emily

While the stuff about Dave Rushton is true, him being Deep Brick was an assumption people made based solely on a couple dates sort of lining up if you squinted hard. Red Quark has since said that the two are not the same person.

So they had the models, but not necessarily the textures?

 

Oh, and just while we’re on the subject of MNOG/Templar, are there any kind of developer credits for MNOG? I know there aren’t any in-game credits, but is there a complete list of people confirmed to have worked on it?

They probably had access to textures too, but the method for converting the 3D models to vectors that they used seems to have only read the models themselves. They would redraw details onto the vectors but things got confused sometimes, like in the case of the Ta-Koronan Guards where they've got the Pakari models but Templar drew Ruru details over them from a forward angle. 

Can't say I've ever seen a list of MNOG devs, official or otherwise.

Like I said, that was what was suggested in the last thread, and wasn’t my idea. I’m not that knowledgeable about the development of MNOG. Where did we learn they had Saffire assets?

The earliest giveaway was when Deep Brick shared the Onua model from his copy of the game. Here's an image of the Pakari model - the normal holes in the mask are detailed in the texture, so the model itself has just got those slits in the cheeks. Since Templar was just porting the models, several of their early Pakari-wearers have got that (e.g. this dude).

Now that the whole game is out, people have compared other models and such and they'll line up exactly in the geometry and everything.

 

Was it ever determined if these images were screenshots from the game? The Makuta scene in particular could prove useful when designing a final boss.

As I recall from the previous thread, the general consensus was yes, those were from the game. And where else would they be from, anyway? The artwork is computer-generated, but it’s not high-quality enough to be from Ghost, and it resembles the pre-rendered cutscene stills from Tales of the Tohunga (also developed by Saffire).

 

I'm like 99.99% those images were made by Templar. At this point, aside from that one image there, there is no evidence villager Makuta was on the table for LOMN - quite the contrary, there's a lot of evidence against it.

We have the dialogue for the Makuta encounter in LOMN, and while he takes multiple forms (one for each Toa), they almost certainly have to be the Shadow Toa, characters who we have heard from reliable sources were going to be in the game. Templar's whole deal was that the villagers were much more interesting than the big heroes, so it makes sense that they would want to take what was there for LOMN (Makuta = the Toa) and change it to tie into the theming of their game (thus, Makuta = villager). And they could do that without any issue, because they knew at that point that the PC game would never be released - it was their job to tell the story in their own way. 

This also accounts for why we don't see a direct Makuta confrontation in the 03 sources (the Style Guide synopsis and Tale of the Toa). By 03 Makuta's nature in the lore had changed such that he couldn't take six forms at once, he was just a regular dude. So the Shadow Toa had to be conceptually severed from him into just more of this creations. In Tale of the Toa, this leaves a conspicuous moment when the Toa inexplicably decide to call it a day after the Shadow Toa fight - it doesn't make too much sense at first brush, but if the story bible ended with that encounter, well, what else was Hapka supposed to do? Meanwhile, in the synopsis, Greg tries to marry the Shadow Toa narrative with the MNOG one, but the latter only gets a passing mention after his full account of the Shadow Toa battle. The MNOG encounter has always been the odd one out.

Those images are the only real loose end that could feasibly suggest villager Makuta was a thing outside MNOG, but we know that in 04 Templar was still contracted to do web animation stuff for Bionicle - and the animations those pics come from, while unlike their usual stuff, do use Justin Luchter's music. And we know that Templar had access to the LOMN assets - many of the early characters in MNOG are actually traced from the LOMN models. It seems reasonable they could have deployed those models to mock up some additional scenes they felt they needed, including one showing their version of the Makuta fight.

I'm not sure I'd be able to explain how to get that running super easily, but saves are pretty easy to locate. Wherever you installed the game, just open the 'data' folder and they're right in there, as player0.sav, player1.sav etc. player1-4 are all the ones created from front end, player0 is created by playing from the developer menu iirc. You could just copy and paste those files elsewhere to back them up when needed.

Okay, I just spent the last three hours playing through Onua's level up until the boss fight but while I was trying to figure out how to use my glyph at the Kini I decided to enter a previous zone (the one leading to the Kini) and now I get an "unhandled exception" error every time I try to load my game.

 

This is pretty upsetting. Can anyone maybe make my save file work properly?

You aren't gonna be able to recover your save, but if you start up a new game and use the debug menu you can teleport to Onu-Kini and restore the items you've collected so you can resume where you left off. Hit the delete key in-game to bring up the menu, use pgup and pgdn to navigate, and select with the home key. Onu-Kini is called 'shrn' in the warp list.

