Youtube

(downloadable copy will be up later)

At long last, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. This episode got delayed for dozens of reasons, none of them especially interesting. It mostly has to do with me attempting too many things at once. I’ll try and get more FM episodes out as soon as I can.

People who are very familiar with Half-Life may notice this episode doesn’t play out how the game normally does. Normally, there’s a sequence you have to initiate before the game will progress, but here, it’s already happening by the time Freeman shows up to it. You can blame this on Half-Life: Source. All I did was load a saved game I had, and the events played out as you see them, every time I tried. I wasn’t able to find a workaround for this, but I don’t think it really matters in this case anyway.

Youtube

Download 1280×720 MKV (148MB)

Merry Valve-Time Christmas! This episode is obviously late for a lot of reasons, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. This episode ended up taking massively longer than it was supposed to and was meant to be an “easy” episode. It was actually supposed to be the second part of a sub-series idea I had for Civil Protection, called “Community Outreach” episodes. The idea was that I would take viewer questions pretending to be City 17 citizens, pick ones I liked, then have Mike and Dave answer them on-camera. I thought this would be a fast way to get episodes out, but too many things in the Source engine ended up slowing me down. I still think the idea has potential at some point in the future however.

This is also the first episode where the majority of the animation (maybe 90%) is done via motion capture. While both “Morning Patrol” and “The Tunnel” used a few motion capture animations, this is the first one where I acted out the major parts myself. I think the results are mixed. The raw animations are quite jittery, so I had to smooth them out substantially. This leads to some slightly awkward movements in places, but I think the technology has a lot of potential and can save a bunch of time, depending on how dynamic the animation is.

Finally, this is likely going to be the last Civil Protection episode done on the Source engine. While I have almost no problems with the general look of the engine, the behind-the-scenes work involved with creating the episodes is just too massive for what I’m trying to do. While I plan to eventually make future CP episodes with Half-Life content ported over, it’s going to be a long time, as I’m going to be focusing on trying to create an actual full-length movie this year (and more Freeman’s Mind). I still don’t know what software I’ll be using in the future, though my first priority is to be able to easily create lots of characters capable of facial expressions and lip-sync and then see what’s compatible with that.

VIDEO RELEASES FOR JANUARY:

Civil Protection: The Christmas episode is practically done, it’s primarily just sound editing left. While I could delay until December of this year, I’d rather just release it as soon as possible, even though it’s late.

Freeman’s Mind: You can expect at least 2, maybe 3 episodes this month.

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION:
While I’ll be continuing Freeman’s Mind, my goal for this year is to create a really great movie. I have an idea for one I’ve been interested in doing for a long time. I’m still writing the script to it, but I have a pretty solid idea of what I want it to be. It’s going to be a feature-length movie and take place in a medieval fantasy environment. It will be a comedy / adventure / mystery movie. I was originally going to attempt this in the Source engine, but after my experience on the last CP episode, I’m going to use something else now. It’s my hope to finish this movie sometime this year, though I can’t promise anything. It depends on how long it will take for me to learn new software, animate everything, and get all the assets I need. The help I’ll need will depend a lot on what software I use. Right now the only position I know 100% that I’ll need help with is a creature modeler / animator.

NEW SOFTWARE / ENGINE:
Due to my frustration with the upcoming CP episode, I’m about ready to abandon the Source engine for anything more complicated than Freeman’s Mind. Unfortunately, I still don’t know what software I’ll be using instead. I was originally leaning towards the program iClone, though someone has recently made some compelling arguments for the Unreal 3 engine. If I want to port over the many assets available for Source (one of the areas it really shines in) I’ll likely need an array of programs. I’m still open to suggestions, but please don’t recommend software if you haven’t used it yourself. In my experience, there’s a world of difference between what software is theoretically capable of, and what a non-programmer can actually do with it; kind of like Linux. I’ve made a list of features I’m looking for to help clarify things:

Ross’s wishlist of features for animation software / engine:

-Support for importing motion capture .BVH data*
-Support for lip sync and facial expressions (preferably finding a facial expression capture solution)*
-Ability to create new humanoid characters with facial flexes and be able to modify things like proportions and clothing without it being an enormous undertaking*
-Ability to export footage frame-by-frame (as opposed to real-time)
-Ability to export with motion blur OR at very high framerates
-Some sort of physics engine
-lighting quality at least as good as Source’s
-ability to keyframe object / character movements
-some system that can automate standard movements of characters, like walking and running, including on non-level terrain
-some procedure for importing models and textures from the Source engine
-some procedure for converting Source engine map architecture + textures to compatible format OR robust mapping community for new engine / software
-decent camera controls
-Reasonably low bugs

*very important category, it’s not even worth me considering an engine without some solution for this first

So that’s what I’ll be up to in case you’re wondering what’s taking so long. Check back later this month for more videos!

