigger.
The game's creation began around 1998 by the first member of the team, Cerberus. The project, named Genocide, was designed for StarCraft. Initially, it was planned to include Hungarian missions and texts in the project. At that time, it was just about having Hungarian-language missions and texts in the project. Cerberus' computer broke down once, and despite the preliminary ban, they formatted his hard drive at the service center, which had the then-current version. Of course, this was an extremely primitive mission series made with the campaign editor, including child voices as placeholders.
After Brood War was released, Cerberus restarted the whole project with the expanded campaign editor. Soon, his own little website was ready, where he advertised Genocide. He was looking for beta testers and promoted his StarCraft clan at the time, the once Hungarian Troopers. The plan was to make Genocide available for download from the internet.
BadTiger entered the picture around this time. He found Cerberus' site by searching for the keyword "StarCraft" on the internet. They got to know each other via ICQ, and BadTiger asked Cerberus to create a demo version that could be placed on the PC Guru CD, where he was the StarCraft section leader. A 2-level demo was created. Since there wasn't a suitable person for recording the necessary sounds, Cerberus invited BadTiger to Szeged to record these texts. The introduction went smoothly, and they managed to record all the missing sounds in one day, including those for the entire HunCraft. Compared to the final version, these were still modest quality sounds, mostly with young voices.
BadTiger showed Cerberus how to replace unit portraits and a few other details on modifying elements of StarCraft. From this point on, BadTiger became a team member. They decided that in the completed demo version, not only the missions but also the voices of the heroes would be in Hungarian. The approximately 20 MB demo was uploaded to BadTiger's school server, from where anyone could download it. A new website was also created and uploaded to a free hosting provider.
They asked the HC Gamers to put the Genocide link on their page. A few days later, visitors reported that the download was not working because the demo was deleted from the school server. This is when Robi from a company contacted them, offering to host their website, providing a free domain, and even giving some gigabytes of storage. This is when they changed the game's name to HunCraft, as it better expressed what this project was about. The www.huncraft.net website was created. This was later changed to www.huncraft.hu due to domain registration issues a few years later.
Two Years of Ordeal (End of 1998 - Mid-2000)
The most challenging elements: chasing after synchronized voices and a sound engineer.
Our very first experience with recording voices was with Miskin. He was the former sound engineer of the Hip-Hop Boyz, and upon seeing our website, he reached out to help. He promised that in his studio in Budapest, we could record the voices with professional actors. Galla Miklós would have been among the actors, who he wanted to hire as Marine. A peculiar idea! Months passed, and we wanted to start recording the voices, but our friend Miskin was never reachable. Once, when we were in Budapest and wanted to meet him to discuss the voice recording, he said he was sleeping, but we should call him around 4. We did. We told him we were at Keleti Railway Station and asked him to come there. We called him an hour and a half later, asking where he was, and he said he would be there soon. We called him another half an hour later, and he informed us that he was at Nyugati Station and couldn't find us anywhere. Meanwhile, we missed the next train home because of this.
Around this time, Ooops joined the team, who created various images for the HunCraft website and also designed one of the earlier designs. Knowing that we couldn't count on Miskin anymore, we tried to find a new person. We asked our sysadmin at the time, Robin, if he knew a sound engineer who would do the sounds for us for free. It was around this time that the #huncraft IRC room was created, which was active for a few years.
One day, a guy named Comp joined the chat, claiming to be the new sound engineer. We waited for the holidays to pass, and he said we could start the sound recording next year, in 1999. We called him to start the recording after the holidays. Or we would have called. We tried about five times to reach him, but we could never get hold of him. We gave up.
By this time, we decided, based on our expanding knowledge, that the HunCraft would be an MPQ campaign. This meant that in the single-player part, you could start campaigns by clicking on the characters, just like in the original StarCraft. Over half a year, the team grew with several members. First, Norby applied as a writer, then Artax as a multiplayer map editor, later Tarathiel and Tassadar as text translators. Reaper also applied to the team around this time.
