|
|
Post by Johnny Jett on Mar 1, 2021 7:27:30 GMT
So, Fire Pro. Boy, I've been playing this game for a while, huh? Yep. Quite a while. Like a couple thousand hours according to Steam. And that's not even counting all the video editing and writing and so on I've done on and off for the last three years or so. I've worked on this whole Power Pro Universe setting thing for a hot minute. The hottest of minutes. It's second only to, like, my DnD setting probably as far as dedicated projects I've worked on. I've made 380 original edits with full logic, movesets, costumes, the whole nine yards. I've reskinned and gussied up the game's extant and DLC wrestlers. I've fleshed out something like 37 companies. I've even dabbled in bringing my numbers up to meet TEW 2020's relatively high roster demands--a task I'll probably end up achieving.
My first goalpost was finishing the Power Pro roster. That one was easy. Fourteen wrestlers, that turned out to be pretty simple. But, then, I needed some cannon fodder for them to wrestle in b-roll. So I made a few other wrestlers; jobbers, young boys, throw away, nothing wrestlers.
Well, then I heard about Fire Promoter and that got me excited. So I found out the numbers I'd need in order to have that fleshed out by the game's standards and I started making other companies, just expanding outward, getting more characters ready so I could run a kickass Fire Promoter game.
Then, well, that felt kinda light. I mean, Fire Promoter has some companies with just six or four people! Nah. That wasn't enough. That didn't seem right. So my next goalpost was to bring the roster numbers up to meet TEW numbers. I think I started with, like, TEW 2010 stats. I used this weird mix of Fire Pro, TEW, and EWR to get the rosters and companies and numbers I thought I'd need to be satisfied, to call the project "done."
But then. Then I decided "well, what if I just remade the default Fire Promoter rosters, too?" And the New Japan roster. And the Stardom roster. What if I completely redesigned them and just incorporated them into my universe's cannon? Gotta have a world beyond the US, this can be my whole international scene!
Then, when that was done, I thought, "Well. What if I made a couple more companies worth of edits, just to make it so that I could run a men-only Fire Promoter so that the game never messes up my women's companies?"
Then I did that and I thought I was done. That I could just plug everything into TEW--beginning ANOTHER long leg of this project--and be done. Maybe I'd make a few more edits later, y'know. Maybe I'd make some dojo students or jobbers, undercard performers from time to time. MAYBE I'd make some women's companies, enough to make an all-women Fire Promoter possible. But that'd be later. That'd be for future me to worry about.
So I decided to use the newest TEW. Because it just came out so WHY NOT. And apparently, for TEW 2020 Adam Ryland has decided to inflate the rosters to, like, double their size to, I guess, reflect modern wrestling companies being massive, bloated things that all blend together owing to their largely shared rosters, differentiated only by the handful of stand-out exclusive or homegrown wrestlers that they maintain.
So now, like I said, I'm doing that. I'm making about four new wrestlers for each company and then filling in the other roster spots with free agents. But I know that won't be the end. How could it be? I'll inevitably find another reason to dive back into edit making. How about those women's companies? I've got a couple of Canadian/UK/Japanese company ideas, too. I still want to make an edit for almost every head in the game (at least the ones that fit the same basic art style). And, of course, I've still got to go back and fine-tune 50-60 of the ones I made early on to get them up to my current standards. And, man, what if someone makes a cool new move on the workshop that I've just *got* to build a wrestler around? I'm just going to keep shifting the goalposts. I'm just gonna keep experiencing mission creep. I love wrestling, I love making up characters, and I love world building. So making some kind of massive, titanic *thing* like this was always bound to happen. But I'm kinda sorta afraid that I'll never actually be at a place that I think is good enough to call "done."
And the thing is, even when I get back to doing actual Power Pro recording and stuff, people will never see HALF of these edits. I'd have to run a 500-some-odd edit gauntlet to get every one of them a single match. Which sounds really cool, but also like a nightmare.
A nightmare I kinda really want to do somehow, some time. That sounds awesome. Or the biggest freaking single-elimination tournament ever.
Regardless. When do you guys stop? What's your end point? When are you finished?
|
|
|
|
Post by Phil Parent on Mar 1, 2021 23:39:56 GMT
I'm not sure stopping will ever be a thing, as far as I'm concerned.
My project, porting all the old games to World, is finite. But what's stopping me from putting all those stats and movesets in a spreadsheet? Or do custom real-world edits that are balanced to work with the canon roster? Or write a book on the series, the ultimate fire pro encyclopedia?
I'll never be done. I'll take edit-making to my grave. At this point, I'm sure of it. I tried to stop, I can't. This is my hobby, like people write, people paint, people play music, I do edits!
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2021 20:18:17 GMT
I'm in awe of Fire Pro creators who create hundreds and thousands of edits.
I have a question, do you have any short cuts when creating, or do you start from scratch every single time?
