A Wipeout Webcomic

[leaf]

Ok, sorry if I got your hopes up, there is not wipeout webcomic just yet.....

But I've been wanting a way to improve my drawing skills, and I love webcomics, so I've been thinking of making some sort of comic.

The ideas I've had so far are either fringe sports, ones which aren't exactly popular, or a wipeout-style of futuristic racing.

With the fringe sports, I'd try to explore the types of people that do that sorta stuff as a lifestyle, not just another hobby. The story would be meandering, with no big climax, my biggest aim would be to give off a certain "feeling" through it.

With an AG themed comic.....I guess I wouldn't use wipeout specific craft or characters per se, but I'd theme it off of here *hehe, I already downloaded the font packs!* Once again the story wouldn't have a point, atleast to start off with, I like to focus on the feeling I impart to readers, rather than a "moral of the story" or anything like that.

But my question for anyone wanting to help me with ideas until I decide on which topic to theme my story around are:

1. Do you see/think there's a very different marketing theme and target group each of the rival companies in the WipeOut series market to and compete for? What type of attributes would you think the companies would want to exhibit, or advertise for, and what type of personalities would they want their pilots to have, since the pilots are representative of their sponsor? What would the Auricom, AG Systems, Qirex, and Feisar companies want to be putting out to their crowds?
2. Brand Loyalty - Do you think the pilots, and fans, would be intensely brand-loyal? And if so, to what degree? From just gentle rivalries between pilots, or to fights breaking out in the stands or sidelines between fans?
3. How common would spectator and pilot deaths be? *I'm thinking about one every couple of races or three, since atleast in XL that's what I generally tend to average....or the AI averages*
4. What do you see as the "pilot lifestyle"? Each pilot would be different, but would you say it could include anything from partying till dawn *regardless of a win or loss*, constant corporate politics, non-stop training, and extensive research + development?
5. Would you see the WipeOut world as bright, clean and futuristic, or more of a "cyberpunk" type of place *I know I know, bad term, but it's the best I can think of to describe what I mean* The other possibility would be varying degrees of that, depending on which team would be the main focus, or which company's track the race is taking place on.
6. Finally, would you think it should be pilot-oriented, or team-based. I'm leaning towards team-based, since unless I make a crapload of new Companies, the overall teams would bemore important to give off their own distinct feel. Sort of like 10k Commotion (http://10kcommotion.com), where each team has their "main" personality, but the entire team is very important as a whole to understand them, and get a good feel of their characters.

And for anyone that even READS half that, thank you![/url]

[infoxicated]

I tend to think the pilot death thing would be once in a blue moon, rather than ever couple of races. Like in Formula One... or more accurately, like in Indy Racing (since there does tend to be overtaking in Wipeout), where you do get a death of a driver every once in a while because it is super dangerous, but for the most part its just the hardware that takes a beating. :)

Also, Leaf - didn't you have a different username beforehand? :-?

[leaf]

No.....I've posted as leaf on everywhere from megatokyo to tech forums to other gaming sites, it helps me keep my username down to a minimum. Plus I don't make alter-egos.

Heh.....but anyways, ok thanks! Now that was pilot deaths, what about the spectators? Hehe....I'm cruel and unusual, and I think a racer flying off the track and ploughing to a stop outside might be an idea, *specially after I just downloaded/saw the background image with the disclaimer for buying an f5000 series ticket I think it was*

Once in a blue moon as well, but I think something like the one nascar race where a hood ripped off the front of car and hit a grandstand spectator might be fitting.....

[leaf]

http://img1.photobucket.com/albums/1003/ferretboy/kano1.jpg

http://img1.photobucket.com/albums/1003/ferretboy/kano3.jpg

And here (http://www.angelfire.com/emo/hanging_leaf) if you wanna see older things....from two years ago. My site is so dead, but I'm no slouch when it comes to artsy things, they just take me a while to makeup....and even longer to post online. But those two are sorta recent just to give you an idea, with newer things in my sketchbook already, I've been on an inking binge for some reason.

Edit: just to show that the comic would HOPEFULLY look half decent if I decide to go through with it.

