Ni-Ki-Oh! News

Two weeks ago, a very strange thing started happening on the site's forums. Some seemingly random videos were posted by different forum members, some of whom have not been active on the forum in years.

These videos were labeled as the Ad Campaign by a Facebook event. This event culminated in the (late) release of the first ever episode of Ni-Ki-Oh!, remade for the internet.

These videos were all posted using a proprietary flash player that was designed by our techs last April.

Hopefully this is the beginning of a new trend of media content on the site!

With the final arrival of Final Genesis RC1 & RC2 this holiday season, the first release of the 4th Season DVDs will almost immediately follow. This means that The Rare Hunters can be expected within a month after RC2.

However, due to the specific content of the episodes in the Rescue Mission and Last Generation collections and some pressure for last minute script changes, post-production cannot be completed on these for some time. The episodes include content shared with the upcoming Isles of Fortune series.

Isles of Fortune, scheduled to enter pre-production parallel to the release of RC1 & RC2, must have the complete story arc scripted and well into post-production before the 4th season can be completed.

There will be a 5th season of . Season 5 enters pre-production April 2007.

The site was down for the past two weeks because of an altered IP address that broke database access. Because our service provider didn't think it was necessary to tell us about the change, the site remained down while we were under the impression that there was a simple service outage. Once we discovered the true cause, we naturally informed our service provider of our displeasure.

During the past two weeks, work on Final Genesis as a whole had to come to a halt. While 3-7 "Losing a Mind" had technically been completed by November 11, now post-production for both 3-6 and 3-7 has been rewound an additional week. We reformatted the system drive on MASTER-EGG v1.1 to free additional workspace. All source files were archived in a safe location, but the changes in the system registry resulted in our software flagging and effectively deleting all special effects that had been made prior to the format.

Having lost a week's worth of special effects data, we sought further ways to speed up post-production. Instead of completely manual manipulation, by using new software plugins we should be able to decrease animation time by up to an additional 40%.

We should have these new tools available and have recovered our effects data on December 8th.

Since Final Genesis was first announced back in 2004, there have been loads upon loads of delays including character model development, system upgrades, system failures, etc. that only proceeded to push the release date further and further back, months at a time.

Now with the release of Final Genesis RC1 scheduled for tomorrow evening, a lot of people had doubts that this deadline would be met, even considering RC1 included a Halloween-appropriate deadline.

These people were right. With less than 48 hours to go and doubts from the staff to even make an 11/4 revised deadline, a massive array of system and video errors halted production. 3-7 has been completed, but picture-lock has not yet been established on even the first 5 minutes of 3-6.

Rendering times for the high-quality animation expected in RC1 were the main source of this concern. At the present rate, experts calculated another 3 weeks of animation before the DVD could be produced. That is, until the system errors and video failure.

MASTER-EGG v1.0 experienced 12 hours of downtime before being successfully rebooted. After some careful recalibrations of the renderer, system errors could be avoided and a miraculous 50% cut in rendering time was realized.

Although this means that Final Genesis RC1 will not be ready for tomorrow's DVD deadline, it does not mean another 6 months' delay. RC1 will be ready in all its glory for the November 11 YouTube date.

When the series was slated to be cancelled after 3-5 "Duel for All Souls," Cracked Egg Studios considered beginning a new series taking place several months after that would be called Final Genesis. It was eventually deemed absurd that another series be created when it could just be continued, so they decided Final Genesis would just refer to the Season 3 Finale DVD. Until recently, this is what everyone thought of Final Genesis, even though Beta only included an incomplete 3-6 "Power Surge."

Stemming from the scrapped new series plan, Final Genesis now refers to the entire Tommy story arc. The episodes contained in the next two DVDs function as a prologue to Tommy's involvement in the Octagon City tournament (Season 4).

Not only for this reason, but also for story purposes, what was originally labelled Final Genesis is now only RC1 and RC2. The reference to release candidate suggests a connection to computer software development (e.g. the Virtual World in RC2) or perhaps since Final Genesis refers to the Tommy story arc, RC1 and RC2 might refer to the concept that Tommy, although powerful, still has not permanently attained his ultimate form (which appeared briefly in The Lost Episodes 1-9).