Just asking for a friend.
|
|
|
|
Post by Eisenheim on Mar 2, 2021 22:54:31 GMT
The only thing worse than an unfulfilled dream is a fulfilled dream  |
|
|
|
Post by Johnny Jett on Mar 3, 2021 1:45:31 GMT
I'm in awe of Fire Pro creators who create hundreds and thousands of edits. I have a question, do you have any short cuts when creating, or do you start from scratch every single time? Just asking for a friend. The best answer is it's a mix, for me. Like, I feel like my edits come in different styles depending on what I knew about the game at the time of their original creation. My main Power Pro Wrestling-contracted roster of fourteen I built from the ground up. The versions that showed up in Season One of my efed were my first attempt at flailing around and figuring out logic and everything for the first time ever. I'd played Returns before World, but I'd never actually understood *anything* about logic or parameters or how edit making works prior to deciding to make a show for YouTube. So those wrestlers started out being built from scratch and now that I have a better grasp of edit making (and a more solid idea of what they should be doing, how they should wrestle, and how to GET them to wrestle like that) I've gone back and fine tuned them for a hopeful Season Two sometime in the future. After that, when I was going for just *numbers*, I went onto the Steam workshop and looked around to find some basic templates to use. DJKM has some good stuff that I used as the foundation for a lot of my earlier edits. I used his templates to get a logic foundation down for maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty or so wrestlers, focusing on just getting their parameters, moves, and appearances right. I'm still absolutely a novice when it comes to logic, but this was at a point when I was even more clueless. So a lot of those earlier edits wrestle kinda weird because their logic is set up for entirely different movesets and parameters than what they actually wrestle with. They still produce matches that are entertaining to me, but they're wonky and their finishers, obviously, aren't always what they try to end matches with. I've been working on fixing them. Then there are the Fire Promoter, SWA, New Japan, and Stardom conversions which just have altered appearances, parameters, and *sometimes* logic. I don't really count those as "mine" so they're not in my total count. Only a few of them are altered so significantly that they're essentially different edits entirely (like Kenny Omega being transformed into the Hawaiian surfer dude Cabana Boy). For them, the goal was to just kinda lower their parameters to match the other edits (for *most* edits I have a cap of ~120 edit points or lower with low defense parameters so that they produce shorter "tv" style matches) and fix their appearances to bring those in line with my coloring conventions (like Black always being 40-40-40). And I fixed the lucha Fire Promoter edits so that they had, like, lucha names based on their nicknames Google translated into Spanish. But that era of my edit making isn't really my work so much as it's just me porting Spike's edits into my style. I'll probably fix them up more at some point. Now that I've got a marginally better grasp on logic and how to sequence things with priorities and so on, a lot of my more recently made edits are entirely ground up. I've got my edit making process down to about two hours per edit working from appearance down to logic. If I'm making a dedicated tag team, I can basically get two in one with maybe half an hour more effort. I still tend to start with a DJKM template, but that's more out of habit than anything at this point. The last dozen or so I think I've just went straight from John Smith. But if you're looking for a shortcut, definitely try working from a template. At first it feels like cheating because someone else has put in a lot of the work, but then once you change enough about it it becomes a real Ship of Theseus sort of thing. Heck, don't even just use DJKM's templates, take another edit maker's work and dig into it. The workshop has got some great edits, break 'em down and look at how they function. If you can look at the template's logic and figure out "oh, this is like this so that this happens" you can then sort of reverse engineer it so that you can make your own edits do things like that. I've only gotten to where I am because I've stolen from other great artists, like any great artist should do. I hope this long-winded, humble brag-y answer helps somehow. |
|
|
|
Post by Timberwolf on Mar 3, 2021 4:01:02 GMT
I'm never finished.
Let's put it this way.
I'm still working on edits that I started on in 2009 😁
|
|
|
|
Post by Dawnbr3ak3r on Mar 3, 2021 8:06:56 GMT
I believe the correct answer to this thread is "Never".
Anyone that says they're finished working on their edits is a liar and shouldn't be trusted.
I may say that I'm content with progress on an edit, but that doesn't mean they're finished. I still have edits from years ago in Returns that I was working on that never got around to being happy with, and they wound up being their own thing in World.
|
|
|
|
Post by Senator Phillips on Mar 3, 2021 19:03:10 GMT
I'm in awe of Fire Pro creators who create hundreds and thousands of edits. I have a question, do you have any short cuts when creating, or do you start from scratch every single time? Just asking for a friend. I have three categories of edits that I could give an answer for: 1) Reworkings of edits that I created in Fire Pro Returns and had ported over to World -These start from a workable base, so that's a pretty big shortcut, even if I tend to redo nearly everything I had done before with them, systematically improving each part. 2) Boxers -I almost always started my boxing edits by coping the closest boxer in their weight class as a base, mainly for balance purposes, and because the boxer build I work with would take a lot of boring redundant work to recreate each time. 3) Everything else -Yes, for about every other edit, I start with the base default John Smith edit, and go from there. I actually find that helps me to make sure that everything is properly set since I don't take anything for granted with that terrible default logic base. |
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2021 20:24:10 GMT
Thank you for the answers to my question.
From what I've gathered from the answers, is to get the most out Fire Pro is to put the work in!