He volunteered; we didn't ask him. He said he would gladly make animations for HunCraft since he was an "animation supervisor" at a company and was very knowledgeable about the subject. We told him we currently didn't have a sound engineer and asked if he could get one. He said he had a home studio where we could record the sounds, and after that, he would do the post-production, effects, etc. When we first went to meet him in Pest, we couldn't find him as he had gone away. On the second attempt, after great efforts, we managed to meet for the date, and we went to record the sound.
It turned out that what he called a studio was actually a wardrobe and a microphone. There wasn't even an amplifier because it was broken. He said he could only create the animation if we got him a Marine doll so he could animate the 3D model from it. We weren't really planning to fulfill this request. We went to record sound at his place twice, and on the third occasion, when we were going for a week to record all the sounds, he went abroad, then came back home but went to the countryside afterward. By then, we knew he was just as unreliable as the first two sound engineers.
During one of the Reaper meetings, we met Egri2, who later joined the team as a multiplayer map editor. By this time, it was clear that someone needed to create the promised intro, and new units and buildings were needed for HunCraft. This is when Cly applied as a video animator, and Psychoo and Jax,
The Publisher and the HunCraft Team (February 2001 – October 2001)
Shark01
Race for the Publishing License and the Beginnings of Professional Sounds
When HunCraft was in its final stages, we began to consider whether it was legal to distribute HunCraft by mail for postage and printing costs. We wrote to Blizzard, describing what HunCraft truly was in a 45-page English letter. They responded, acknowledging the Battle.net server overload issue and stating they were working on it. Unfortunately, this copy-paste response didn't get us far. We then wrote to Ecobit Kft to inquire if they could help with legal matters related to StarCraft. They replied, saying it belonged to N-TEC Kft.
So, we wrote to N-TEC, detailing everything we had previously written to Blizzard. In their response, they expressed interest in the completed version and wanted a personal discussion, also requesting three CDs of the finished version. To facilitate this, one CD was to be sent to Blizzard and the other to the publisher. In our reply, we confirmed that this was possible and asked for a suitable time for the discussion. A week passed with no response. We decided to call them and set a time for the conversation.
We managed to reach them and scheduled the meeting for the following Friday at 11 am. On Tuesday of that week, BadTiger traveled to Szeged to perfect the version intended for presentation. However, during the week, a 20-kilogram weight fell on BadTiger's foot. Its effects became apparent on the evening of that day.
By 4 a.m., we had completed the 100% functional version, and after a two-hour sleep, exhausted, we headed to the train station, traveling to Budapest. The company's office was in Kőbánya, near Szent László tér. When the train arrived at Kőbánya-Kispest station (at 9:15), after a 2-hour journey and several inquiries with police and information desks, we reached the office. However, it was only 11:15, and we had 45 minutes until the agreed-upon time. Thinking we had plenty of time, we decided to find a McDonald's for lunch.
We spotted a sign indicating it was straight ahead 800 meters. We walked until we saw another sign pointing back to the fast-food place. We started walking back, thinking we must have passed it. But there was no McDonald's anywhere. This was not the era of GPS yet. By this time, we were very hungry and tired, so we bought some food from a street vendor. We consumed the sandwiches sitting in front of an elementary school, and precisely at 12 o'clock, we headed to the office.
"Good day, we're looking for Tünde."
"I am she."
"We are the HunCraft team..."
After a minute of silence: (they had no clue who we were)
"...Hungarian StarCraft!"
"Jaaaaaaaaaaa, the HunCraft team! I'll inform Sanyi, please have a seat."