Looking rad. Where'd you find the original web descriptions for the Toa? They're pretty close to the ones in the Legend of Mata Nui booklet, but have some different details - I think the biggest deal is that "Great Beings" as a term apparently existed at this point.

There's a fair bit of overlap between the different media, but here's a rough list:

- Season 1 of the webisodes

- Both the graphic novels - Gathering of the Toa and Battle of the Mask Makers

- Season 2 of the webisodes

- all 3 books - Island of Lost Masks, Revenge of the Skull Spiders, Escape from the Underworld

- The Journey to One

That should get you through stuff chronologically, with a teensy bit of jumping back to retell events (with different details, sometimes) in the case of the first graphic novel and the first book. The little comics "Quest for the Mask" and "Get the Mask" cover the same story beats roughly as the webisodes Season 1, idk where/if you'd want to fit them in but here they are on Biosector.

With regards to the treespeak thing; I'm pretty sure I remember that, when it was first introduced in MNOG, treespeak words had no hyphens; it was only around-about 2003-04 that started becoming a thing. I would tentatively guess than all such words coined in the early years were forever spelled without hyphens, while any new ones that Greg invented from the Metru Nui era onwards were given hyphens for ease of understanding? Though this is only a guess based on half-remembered facts, as it's been ages since I seriously looked at any of the source material.

Sounds about right - the lexicon is like mnog and doesn't use hyphens.  If anyone has the Official Guide to Bionicle on-hand to check, It'd be interesting to know if there are hyphens there, since it's written by Greg.

Has anyone worked out the compatibility settings needed for this to run on Windows 10 yet? I'm amazed this has turned up, and very curious to give it a go - but I'm not getting anything beyond white screen with a loading cursor for a few moments, then flashes of black, white, black, and a quit back to the desktop.

 

I only just saw this topic a couple of days ago, and so haven't been keeping up with all the ongoing processes of getting it to work; so I may be missing a solution that's already been discovered by now xD;;

Yeah, its not super obvious but it you scroll down on the bmp page for the game there's a link to the latest patch. Among the fixes is win10 support!

[LXF download link]

Unfortunately the LOMN model for the Fikou Nui omits some of the elements necessary for connecting the main body to the leg/abdomen assembly, so I haven't been able to 100% figure it out either, even being able to look closely at the model for reference. Yours is pretty close, though - the biggest thing is that the part that the eyes and roborider head attach onto is actually a roborider body part - this one. That part isn't in LDD, but I approximated it and built around that.

As an aside, it turns out the big bugs in QftT are actually built mostly the same as the Fikou Nui, just minus the abdomen and with much smaller legs. So I've got them both in this LXF.

Aw, there's really no need to beat yourself up like that! You're more important than a couple pieces of plastic.

And that's a cool shirt! One I haven't seen before - thanks for sharing pics.

Supersonic RC

Dirt Crusher

Enjoy!

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?B=biocom02uk#T=S&O={"iconly":0}

early on the distribution for the Bionicle comic was weird. They seemed to get it all standardized by mid-2002 to the numbering of the full (US) series, but before then there were some oddities. UK also got this and then there's stuff like this.

Um I think that was out around the time of Brain Attack. So I don't think it's new

nah its new. they did a rerecording of Gravity Hurts back then, but this is a new one.

100% factually incorrect. Mata Nui being a giant robot and containing an entire universe which the Matoran originated from was planned from the very beginning. In fact, the contingency plan was for the giant robot to rise out from underneath the island at the end of the very first year, in the case that the theme did not do well. However, the theme was a massive success, so they continued with their original plan, which encompassed the Mata Nui, Metru Nui, and Ignition arcs - which were ALL roughly sketched out long before the theme was officially released. Literally the only arc that wasn't planned from the beginning was Bara Magna - the original plan for the years following Ignition involved "finding the Great Beings."

I think Planetperson was more talking about from the fans' perspective. After all, the term "Matoran Universe" really only saw use in the first place because the secret - that the Matoran Universe was actually just Mata Nui - couldn't be revealed. The concept of the MU was always there, but the term definitely was not, and it only needed to come to be once we started to realize there was an underground network beyond Metru Nui - in 2006. 

I'm curious where you heard that the plan for the post-Ignition years was to do with the GBs - that's not something I think I've seen before.