I'm off to get acquainted with John Smith on my Friday night Fire Pro sessions.
|
|
|
|
Post by LankyLefty17 on Mar 4, 2021 19:06:11 GMT
Fire Pro is all about the grind. Grinding out edits, testing them, tweaking them, creating new edits, going back to the old ones because you figured out how to do something and now you want to apply it to the old one, rinse and repeat. To love Fire Pro is to love the grind- a lot of people dont which is why I think you see a lot of grand declarative plans that never see the light of day.
For me, its not even about just about making edits. Its about making moves for those edits, and parts. And with mods, its about making venues for my feds, and custom entrance trons, and custom sounds, and friggin custom audience members, and all the other added options. Then its about actually running my efeds that apply all of that work. Fire Pro, and World specifically, is a creative white space with almost no limits- and no real end point past maybe the occational burnout haha.
|
|
|
|
Post by OrochiGeese on Mar 5, 2021 8:40:11 GMT
Wait....we're...we're supposed to be able to finish Fire Pro? 😳
*Vaguely remembers starting to play Fire Pro D in 2001...*
Oh man, I've been doing this all wrong!! 😁
Fire Pro is the ultimate replayable game. Not only can you use it 100 different ways, but you can get super thorough with each way that you want to play it. My relationship with the game has changed, evolved, devolved, re-evolved, and danced the Charleston throughout the last *gulp* 20 years.
WOW - next year my FP experience can drive! 🚗
I think Phil and Senator were playing even longer than me as well!
I have so many projects that I still want to work on and want to work on more. Edits who I created the loose idea of for FPR that I wanted to make but never did. Variants of edits that already have variants. Now we have Move Maker and my mind frequently shifts to ideas for moves that I want to make and edits I want to make to use those moves. It's basically a giant ouroboros like Eisey alluded to ✨
I've never completed or finished one edit. Like Dawn said, it's impossible. Dividing by 0 is easier.
At the same time, it's a testament to the replayability of Fire Pro and our own potential creativity.
An edit is always a Work in Progress. If you're lucky, you have 1 edit that you feel really good about: whether it's an edit of a real life wrestler (example for you youngsters: Dennis Stamp) or an original character edit.
The best that one can hope for is a "finished final draft" that works the way you want in sims (through logic trends over time) and reflects the character of an edit for a specific time frame in their career.
I'd say in the last 20 years, I've made 3-5 edits who have had time frames where I feel like I captured their characters the best I could with what the game allowed. I say time frames because characters change. The Orochi Geese edit in 2007 was the bees knees, the cat's meow, the yak's shriek. But then the character changed and that edit became painfully (ask his opponents) obsolete.
I'm trying to capture the Geese character of 2021 now with his edit and hoping 2007 style lightning will strike twice. It didn't with his previous FPW versions (all 3 of them). Even though the edit worked reliably in sims - the character just wasn't being fully portrayed the way I wanted him to. Not to the point where he really "popped" out of the game and felt real. I approached his current version differently as a result - and Move Craft helped a TON. But even if I nail it, it will be obsolete again once his character evolves again or if I decide to switch around a move or strategy and need to adjust.
The edit is never finished. If you can catch lightning in a bottle for a few months or a year, you have succeeded. But then you just have to get ready to adapt them all over again when it is time. Enjoy the success, learn from it, and be confident you can do it again.
Lanky said it wonderfully:
*GrindingGoose likes this post 👍
I love this game. Like Phil said, I'll never stop experiencing it on some level. Whenever I feel like I can be a bit more aggressive with my free time, I always turn to it. And it's always running in my mind to some extent: whether it's ideas for a move, ideas for an edit, or related e-fed character/storylines. Once I started playing this game, it's like my brain had its own Big Bang moment of creativity and imagination. It's out there, slowly expanding, slowly causing old galaxies in my head (like 6th grade math) to experience heat death or get sucked into black holes. In the end, there may only be Fire Pro stretched across the fabric of time and space.
In the end, we are the edits. And Fire Pro will never stop simming us.
|
|
|
|
Post by Spunk on Mar 17, 2021 1:43:07 GMT
With the mods in play there's not many limits for the uses of Fire Pro.
If I ever have a lot of time at some point I'm gonna make an animated movie using Fire Pro.
|
|
|
|
Post by fignuts on May 14, 2021 20:59:50 GMT
There is no "finished" when it comes to sandbox type games. There's always new ideas that you can try.
|
|
|
|
Post by kip1985 on Jul 24, 2021 5:46:36 GMT
I'm currently downloading and editing DJKM's edits to fit my style more. I'm also porting over the edits from Returns he has yet to port over himself, so one edit takes me about 30-40 minutes to complete that way. The guy created over 6000 unique characters on Returns, so I've got my work cut out for me.
|
|
|
|
Post by Staubhold on Jul 24, 2021 15:51:00 GMT
I think I'll be never finished. I'm almost daily downloading new moves or whole edits, constantly adding costum moves to older edits. Watching matches on youtube and then adjusting the CPU logic of the edit to operate like IRL... and be tickled if the edit acts like he should. |
|