Once Sanyi arrived (we later found out we spoke to him on the phone), he asked us to follow him and led us to a computer room where we installed StarCraft, Brood War, and finally, HunCraft. After demonstrating the entire game from A to Z, Sanyi mentioned that they would re-release the StarCraft Battle Chest, and they wanted to include a bonus CD with the original games' Hungarian patches. They wanted to fit all 5 hours of audio material and 10 synchronized videos on one floppy disk. We clarified that it would require precisely 400 floppies, but we agreed to release it on CD instead. Sanyi asked us to do it, and we agreed. After a 3-hour negotiation, based on Sanyi's instructions, we headed to Nyugati (Western Railway Station). Another hour of travel followed, and 10 minutes before the train departed, we arrived at the station. Thanks to the first-class compartment being packed, people standing in the aisle, and two 20-minute delays at two stations, the return journey was extremely comfortable.
Once back in Szeged, we started thinking about how to find the right person for distorting the sounds. That's when we remembered our third sound engineer, Reaper, who was quite skilled in sound distortion but didn't like working for free. Later that evening, we managed to contact Reaper online and discuss sound distortion-related matters. Regarding the sounds, he mentioned that distortion in a studio would cost around 500,000 HUF, but he would do it for 200,000 HUF. We were amazed when we heard this.
Sándor had earlier requested that once we talked to everyone, we should call him. We told him about Reaper asking for 200,000 HUF for sound distortion, and upon hearing this, he started banging his head against the wall vigorously. Then he asked about the progress of the Hungarian localization and requested us to write a letter describing the sounds in StarCraft, so he could send it to sound studios. He gave us 1-2 days to write the letter, but we only got around to it on Saturday.
He also asked us to send him at least a 3-minute excerpt from the video(s). At that point, we mentioned that it would be good if the things mentioned in the StarCraft manuals matched those in the Hungarian localization. He then said the Battle Chest's manual would be the same as the 1998 version. However, he realized it had already gone to print, and it might not be possible to stop it, but he would check. This process didn't go smoothly either, as the administrative lady fell ill, and it took a week to reach her. She said modifying the manual was no longer possible as it had already been produced.
After finishing the massive project, HunCraft, several enthusiastic amateurs, called by us, arrived to help from Budapest and Kecskemét. For eight days, almost every day from ten in the morning until two at night, we worked on the sounds until we were done.
Upon the agreed-upon time, we completed the Hungarian translation and its testing. We scheduled a meeting with N-TEC on a Friday to hand over the master CD. Endre tried the game, found everything in order, but payment issues arose. We couldn't resolve them satisfactorily, and there were also complications with the Battle Chest edition. As a result, we parted ways with N-TEC, keeping the recorded materials for ourselves.
We wrote our story to two other Hungarian game publishing companies, expressing our willingness to work with them. Automex Kft. responded, expressing interest in the translation CD and inquired about the conditions for game translation. We sent them our terms along with the promised CD and the HunCraft beta version. Unfortunately, things did not go smoothly here either, as our small package got mixed up in the mail but was eventually received. Meanwhile, negotiations with GameStar regarding HunCraft began because they were also interested. They mentioned talking to Blizzard at E3 and the possibility of getting approval for the release. The maximum royalty fee they expected to pay was around $700.
Since HunCraft was still not completed at that time, we decided it was time to finish it for real. On a Thursday, BadTiger traveled to Cerberus to put an end to this madness. Mat had already finished the closing animation by then, and the next day, three of us traveled to Kecskemét to create the soundtracks for the videos at Bogi's place. Bogi mentioned that if we had all the sounds for the video, we could finish everything in an hour. However, she wouldn't work for free, and we had to pay from our pockets. Mat promised that if we didn't finish within an hour, he would cover the additional hourly rates.
Upon arrival, we spent 3 hours converting the intro on the secretary's computer to uncompressed AVI because the animation encoded with DivX was not compatible with pro systems. During this time, Bogi worked on the epilogues on her computer. Once this was done, we started transferring the 4.5 gigabytes of animation over the network, which again took an hour... or would have taken if we hadn't realized that we needed to remove the hard drive from the computer and transfer it to another one. We started the video synchronization, but due to the huge size of the animation, it ran at about 1 frame per second. We had to start the conversion again, which took another half hour. When it was done, Mat arrived with his computer and the uncompressed chaos animation. We were very happy because now it could be recompressed.