- – -

Edit: There were several other events that came up, pushing back the FM episodes, making my time estimates worthless yet again. They’re next in line to come out however.

I think this may be the most frustrated I’ve ever been in working on a video. I might be saying this because I’ve been awake for 26 hours working on it with only 4 hours sleep the night before, but this video really drained me. I honestly though this was going to be a simple video, a comparatively easy one for Civil Protection. Really in concept, it still IS a simple video, but the problem is a “simple” video with relatively high production quality in the Source engine can be grueling by almost any other standard.

I have no idea how much time I’ve put into this project, but I’m certain it’s at least 250+ hours. This is for a video that’s going to be about 7-8 minutes and involves mainly just dialogue. While I’m actually very pleased with how the video is turning out, I consider this ratio of work to what I can produce to be rather horrible. This video also contains more motion capture in it by far than any other episode I’ve worked on. I was hoping this would be a solution to animating much more rapidly and taking more of the drudgery out of making the videos. After having worked with it quite a bit, I think it has a lot of potential and can save time, but it also has many limitations as well. For this episode, I think it definitely improved the quality of some scenes, but didn’t have a significant impact on production time either way.

I may have hinted at this before, but I really do not enjoy animating. I do it because it’s necessary in order for me to create videos. If I never had to animate again in order to get videos made, I would be happy. I still want to make videos, but not like this. I feel like this is more like a torture exercise where something good comes out at the end of it. I think there’s a real chance this could be the last video I make in the Source engine because of this (then again, I said the same thing after Halloween Safety). While it’s miles ahead of many other game engines out there in terms of customizability, it still has so many limitations and bugs, that I can’t trust it at all not to completely ruin a project I’m trying to work on.

I still want to make videos, but I really don’t know how I should be doing that now. I don’t want something overly simplified so that I have extremely limited options, but I’m also not trying to make a Pixar production either. I just want something that looks “good enough” without being torture to animate in. I’m still willing to put in work animating if I feel like the rate of return is better than than what I’m doing now and I’m not wasting 3 hours trying to get a character just to wall up a damn hill because the engine has decided it wants to glitch out permanently. I’m not a graphics snob at all, though I feel like characters need a certain level of fidelity to them so that viewers can get immersed in a story rather than get creeped out by stiff moving and unnatural looking characters.
I would love some viewer feedback on what software / methods I should use for creating more animated videos. Before this trainwreck, I was actually planning on making an announcement on New Year’s that I was going to start work on a BIG feature-length project in the Source engine. I now think that would be a mistake, but I’m still interested in making a full length movie eventually. Email me if you have experience working with other software that would recommend. I expect nothing will come of this, but I’m cyncal and sleep deprived.
Anyway, I’ll release the Civil Protection episode late sometime after New Year’s, it’s still pretty good even if it misery to make.

ADHD Version:
Ross is pissed at the universe and the Source engine and wants to try different software for videos. He will still continue Freeman’s Mind.

Download new & improved “Diary of A Zombie” 1280×720 MKV (94MB)

WINNERS:

“TheDazro” (www.youtube.com/thedazro)
Mark Dzidowski (www.homerecordingstudio.com.au)

GOLD AWARD:

“TheDazro” (www.youtube.com/thedazro)
Mark Dzidowski (www.homerecordingstudio.com.au)
Darrin Smith (1446611@gmail.com)

SILVER AWARD:

“AndrewN” (www.andreworks.com)
“Chuck the 2nd”
Ólafur Arons (www.youtube.com/OlafurArons)
Ian Davis
Chad Keating (deadlysin4@gmail.com)
Sean “Ita” Larkin (itakare.sound@gmail.com)

BRONZE AWARD:

