Another RAD Contest Proposal

[Jennifer_P]

That's an cool idea, Andy; "mood" and "atmosphere" as the criteria for winning. This should be interesting!

[GPNMilano]

I'm in. I've been itching to start a new age since I can't finish the old one until I get word back from Cyan, so working on this would be a blast.

[andylegate]

Okay, well there seems to be some gathering interest in this. Like I said, I'm "itching" too, to start a small "Mood" Age I guess you can call it. Something that looks very pretty, tries to follow the Cyan Canon of "Stunning" (all though I'll be lucky to simply have it look "okay" hehehe).

Music? Why yes, of course! Sounds, from ambient, to sfx, to music is what helps make or break an Age. I mean, just how good would any of you thought of Eder Delin had when you linked in you were met with the background music of AC/DC (whom I love to listen to personally), it just would have jarred with the Age.

The reason I said "No puzzles" is to try and do 2 things:

Simplify the Age itself. Many kinds of puzzles will take the making of sdl and python files. I wanted to give those that are not up to par with that a better chance.

And: leave it for the next RAD, have a Puzzle Age contest.

Again, it's just a suggestion on my part, if I do this, I'll more than likely not have a puzzle, so I can concentrate more on the beauty of the Age itself. I'm not saying puzzles not allowed, just saying to leave it from the judging this time around.

@Chacal: What ever you do in private is your business of course. But being one of the people on the FCAL Project, I can't really be out there telling people to ignore RAWA now can I?

I've gone back over RAWA's guidelines, and I really can't see where it severely limits creativity. If anything, it opened up the doors to it drastically:

You can create a D'ni Age if you want.
You can add to the Cavern, but simply have to make it isolated, like Bevin is.
You can say a Main Charactor had visited a place, but you can't introduce fact like they built it, or owned it.
You have to stick to the old rules of linking, no Yeesha stuff. Well, okay, I had heart ache with some of the Yeesha stuff anyway.
We're allowed to point to the sound files, and things.

There are limits, but just by acknowledging Fan Ages and giving us guidelines was a HUGE step in my opininion.

Anyway, so y'all going to get this start? :rubs hand together in anticipation:

[Lontahv]

Let's get it started! Feel free to PM me and/or a few other people or whatever and get this thing rolling.

[Trylon]

I kinda feel like making a small mood age too so I might just be joining in...

[Marcello]

I could start any day... but do have to get my pc of the ground and on some table of sorts lol. Working an this laptop won't work. I have one problem though (well not a problem since it's a nice thing, but in the context of a contest).... I will be on holiday from the 17th of October until the 1st of November. Would love to participate, but then I would probably have to start today !!

[Robert The Rebuilder]

You bring up a good point, Marcello.

We want to be able to advertise it for a while to get a good number of contestants. But we also don't want to delay too long. When should this contest be held?

On a different note, I suggest we only allow people to create ages from scratch for this contest. It's too confusing for judges to differentiate the progress made on an existing age verses a completely new age, IMHO. What does everyone else think?

[andylegate]

Oh yes, I meant from scratch. As you said, we could do the progress thing like the Shells contest, but I gather that was kinda hard?

Anyway my suggestion was from scratch.

I'd like to start it soon, but I know that things have to be prepared for it. And yah, I'd hate anyone, like Marcello to miss it. But then if we wait too long we start getting into the holidays and also (hopefully) MORE starting back up, and the RAD would suffer from that I would think.

'Tis all up to you.

In the mean time, I'm fiddling with the City MOUL files. Got my swooping Bahro to work, the Light Meter is back on the dock. I even had the Memorial back, except it was like off, then when I fiddled with the python file, it went from off, to gone, and in it's place was this canvous cloth and barricades to the Pub...never saw that before, and I assume that was there during the Wheely episode (couldn't get in there myself, way too many people). So I'm having fun working with that and Myst V ages too.

[Godot]

If a person does not have a FCAL can we still use the URU avatar and other URU infrastructure for this contest?

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Another good question!

For the 2nd RAD contest, this was not needed - Ahra Pahts already has a FCAL. For the 1st RAD contest, the reward was to help people obtain a FCAL.

Should each contestant try to obtain a FCAL? After all - they're going to be sharing their ages with the general public. But I'm guessing that Cyan is currently swamped with the upcoming MORE release. Heck: Chogon didn't even have time to post a progress report this month!