I always thought the idea of scaling them down to canister set size like they did in this Tower of Toa prototype was neat, even if it left Keetongu hilariously out of scale. Just want those yellow Metru pieces! 

Kinda funny how closely this parallels bionicle's last year. Creatures that embody the land's elements, a ancient villain rising up and taking action from the other end of a dark portal that leads to a shadow realm, an apparent loss of elemental abilities as a result of the villain's actions, a light-powered newcomer that is associated with a bird (or in this case, becomes a bird). 

Hope the Netflix series will continue, it was fun. 

Oh yeah, that one! I totally forgot it had the ending of that music track in it. Glad you figured out what the video was, even if it ended up not being something new.

They don't know who sung it but they guessed from the writing style it may have been written by Lego directly and performed by someone else.

 

Since the rap is so cringy clean but keeping a smooth flow. Tells it was originally written that way.

Yeah, I'd say this is the most likely possibility. Especially since we know Creeping in My Soul from a year later was written and performed by an in-house team at Advance/Lego (who would then later go on to form Cryoshell). The guy that sings Piraka Rap is also the voice for the commercial, so they're probably hired talent to try and make everything sound extra 'hip'.

Actually, while we're on the subject, what is the origin of this video?

Its on the Bohrok Swarm/Toa Nuva CD-ROMS. You'll see versions of it floating around without the narration like that because that's how the video is stored on the CD, the narration is separate audio clips that are set to play at the appropriate timestamps when you watch it on the disc. Kinda weird. 

Hmm. This sounds super interesting, but I don't think you saw it on Biomedia Project - I just went through their whole archive a short while ago and at the time, even the Bohrok CD version you linked lacked narration in their copy. Didn't see anything like you describe.

Your description of the full music sounds true to what I remember hearing when it used to be listenable on this page, though, so I totally believe that you saw this vid. If it uses the three virtues spinny animation thing its probably from 2002, though - at least, we only have 2002 stuff that uses that animation, so I don't think it would have been made in 01. 

It'll be tricky to track this down, considering how many similar videos there are - the one you linked, and also like The Legend Lives and Project BUGS. If you saw it a month ago, it's gotta be out there still - any chance you might be able to dig it out by searching your browsing history, or something like that?

For the people who dont know where this is, it is located in mnog, in a le koro cutscene when kongu's bird rahi has crashed, you can see it on the left, and in mnog 2 when you enter le koro

neat!

The title is a little misleading - this isn't a booklet made for The Legend of Mata Nui, the cancelled 01 game. It's a part of the contents of the theme decks for the old Quest for the Masks trading card game. It just happens to have the same name!

Nevertheless, it's still pretty interesting! It contains a lot of what appears to be very early material written for the Bionicle line. It is of such a style and organization that I suspect it is excerpted more or less directly from one of the first editions of the story bible. 

I wanted to make some nice scans, but unfortunately it isn't possible right now, so I went ahead and took photos instead. Here's the album!

It's got bios for the Toa and Turaga, plus the masks and the Wahi. The Toa bios were also printed on the collectible pens' packaging, but everything else is unique to the booklet. There's a ton of stuff of note, but here're a couple of things I find the most interesting:

- This was written before the Toa were switched from god-type characters to be more down-to-earth and relatable. Storms are clashes between Gali and Lewa, Onua brings the earthquakes, etc. Gali is also apparently the most worshiped of all the Toa, across all the villages!

- There's a passing mention of 'totems' the Toa put there masks on. Whenever this section was written, they hadn't yet conceived of the Suva.

- Nuju and Nokama hang out on lake Naho... when it's frozen in the winter! Seasons, on Mata Nui? also, adorable

- Weird subplot about one of Gali's masks being missing from the village, and Tohunga going out to find it. 

The credits give the effort of compiling the booklet to someone at Upper Deck, but not writing it, which seems to confirm it is from an external (i.e. from Lego) source. I can't imagine what that would be other than the story bible.

PS, these are actual rainbow tinted foil holo cards, not the silver letter ones from the limited edition packs (this whole time I kind of just thought they were misprints). If these are the rainbow cards, and if you’re interested. I found mine in the ebay tab here on BZPower. http://www.ebay.com/itm/TC-Lego-Bionicle-Sammelkarten-alle-6-Elemente-Holo-Die-Suche-nach-den-Masken-/352048972077?hash=item51f7c1012d:g:~VIAAOSwt0FZDIxl

 

A little late here, but thanks for pointing this listing out, I got a set of cards from it. Weird that the seller has so many of them - maybe they had wider distribution in Germany than the US.