While this was happening, we started creating the sound for the intro. Our task was made difficult by the fact that the effects and raw sounds were in different libraries. Instead of the predicted 1 hour by Bogi, it took us 4 hours to synchronize the intro. We didn't touch the closing animation that day. We traveled back home and started converting the sound to the video, revealing a multitude of errors in the soundtrack. We thought it didn't matter since we had to go to Bogi's again, and we would fix it then.
And so it happened. A week later, we traveled again, and Mat went to Kecskemét. We quickly corrected minor errors in the intro and started synchronizing the chaos animation. It took a brief 8 hours to complete the sound for the 6.5-minute animation. When we returned home, we started converting the AVIs to SMK, which Starcraft uses. Unfortunately, since the animators didn't create the video in the same size as the original, the game stuttered terribly, and the size was about 1/3 of the original. After 2 weeks of suffering, we managed to compress it to a size that didn't sacrifice speed or quality.
By this time, the entire HunCraft was ready, but during testing, we discovered that our Russian friend Snoopy's AI (artificial intelligence for computer players) was faulty, so that needed reworking as well. We came up with the idea of merging the translation with HunCraft, allowing a complete trilogy to be played in Hungarian. When everything was done, we informed both Automex and GameStar that the master CD was ready for release.
We called Automex, and since they couldn't connect us to their representative Attila, we left a message. He called back half an hour later and explained that they hadn't received the rights from Blizzard yet, so we should write to them. After reading our letter to Blizzard, Attila agreed to forward it. We sent it and waited for feedback. Attila mentioned that they had also written a letter to Blizzard. We agreed that Attila would contact Cedric Marecal, the person responsible at Blizzard.
When they called Blizzard's California office, the secretary informed them that Marecal was spending a 3-week vacation somewhere on the Florida coast. They were advised to call in August. Attila did call, miraculously managing to reach him. Marecal claimed not to have received any of our letters, although we had sent him about 10. He promised to look into the situation with HunCraft and also find our lost emails.
Tired of waiting, we called GameStar - our last hope - to do something. The boss said he had a meeting in the afternoon but promised to call the next day. Regarding the Marecal issue, he mentioned that they relied more on their own Blizzard contacts.
Has the curse been broken?
For several weeks, we heard nothing from our helpers until one sunny Friday afternoon when BadTiger, on a crowded bus, received a call from Attila. He informed us that they had managed to speak with someone at Blizzard. We needed to send a sample copy of HunCraft to Blizzard (which they probably didn't understand much). Overcoming some reluctance, BadTiger agreed.
Over a weekend, we put together the CD, traveled to Budapest (for approximately the 894th time since the start of HunCraft), and after a half-day odyssey and negotiations, handed over the CDs. The package was sent to Blizzard.
Three months had passed since then... We thought Automex didn't take our case seriously because we couldn't reach them and received no response. Meanwhile, a lynching atmosphere developed on our forums and in our email traffic because we still hadn't released HunCraft. Some accused us, while others were understanding, and some just wanted to play. We decided that come what may, we would release the game.
We called Automex, and finally, they provided a clear and understandable answer: Vivendi Universal, Blizzard's publisher, wouldn't deal with it because the Hungarian market was too small, and they wouldn't allow the release as an attachment to the original game. However, they gave the green light for the release of HunCraft and the Translation if it was distributed freely on the internet.
Finally, the path to release opened. On February 15, 2002, HunCraft was uploaded to the server. After three years of torment, the grand work was released. The translation, after solving other problems, could be downloaded from us starting July 23, 2002.
"It's done, the grand work is finished. The computer is running, the creator is resting."