“av3nger”
“Joannou1″ (gldesert.com)
Daniel Eriksson
Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson
Robert Fryer

BEST VOLUME BALANCING:

“Chuck the 2nd”

MOST ORIGINAL SOUND EFFECTS:

Darrin Smith (1446611@gmail.com)

LOUDEST GUNSHOTS AWARD:

“av3nger”

JUST KIND OF DID HIS OWN THING REGARDLESS OF THE INSTRUCTIONS AWARD:

“Joannou1″ (gldesert.com)
Daniel Eriksson
Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson

TURNED IN ENTRY AFTER THE DEADLINE WAS OVER AWARD:

“Chuck the 2nd”
Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson
Robert Fryer

That should be everyone. If you sent me an entry for the contest, but don’t see your name up here (I hope not), that means gmail swallowed your email somehow and you should probably contact me again.

Download “Civil Protection: The Tunnel” 1280×720 MKV (250MB)

So not as Halloween-ish as I hoped, but 1 out of 3 I guess is better than nothing. I think the quality is quite good on this copy, however I ran into some minor errors for EVERY method I tried for x264 encoding when using VLC Player to play it back. The setting I decided on resulted in the least amount of visual errors, but there still are some small ones when using that player. I’ll be slowly rolling out MKV copies of other videos (including the past 2 FM episodes) as I get around to it. I’m pretty impressed with the visual quality from x264 encoding, so if you don’t like the format, I recommend checking the forums to see if anyone wants to convert these to other formats.

In other news, my throat is mostly healed, so I plan to start again on the next Freeman’s Mind soon, and I also hope to get the sound editing contest resolved soon as well. Beyond that, everything I work on feels like a giant spinner I turn to figure out what I’ll do next.

Youtube

Download 848×480 MKV (108MB)

Here is the much-delayed episode 39. I like this one if just for the fact that it finally ends the seemingly never-ending factory sections (for now anyway). For some reason, I started having a lot more ideas once I got out of the factory section of the game. For those that haven’t played the game before, the upcoming episodes will have a lot more of the environment to “interact” with, so that makes things easier for me. While the filming is more or less done, voicework won’t resume on Episode 40 until my throat gets better. Also it looks like the color got skewed on Youtube again, it feels like a dice toss these days as to how that will turn out, but the downloadable copy should look correct once I encode that.

Second, while I’m guessing some of you may not believe me due to the timing, I’ve come down sick with something in the past day or two that’s gone after my throat. It’s currently painful for me to speak for more than a few seconds, making more voice recording not an option right now. I’ll resume recording on the next FM as soon as my throat is better.

Third, things may not be so great on the code end of things for the Source engine (again). I did get in contact with Valve, and the last email I received from them said that while it would take them a while to release a bug fix of the code officially, they could hook me up with a part of the code that fixes the stuttering of animations during demo playback. Unfortunately that was over a month ago. I’ve been sending them a check-in email each week since then, with no reply. While I suppose I’m the last person to criticize others of being late on emails (considering my current backlog), if someone is emailing me once a week as a reminder about something I already said I would help them with, I would almost certainly respond in a more timely manner. Anyway, I hope the employee I’m in touch with is just busy and will get back to me, but I may have to figure out alternatives in the meantime.

Fourth, I still have plenty of other things to catch up on. Round two of reviewing the sound editing contestants, finalizing the MKV tests, getting more things (like broken links) fixed on the website, and catching up on emails. The next post here will likely be the sound contest winners or else FM #39.

Work continues on the videos and I hope to have some more work started on improvements to the website (including broken links) sometime soon.

As for the video releases, for those that have a preference, people seem to favor MKV over MP4 almost 2:1, so I plan to be transitioning to that. From the feedback I received, there seems to be NO consistency with what stutters on people’s computers. It’s almost like each format is different for every person. MKV at least has the advantage of being one of the highest quality options, so even if you don’t like the format, you’ll be working with a better source if you want to convert it to something else. Also if you prefer the existing WMV copies of the videos for some reason, I recommend grabbing them now, because I plan to take them down later and replace them with the higher quality .MKV files.

I’m getting close to deciding on a format in the future for the videos, and I’ll probably go with either MKV or MP4, since both of those formats can utilize the x264 codec, which offers some of the best quality to size ratios out there. Before I make anything official however, I wanted to essentially “beta test” the new formats.