[RJ O'Connell]

A few tips:

Depending on what era you are doing, if you do it related to Wipeout, you might wanna consider that F3600 crafts can only be wrecked out of a race, F5000 craft are the equivalent of 19950s-60s F1 cars in that pilot/spectator fatalities were considered "expected," and F9000 is safer that the aforementioned, but still dangerous. I consider that if there was corporate sponsorship in AG racing, it would be a sticker possibly near the number plate or on the driver suit. Also, this isn't really the game itself, so if you wanna do Days of Thunder-style rollovers and pileups, by all means, go ahead!

I might take a similar but different approach to WIpeout comicking-satire. :wink:

[leaf]

A few tips:

Depending on what era you are doing, if you do it related to Wipeout, you might wanna consider that F3600 crafts can only be wrecked out of a race, F5000 craft are the equivalent of 19950s-60s F1 cars in that pilot/spectator fatalities were considered "expected," and F9000 is safer that the aforementioned, but still dangerous. I consider that if there was corporate sponsorship in AG racing, it would be a sticker possibly near the number plate or on the driver suit. Also, this isn't really the game itself, so if you wanna do Days of Thunder-style rollovers and pileups, by all means, go ahead!

I might take a similar but different approach to WIpeout comicking-satire. :wink:

I'm going to be basing mine at the beginning of the off-season following the latest F9000 series, in a lower circuit class working their way up.

For safety....yeah, I've read quite a bit, so I can see pilot deaths being fairly uncommon, same as for crowds. Overall, atleast ONE good crowd-wipeout, and one or two pilot deaths. And for the logos....yeah, just take a look at the ships now, the placement will generally be the same. For pit crews and the racer outfits....hey, just look to nascar, f1, and rally racers - logos all over, with placement and size depending on how big the contributions were.

As for logos....

http://img1.photobucket.com/albums/1003/ferretboy/logo1.jpg

I've made a few more since then, I'll make a better page with cleaned-up versions of each once I have enough where I'm satisfied. One question - does anyone here have the ability to write sandscript, arabic, or something along those lines....? I'm wanting some representation world-wide, and it would be stupid to ignore one of the most populace countries in the world. So anything from Indea and China would be much appreciated! *just say if you can, and I'll have a word or two, maybe a phrase like an ad slogan* *i got people who can work japanese for me*

[Lance]

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Sanskrit, India

sandscript is sorta like fingerpainting; anybody can do it. but Sanskrit is more difficult and rare, and like Latin, no longer exists as a living language. and i can't write any of 'em, dammit :(
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[zargz]

leaf: lookin good & cool ideas BUT u shudnt post images here - instead
make a html page where u put these pics & then post a link here
coz of bandwith & stuff like that u no
i no u r new here so this is just a pointer 8)

lance: y is it always me who says this stuff 2ppl? :evil:
im not even a moderator! :P (& dont intend 2b) :D
8)

[Lance]

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i should have said something. i had images turned off as usual, and just didn't notice.

leaf, post a live remote link [ A HREF] to large images, not an image link [ IMG SRC ]. i am one of the few who leave images off, so most people, particularly those on dial-up connections will experience slowdowns in getting a page with a 174 Kilobyte image like this. in fact, there is someone else on the forum i should mention this to, who posted smaller, but multiple images
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[Shem]

I have an idea Leaf - you remember the Fluke's single of "Atom Bomb"? The artwork for the cover of this one was just what you want to imply to your story (i guess). I suggest you to take a look at it if you didn't see it before. Here's a link (Hi Lance! :wink: ) :
http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B000006YQL.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
I also think about presenting you some of my own logos inspired by wipeout (but first i gotta scan some, some need to be found on my PC, God knows where they are now..)

[leaf]

Woah, 56k'ers still exist? :o

Haha, I'm no newb to forums, and most places I frequent people don't really care since yeah.....cable/dsl, whatever. *the only time I've had trouble is when someone LITERALLY posted over 200 images in a single post....that was brutal.

