Lusitania: The Greyhound's Wake

[Milos Grkovic]

Update from Tom Lynskey on his YouTube channel post at Part-Time Explorer​

With his photo collage​

"As we near the finish line for our Lusitania virtual museum experience, we've been starting work on our next experience. This one focuses on the wreck of the Empress of Ireland, allowing the users to walk the decks, explore the interiors, and experience the sinking in real-time. It's incredibly exciting when looking back two years ago, when started laying the ground work for this project, to seeing it all now taking shape!

To really dive deep into this, I brought some of the HFX team up to Montreal, Quebec City, and Rimouski to get a thorough understanding of the Empress' legacy. We stood where the passengers boarded. We held the artifacts. We laid flowers on the graves. We had long, in-depth conversations with those who dove the wreck. Our friend, David Saint-Pierre, gave us an awesome personal tour of these sites, sharing is personal research, and helping us ensure the utmost accuracy we can possibly deliver.

When our team commits ourselves to a project, we don't simply crank it out as quick as we can. We do all that we can to thoroughly understand the subject matter and develop a personal connection with it. We are telling the story of over a thousand lives that were tragically cut short, and we need to fully grasp this before we are ready to convey it to the world. We've seen too many projects simply rush to tell a story for the sake of views or to beat us to the punch, but like the Lusitania, we want to get the Empress right.

A quick rundown of the photos in this collage, going clockwise:
1. David, Simon (a diver), and I review rare plans of the Empress and discuss the state of the ship today.
2. Levi takes David and the staff of the Empress of Ireland Museum of Rimouski on a tour of our Lusitania project to give them an idea of our goals with the Empress.
3. Levi and Alex measure various artifacts pulled from the wreckage while Amos photographs each one.
4. Amos and a toilet seat.
5. Our team standing right where the Empress departed on her fateful voyage."

https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx7KTqFGRsmx86_0GdNsVkb4NrazBGGLnz

 

[Milos Grkovic]

As a companion to this project, Tom just uploaded this short teaser for J. Kent Layton's new book:

 

[Milos Grkovic]

On the main page of HFX Studios, in the Lusitania Museum Experience section has this paragraph that recaps the update on
28th May this year:
"Progress continues as we near completion on our Lusitania Museum Experience. We’ve completed most of the exterior and are currently working on refining the interior, as well as producing marketing and distribution material and overall polishing."

Also including two renders of the recreation of Lusitania's saloon and menu plus a bonus of this still of Lusitania sinking as a homage to Ken Marschall's painting.

 

[Milos Grkovic]

An update from Kent from his Lusitania: An Illustrated Biography:
"In honor of the 116th anniversary of Lusitania's final night at sea on her maiden voyage to New York, we are sharing this splendid image with you. Stay tuned for more updates on both the book and the upcoming virtual museum experience "Lusitania: The Greyhound's Wake" from HFX Studios!

 

[Milos Grkovic]

Looking at some of the renders, the ET's logo gets in the way of HFX Studios one just a little bit, but I can't do anything with that. But, at the very least, it does give a glimpse of the project for a virtual museum experience.

Anyway, here's a screencapture of the Update 2 on the project with regards to achieving the rust and algae on an used, filthy, well-battered and well-used ship. With a bonus of Mike Brady's texturing of the hull.

 

[Milos Grkovic]

Deciding to change the cover to this one from the official Historical Effects (HFX Studios alias for Tom Lynskey) website.

Again, I apologise for those early comments. Some people do get onto the topic of Lusitania, but not realising that this thread 'Lusitania the Greyhound's Wake' is for posting updates off a virtual experience. Hence why I've opened it in the first place.

 

[Milos Grkovic]

An in-game shot of Lusitania that was posted on Lusitania: An Illustrated Biography.

Post description: One of the greatest liners ever to sail the North Atlantic stirs.

 

[Milos Grkovic]

Happy New year everyone,
wishing you all the best in 2024.
Just yesterday, Tom put a video detailing his content during last year. At 5:47 mark, he began talking about this project Lusitania: The Greyhound's Wake virtual experience.

​

 

[Milos Grkovic]

This one has been shared already, but just to do a slight comparison of what Levi and Tom's team did with the faithful recration of Ken Marschall's 1994 painting of Lusitania. In a livestream when Mike Brady was unavailable due to illness, they chose to invite a special surprise guest, hence Ken Marschall. The first major update is the angle. It's lined up but also has a really interesting technique that film enthusiasts may recognise as a dolly-zoom effect. Except here it's been used only to capture the angle from how Ken painted the Lusitania with the animation playing constantly and camera staying as it is from that zoom out.