My biggest concern about .MKV or .MP4 is that in the past I’ve seen the footage stutter or become choppy under certain players. It’s my hope that this is the result of people encoding in a less compatible manner, so I’m trying to make mine as kosher as possible.

If you have time and bandwidth to kill, I’d like your help testing this out. I’ve uploaded some clips from Civil Protection that contain scenes with smooth-scrolling motion. This should make it easy to see if there’s any stuttering during playback. In addition to .MP4 and .MKV I’ve also uploaded a copy of the same footage in Xvid .AVI and .WMV for comparison. If you notice any stuttering in one format, but do NOT see it in another, I’d like to know. Preferably leave a forum post, or you can email me. Including information like your OS, any codecs installed, and what player you were using would be helpful. You don’t have to contact me if it stutters in none of the clips or all of them. In those cases, nothing can be determined specific to the format. Also, there’s no sound in any of these clips, since I didn’t run into any problems with that when encoding. Here are the clips:

1280×720 Test clip MP4 (70MB)

1280×720 Test clip MKV (70MB)

1280×720 Test clip AVI (125 MB)

1280×720 Test clip WMV (172MB)

More stuff coming in the future.

In other news, the dialogue for the next FM episode is done and I’ll start on episode 40 soon. I simply didn’t get as much done on the videos last month as I meant to, but hope to get more done this month. I’m not sure when, but you can likely expect another “spree” of FM episodes at some point in the future. Until then, there will probably be a new one every couple weeks. CP is still in limbo because of some bugs with the engine, but I’m confident they’ll get fixed. Valve has said they’ve found the problem, but it may take them a while to roll it out into the next build of the SDK, but we might be able to get access to part of the code that fixes the bugs I was having.

Also if anyone has personally confirmed (as in you’ve done it yourself, not just read about it) how to get lip sync extraction working in Face Poser on Windows 7, please let me know. I’ve already tried this software, which didn’t work for me at all.

Here’s another post I’ve been meaning to have for a while. While I’ve overall been quite happy with the sound editing for the different videos, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need additional help in the future. Rather than try to decide by email who is a good candidate or not for sound editing, I thought I’d arrange a small contest to let anyone take a shot at it for one of my previous videos.

For April Fool’s Day, “Diary of A Zombie” was completed just BARELY in time. Otto Beumelburg, my usual sound editor, was unavailable, so Phai Giron and I ended up doing the soundwork at the last minute, and I think the quality suffered as a result; there just wasn’t enough time to do a better job. I’d like to see a better mix made of the audio for this video, since I think it has a lot of potential in terms of the sound.

CONTEST:

My contest is to do a complete remix of the audio for “Diary of A Zombie.” I’m releasing all the unedited, isolated tracks for you to mix as you see fit. In terms of sound editing, this video has just about everything going on. Lots of different sound sources, volume balancing, lots of positional mixing, reverb in different areas, occlusion, audio cleanup, and any additional sound effects you want to add. The goal is to make the best mix you can, by any means at your disposable. Alternately, if you’re not the best at overall sound mixing, but think you’ll be GREAT at balancing the volume on everything, go ahead and give it a try too.

You can download the source files here (includes .wav files + .avi preview for syncwork):

Sound editing files (100MB)

RULES:

The rules, instructions, and guidelines for this contest are included in a text file in the download. The short version is just make the best mix you can. The deadline for this is October 1st.

PRIZES:

I admit these are kind of lame, but hopefully people will be doing this more for the fun / interest of it than anything else.

1st place: While I cannot change the Youtube version, the downloadable copy of the video will be re-released at higher quality with your sound mix, and your name will be added to the credits of the video. You’ll also be a top candidate for additional sound editing jobs in future videos here (if you’re interested).

Runner-ups: If you do a decent job, your name will be listed when the winners are announced, plus I’ll link to any personal contact info you want (email, website, etc.). If your mix is especially good, you’ll also be considered for future Accursed Farms videos.

People who do a bad job: Nothing.

- – -

I’d wish you all good luck, except logically that doesn’t really work when there can only be one winner. So I hope everyone who works on this has some fun doing it, I’m looking forward to the entries!

EDIT:

If anyone has ideas for other prizes that don’t require too much time or money, feel free to list them.

