Tales of Duranin | A work in progress

An AU of Warcraft

Tales of Duranin is an alternate universe (AU) "fan-fiction" story of Warcraft that an old friend and I made. John, thanks for really starting it off. It follows a group of characters whose lives and stories slowly cross as they become caught up in something much larger than any of them. It's a story about heroes, but perhaps more importantly, what remains of them when the battles are over and history has moved on. The characters are, naturally, our own. Dradaco is in there, and Hyndon (Hy-den), any many others. The roster is actually based on many people he knew while playing WoW. I don't want to tell a lot of the story here just yet. I've always wanted to bring this story to life through WoW Machinima. The story takes heavy inspiration from Tales of the Past, hence the name.

Working in the Game

With wanting to make a WoW machinima, there's many different routes you can take to make one. The most common, currently, is using Blender or another similar program to animate the characters and make your machinima that way. Another popular way is using WoW Model Viewer to capture the footage of your characters in front of a green screen and keying a background behind it. The last one, that I can think of, is simply recording it all in game. This is the approach I have taken. I've made a private server, added many content patches for new regions of the game, and have added tools to help in this endeavor. I have made a way of adding custom actor NPC's very quickly. I simply design them in WMV and import them directly in game. I have an addon that I made which allows me to quickly take control of one of the actor NPC's and move them around freely. I can also make the selected NPC emote with simple buttons I can click, or if there's a specific emote not listed on my current palette, type in the specific emote ID. There is one final program called Bugcraft Studio that allows me to access a free-cam and also supports positional keyframes for those camera-on-a-track shots. So how do I get my footage? Quite easy, I have two clients running simultaneously, a recording client that Bugcraft is working on, and my actor client which lets me quite literally act.

Final Thoughts

Yeah, I'm ending this one a bit short, too, but this is just an update of what I've been doing. This project is huge and I don't ever know if I'll ever get the chance to finish it. The story I wish to tell is a lot, but this story means a lot to me, too. I've written a bunch of it, intending for it to become a machinima, but it is nowhere near complete. So much to do, so little time...

ALSO HAPPY HALLOWS END!