 

[Milos Grkovic]

This one is Tom Lynskey's section from "'On a Sea of Glass' Author Meeting" that was done last month. I wasn't able to upload the entire clip so I had to upload to Google Drive. The entire livestream can be found on J. Kent Layton's channel.

 

[Milos Grkovic]

Screencaptures from Tom's livestream.

 

[Milos Grkovic]

I have to copy this post which was shared yesterday by J. Kent Layton in its entirety, as it does contain both the project and the book. I don't want to explain it too much. I'll put it in quotes to seperate my own section.

Earlier today, in a group that was dedicated to another liner-related game project, some enthusiasts asked questions about whether they would soon see some updates on multiple game projects that they are rightly excited about. In particular, they expressed the hope that they would see an update on the upcoming HFX Studios virtual museum experience, "Lusitania: The Greyhound's Wake", perhaps on May 7 (the anniversary of the Lusitania disaster). I felt their enthusiastic interest deserved a clear and honest response, at least as far as our own project was concerned.
For some reason, the admins of that group deleted the entire thread, along with my answers. After careful consideration, I feel that these enthusiastic individuals -- and others who are looking forward to our virtual museum experience and our forthcoming two-volume book set, "Lusitania: An Illustrated Biography" -- still deserve the answers they were looking for. So I am posting my response on MY pages, and I hope that these answers find their way to all of those who are so patiently waiting to hear more about our projects.
Right now, our priority is getting the two-volume book set finished up. In the process of the research for "The Greyhound's Wake", our team of historians -- who were tapped by Tom Lynskey because he realizes the value of having credible historians do the work on this, rather than trying to forge forth himself -- made so many astounding discoveries that we knew we had to release them in a scholarly way. Otherwise, they would have no more depth or trustworthiness than any of the other poorly-researched YouTube videos on Titanic and Lusitania that are floating around out there. Even many previous Lusitania books on the subject have been prone to significant errors. In other words, we needed to give the public more reason to trust our conclusions than a simple, "Because we said so."
Sadly, in today's fast-moving internet-speed world, that takes time. But it has allowed for us to completely rewrite the history of the Lusitania disaster, and everyone will be able to see it in a way hat they know they can trust the work that went into it.
As far as updates regarding progress on "The Greyhound's Wake", we haven't planned to do any in the foreseeable future, at least not that I'm aware of. This is a careful decision based on at least the following two factors:
1) As we are not taking in huge sums of money every month to fund development of "The Greyhound's Wake", we don't feel that it is necessary to give regular progress updates as a sign of "we're taking your money for this, so we are responsible for giving regular updates." We also don't want to over-promise, run into a delay, and disappoint on a delivery date.
We have also had to deal with people who have left our team, moving on to handle their own projects (often in direct competition to our work, or to our future plans that they were privately made aware of) instead of finishing their work with us. Some of the work that was turned in was also not up to our standards for this project or contained significant inaccuracies, and eventually had to be replaced. This has left a larger and larger workload on our increasingly-frazzled, but ever-enthusiastic, modelers and animators. I have to give credit to Levi and Alex for their spirit in the face of challenges we've faced since 2019, when we started.
2) Sadly, there are many who would love to copy our work, or claim that they made certain discoveries first. It is unfortunate that every time we make a breakthrough, someone tries to claim it as their own. The atmosphere has become toxic and there is no room for trust these days. Because of this, we are being very careful, and we aren't wanting to "show our hand" to early.
However, I can tell you all that the virtual museum experience "Lusitania: The Greyhound's Wake" and the accompanying books will be well worth the wait, and we appreciate your patience as we work on these hand-in-hand projects. I hope this helps everyone see where we stand, and thank you for your ongoing support!​

 

[Milos Grkovic]

This still is from a recent video of an interview with Martn Payne a survivor of Lusitania that was posted on J. Kent Layton's YouTube channel showing a render of the Lusitania model from a similar angle to the one from Tom Lynskey's 2023 review. While Kent's video only shows a glimpse of this still, it's interesting to see how Lusitania Greyhound's Wake looks like in terms of lightning and hull texturing. And Tom did mention in the 2023 review of his channel 'Aside from a few modelling bits here and there, it's mostly just programming from here on out.'

 

[Milos Grkovic]

Happy New Year, Encyclopedia Titanica! Here are newly released stills from Tom's PartTime Explorer: 2024 Year End Review! of the project.

 

[Milos Grkovic]

A clip about the experience from Tom's review of 2024.