My main system that I do everything on has been unstable for days and I’ve been spending a LOT of time trying to diagnose what was happening as the errors were varied and very elusive. It will be a few days before everything is back in order as I’m on a backup system at the moment.

— start geeky hardware explanation —

I was having a lot of random restarts and vague blue screen errors, nothing seemingly related to processer or GPU load. All signs suggested that the problem was either with the power supply or RAM, but after days of testing, nothing diagnosed reliably (memtest kept coming up fine, except when the graphics corrupted), it was driving me nuts. What finally DOES seem to be the problem is the northbridge chipset on my motherboard is consistently running way too hot, at over 80 degrees Celcius (the rest of the system temperature is fine though). The heatsink must have come loose from the chip somehow and I’m really not sure how long I’ve been running it at these temperatures. I’ve ordered a new chipset heatsink from a local store near me, but it may take them a day or two for it to come in. Assuming the northbridge hasn’t been permanently damaged, I should have things back to normal in a day or two. If it IS damaged, I guess I’ll have to get a new motherboard. Right now I’m typing this on a secondary system I’ve built solely for motion capture and it doesn’t really seem to be worth the hassle of configuring all my software on another system if this will be down for only a couple days.

— end geeky hardware explanation —

This has brought things to a halt at the moment, but it shouldn’t be for very long. Here’s the state of everything I was working on before this happened:

SOUND EDITING MINI-CONTEST: I was expecting to have a new post on this up by now, but it will have to wait until I get some more files together and my system operational again.

FREEMAN’S MIND: I was planning to get moving on Episode 39 and I think people will be pleased for what I have in mind for it. You’ll have to wait longer for the downloadable copy of Episode 38 because the raw video files are sitting inside a gutted computer at the moment (see picture).

SOURCE ENGINE BUG: After exhausting all other options, I send Valve an email for the first time about the animation bug I was having in particular regarding demo recording in the Source engine. I received no reply. I then contacted a fan who had emailed me in the past and had some contact with Valve, who referred me to contacting someone else there personally. I then emailed them, then got referred to yet another person, who has looked into the problem and I have just recently heard back from, saying they may have a solution. This gives me some hope for staying on the post-2006 engine.

MYSTERY VIDEO / SERIES: After spending some time with the toolset of Dragon Age, I’ve decided to abandon using this engine for the medieval fantasy video I want to work on. In addition to encountering some difficulties that wouldn’t happen to me in Source, I’ve realized the mapping support just isn’t there. I’ve found maybe 10 custom maps created for Dragon Age, versus some 10,000+ made for the Source engine. My new plan is to do this all in the Source engine, which I think is doable, except I’ll need a lot of custom rigged humanoid NPC models with face flexes, which is somewhat of a tall order. I’ve received a couple very promising offers on this however, so I’m optimistic this video / series will eventually get made.

ALTERNATE VIDEO FORMATS: Even though opinion on what format I should use is quite divided, the H.264 codec does seem like the best quality to size option out there, which would steer the format towards either .MP4 or .MKV. I was planning on doing some encoding tests to test compatibility. My goal is to find an encoding option that will work on multiple players without having any framerate drop, rendering errors, or the sound becoming out of sync, even on a system with a botched codec install. So if somebody is using VLC Player, ffdshow, MPC-HC, some nightmarish codec pack, whatever, I want to see if I can come up with encoding settings that will work properly on almost anything.

MICROPHONE: This is actually a past issue, but I never made a news post about it. Around the time I was getting fed up with volume clipping issues, I was also getting fed up with driver issues on my old sound card, a Soundblaster Audigy. Since I already wasn’t a fan of Creative Labs’ policy about fixing their drivers, I decided to go with a soundcard from another company, in my case an Asus Xonar. In addition to the sound quality being perceivably better than my old Audigy, the volume clipping problem I had on my old mic has utterly disappeared on this new soundcard. I’m not exactly sure what aspect of it has made the problem disappear, but I’m just happy it’s gone. This means I’m no longer in a rush to get a new microphone, I’ll probably look into something again later based on all the suggestions I received.

That’s it for now, I’ll try and catch up on email in the meantime.