Anyways I'll edit the post, but here's a more updated version with more things, not really cleaned up but more finalised ideas atleast.

http://img1.photobucket.com/albums/1003/ferretboy/c06802d4.jpg

But I'm good at fingerpainting! But whatever languages are written in India, I'd love to find someone to translate, since I've already got a couple people who're helping me with the japanese/kanji symbols. I just said sandscript since I have no idea what the majour languages there are called....

And yep, that's essentially the thing I'm going to be aiming for with the general look, but my characters will hopefully look a bit more adult-like heh.

More companies would be great, long as I have permission and all.

[Lance]

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having recently experienced the joys of something called eCable while a friend of mine had it for a short time, i now realise just how bog slow even DSL and standard cable are. most downloads on eCable ran from 160 to 205 kiloBYTES per second, while the microsoft.com and opera.com servers were apparently able to deliver even faster than that. examples: i downloaded windows media player 9.x so fast that by the time i could look to see what progress was being made, it was already done. 13+ megabytes done in something between 5 and 10 seconds. [it seemed a good deal less than 10, but i'm trying to be conservative in the estimate.] the much slower server from which i downloaded Adobe Photoshop CS took 15 minutes to transfer 151 megabytes. that would have taken an absolute minimum of 15 hours on my dial-up connection. apparently, when the server you download from has enough bandwidth to feed data to you fast enough, this eCable thing can download at 3 megabytes per second. that is almost a thousand times a fast as most of my dial-up downloads go. and a good bit faster than DSL, too.

[there are a lot of 56Kers; it's just that after even a few minutes of using something better that it's hard to remember that they exist and how slow it is for them.] [my dial-up is 10 dollars a month; eCable would be forty. can't do it in my current situation, and this is true for many whose resources are spread thin, like people with families, big bills to pay, and crap jobs to pay them with. there are lots and lots of those people]
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[xEik]

It's not always a question of what the users are willing to pay.
In some areas you won't get more than 56k (or 28k, I'm not kidding) just because of lack of infrastructures. DSL customers must be inside a certain range from a central that provides the service. That is, there is a strong distance constraint for some technologies (DSL being one of them).

[yuusen]

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Woah, 56k'ers still exist? :o
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yes, and we still outnumber the digital subscribers. subjective reality is not the beall and endall. im on 28k here as i share a phone box with the neighbours and broadband isnt in our area yet.

by the way, can someone sort out that page with the unused wipeout graphics on? the bottom posts keep jumping about in mozilla as they load which makes it terribly hard to read and even scroll on slower computers.

that gives me an idea.
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¥

[Lance]

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the page was already edited by the original poster to replace the pics with remote page links. you shouldn't have any trouble now.

moz and firefox and Opera 7.xx all use dynamic page rendering, so there's going to be some hopping about of the page elements. using an older version of Opera such as 6.06b or 5.12 will kill that behaviour. only problem is the occasional hangup on an adserver whilst leaving the page blank and leaving you wondering what t f is happening. but this is a rarity. come to think of it, i've not noticed much jumping about with Opera 7.5 preview 3, but it may just be that i am used to that sort of thing now, but more likely it's just that i usually browse with images off for speed, so text is loaded and formatted pretty quickly even on dial-up. loading selected pics after completion of the page layout is not jarring to the senses
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[yuusen]

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if phpBB sent the dimensions of uploaded pictures to the browser in the img tag attributes it wouldnt jump about at all. the html would load with the picture holders already at the right size for the image to appear in and the page would remain stable while they load. you see, the jumping about happens when small, default size, picture holders suddenly receive pictures that are larger and the subceding html has to jump downwards in order to accomodate the size.

im sure a little php GD code would be able to detect the image sizes and write out the correct img size attributes. ill send an email to the developers and ask them to try and include it in one of their updates.
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thanks to the poster for sorting it out :D
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¥

[Lance]

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winamp's pages are notorious for jumping about, but as far as i recall they don't use php; they're just too lazy to format the pics.

and noooowww.... back to webcomics! :D
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[yuusen]

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yes, sorry, that was a bit of a long tangent to go on.
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¥

[Lance]

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what are you apologising for? i started it!

er... and nooooww, back to webcomics!
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