Youtube

Download 848×480 MKV (80MB)

Here is the exciting conclusion, I mean, next episode of Freeman’s Mind. This one took a lot longer to come out than it should have. Upgrading to Windows 7 set me back a week or two, which completely shattered any time predictions I had, then for various reasons, the episode is coming out almost 2 weeks after the dialogue was completed. This episode may also be the new record for the most amount of wandering in the game. As a result, it’s not necessarily the most interesting one, but the next one should have some more action. At the moment I’m split between 3 different projects, but I’ll be starting the next FM episode soon.

If you’re artistically inclined, feel free to submit concept art of Freeman’s alien design in the forums.

-Animation playback in recorded demos in the game is flawed. I’m not sure what’s happening, but the behavior between what’s seen in-game and what’s played back via demo is clearly different. I’ve included 2 examples of where this happens and can be reproduced reliably. While these examples are relatively subtle, I’m encountering this bug EVERYWHERE in small doses and has resulted in me having to do a lot of workarounds or redo entire scenes because of it. This bug appears to be present in Episode 1 as well, but I definitely find it more drastic in the Episode 2 engine. You will need a copy of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 in order to test out the files.

Example 1 (download): Involves a book moving as a prop_physics object.

Example 2 (download): Involves a NPC turning via a scene file.

All instructions and details are included within the downloads.
 

BUGS I DOUBT WILL EVER GET FIXED, BUT I CAN DREAM:

-Fix the AVI output function so that it can handle files greater than 2GB before corrupting and greater than 4GB, period.

-Fix demo smoother so that it doesn’t feel compelled to reset the viewing position almost randomly when a mouse button is clicked

-Fix demo smoother so that listing a specific tick number on the timeline actually results in that tick being selected and not a semi-random larger number.

-Fix demo smoother so that the camera path shown in preview mode is actually the end result once the demo is modified (and not slightly higher or lower)

-Fix demo smoother so setting keyframes and targets actually appear in the position your camera shows at the time

-Fix demo smoother so that when paused and moving the camera, it doesn’t cause the camera to move up or down after moving forward or backward by a certain amount.

-Find a way to apply high quality engine motion blur to the entire scene, not just based on player movement, AND be capable of exporting the effect to AVI or raw frames.

 
If you’re able to solve any of these bugs, please contact me at rosswscott@gmail.com. If a reliable fix is produced to any of these problems, it means there’s a real chance your name could appear in the credits for every future episode of Civil Protection.

* * *

THE WEBSITE – While most of the actual work is being done by Zachary Reidell and Jexius, I’m trying to manage some changes to the website I hope to get implemented. In short, I want it easier to create new episode pages and have more information added to each of the episode pages as well, including some notes I have for some of the episodes. I also plan on updating the FAQ and make it easier to navigate.

UPGRADING TO WINDOWS 7 - While this might be a simple procedure for some, I’ve been using Windows XP for a long time and I have a cornucopia of specialized software that I use, some of which is not compatible with 7 or at least the 64 bit version. I plan on setting up a virtual machine for the most incompatible stuff, but I’m trying to clean up all my files and determine everything I’ll need to reconfigure or reinstall. I also already use a custom GUI I made via Litestep, so adapting to a new OS can be an involved process for me.

VIDEO ENCODING TESTS – Since opinions are so divided on what format people want to download the videos in, I want to do some encoding tests on MKV and MP4 and see how they hold up, even when using VLC player.

CIVIL PROTECTION – There are some important bugs to isolate with the engine that I encountered when making The Tunnel. Once I can have the reproduced reliably, I’ll be looking for coding help to try and fix them, or else revert back to an earlier version of the source engine.

FREEMAN’S MIND – I want to stay true to my intention of being more regular with releases. While I haven’t decided on a new microphone to get yet, the next episode shouldn’t have too much shouting, so I plan on starting on that in the next day or two.

MOTION CAPTURE – I’m very interested in getting this up and running to see how much I can implement it into Civil Protection. I have the hardware I need, I just need more time to put into it.

SUBTITLES – With the help of some volunteers, I’m reviewing some of the submitted subtitles for the different episodes and hope to get more up soon.

SOUND EDITING MINI-CONTEST – I could use a backup sound editing person for future jobs that need extra help in the sound editing department. I plan to make an announcement on this later, but I have the perfect test in mind if people want to audition for this part. I don’t have the files ready yet, but I plan to get them done soon. All I can say is if you enjoy sound editing, you should enjoy this test. If you’re a sound editor and want to help out, let me know what video format for previews is most useful for you to work with when editing.

COMPOSER SHOWCASES – I still plan on having some posts dedicated to different composers who contributed towards “The Tunnel,” even if their music didn’t make it into the episode.

MICROPHONE RESEARCH – I’ve received lots of feedback on what microphones I should look into, which I need to sort through. I’ve also had at least one person claim that my problem lies with a lack of a compressor moreso than the mic, so I’m looking into that too.

ENGINE RESEARCH – While I really have my hands full with Civil Protection and Freeman’s Mind, I have tons of ideas for videos I want to work on, and one of which will be a very different format than anything I’ve done before (many different characters, continous storyline, longer content, etc.). It will still be comedy, but set in a medieval fantasy environment. Based on my research, I think the Dragon Age engine (Eclipse engine) will be the best choice for attempting this, even though the storyline won’t be based on anything from the game itself. This means I’ll have a new game engine to learn, which is likely to take a while.

T-SHIRTS – This is a low priority for me, but I eventually hope to get some t-shirts made due to viewer request with the show logos and/or some quotes with Freeman’s Mind along with accompanying artwork.

EMAILS – While I’ve caught up on a bunch of them, I still have many to reply to. I should reiterate that if your email is asking questions that are in the FAQ, you may not get a reply. Also type “cl_drawhud 0″ in the game console to get rid of the HUD in Source-based games, since about 5-10% of my emails seem to be about that question alone.

GAMES – While this isn’t consuming a large portion of my time, I am YEARS behind on games I’ve been interested in playing. I actually haven’t had much downtime at all over the past several months. I went straight from finishing The Tunnel, to moving, to doing a series of Freeman’s Mind videos. In addition to catching up on everything else, I’m trying to at least have some more fun in between.

* * *

ADHD version: Ross is working on lots of different things. He will start a new Freeman’s Mind soon.

I’ve updated this post to include a poll to try and gauge what users want better. I’ll be leaving this up for a little while.

Well I’m gradually catching up on email and at the moment only have about 100 to reply to. In light of this, I want to get some more feedback from viewers on a couple of different topics. If you’re registered on the forums, I prefer you just reply to this there, but if not, emailing me is also an option.

VIDEO FORMATS:

All the videos here have been released in WMV format for one simple reason, at the time, it really was one of the most compatible formats out there where people didn’t have to mess with downloading codecs, or finding the right player. By and large, this led to a dead minimum of people asking me how to play the videos, which is quite an accomplishment, considering some of the questions I receive (i.e. “What game do you use for Freeman’s Mind?”). Nowadays, I’m more open-minded about what format the videos are in, so I’d like to see what the majority of viewers want. MP4, AVI, MKV, etc. You tell me what format you want. I know some viewers have expressed interest in the videos being in an iphone-compatible format, which is doable. Beyond that, I don’t know. Whatever format is decided on, I will NOT be providing technical support for how to play it, so you’ll be on your own for that. Also, if you only watch the videos on Youtube, you can ignore all this.

VIDEO ENCODING GURU:

Tying into the first topic, some help would be appreciated by someone who is a video encoding FREAK. Someone familiar with lots of different compression techniques, knows about I-frames, B-frames, quantizers, H.264 compression, different container formats, browses places like doom9.org a lot, etc. If you’re someone who is interested in getting the maximum amount of quality in the least amount of space, whatever the format, I might be interested in your help for converting all the episodes to new formats. I have all the Civil Protection episodes backed up in maximum quality Xvid-compression, and the Freeman’s Mind episodes in a slightly lower quality version. Go ahead and email me if you’re a video encoding veteran of sorts, and are familiar with many formats.

MICROPHONE RECOMMENDATIONS:

Up to date, I’ve just been using a cheap clip-on microphone from Wal-Mart for all the episodes. This combined with careful recording and sound editing means my voice comes out relatively well in the videos, however the last episode of Freeman’s Mind reminded me of its biggest downfall, which is overwhelming the microphone input with my voice. You may not be able to tell from the videos, but I can get very, very loud when recording. So loud it often limits what places I can live for fear of disturbing all neighbors in a large radius around me. With my current microphone, it doesn’t matter what recording levels I set the microphone to, it sometimes is just too much for the mic and I get volume clipping, which I hate.

One aspect I like a lot about my microphone is it picks up relatively little in the background. When I was working at Machinima.com, they were using a Blue Snowball mic, which generally gets quite good ratings and reviews. I didn’t like it however; on every setting, it simply picked up more background noise and echo than my cheap clip-on one, which is a problem for recording. So my standards for not picking up background noise are higher than what that mic provided. If you have recommendations on microphones that can handle a LOT of volume, don’t pick up much background noise at all, and are relatively inexpensive, please let me know.

Youtube

Download 848×480 WMV (93MB)
 

Here’s the next episode, and as promised, it contains more wandering around while lost, this time with more water.

I’m sure this will upset a lot of people, but this is going to be the last FM episode on a weekly rate. Believe it or not, it takes me most of my available time in the week making an episode (I’ll make a chart illustrating why later) and it’s been sucking up my time to the point where I’ve fallen behind on many other things I want to be working on. If I could do improv comedy well, the process would be at least 10x faster, but the neurons in my brain don’t quite fire fast enough for that. I don’t know when the next episode of FM will be completed since I want to catch up on subtitles, website improvements, responding to emails, bug hunting on the Source engine, getting more video formats available, and at least getting STARTED on the next CP episode. I won’t neglect FM for months at a time like I have in the past though, you can still expect more FM episodes, just not as fast as I’ve been doing them lately.

EDIT:

For fans of Freeman’s Mind Episode 2, it looks like the cold-blooded side of the debate is losing ground.

Youtube

Download 848×480 WMV (68MB)
 

Well I hope everybody likes watching someone wandering around lost and talking to themselves, because that’s what you’re getting with this episode. And the next. And the next. This is one of the less action-oriented areas of the game. I’ve noticed before that sometimes people get upset when I don’t take the most direct route in the game. In this case, I try to exhaust all options that a real person would try before going with what the game wants me to do. I am a little concerned that maybe these latest episodes are weaker because of the pace I’m putting them out, I’ll see.

I’m afraid there’s still not much progress at all in other areas due to the weekly pace of Freeman’s Mind. Once I let up on the pace, my focus will be on isolating bugs in the Source engine for Civil Protection, improving the website and links, and catching up on emails (I currently have about 380 to reply to dating back to the end of March).

Youtube

Download 848×480 WMV (127MB)
 

Well here continues the currently weekly march of Freeman’s Mind. This pacing should be treated like an isotope, it’s hard to say how long it will remain stable. I think this one may be a little bit below average. I tried going a slightly different direction with it to avoid making things feel too mundane, but I’m not sure it really had the effect I wanted. Bonus points if you can find the pun used in this episode, I’m guessing a lot of people will miss it.

Since the last few uploads to Machinima.com have had the color and brightness distorted when they go on Youtube, this time I intentionally screwed up the picture in the OPPOSITE way to try and counteract what I’m guessing they were doing and it looks like it mostly worked. They’re still uploading 640×360 content as 1280×720 however, so next episode I may just upscale the original 848×480 footage to 1280×720 so while it won’t be HD quality, it will at least be sharper.

I’ve seen many posts before asking me to use mods to improve the graphics for Half-Life Source, with this episode being a good spot in the series to change things. I’ve experimented with every mod I could find for it and they ALL had problems. Some shaders would be overblown and/or not transfer to Source recorder, some models would be missing textures or not behave when recorded in a demo, some textures would make some areas look much better, but stick out horrendously in others, and most of them change some of the original weapons. For all these reasons I’m not planning on using visual enhancement mods for the game. I doubt people were really watching a game this old for the eye candy anyway.

Since I’ve increased the pacing of FM, I’m currently falling behind on Civil Protection, emails, subtitles, website improvements, and several other things. So if it looks like everything else is being neglected, it is, but not intentionally. I’ll get caught up again at some point.

Youtube

Download 672×384 WMV (77MB)
 

Here’s the “mystery episode” that was alluded to in the progress bar. I’m sure some of you predicted this, hopefully no one’s expectations were ruined too badly. I thought about doing a training course episode before, but parts of it conflict with how I’ve been playing through the game, trying to make it seem more realistic. This episode is a compromise between not doing it and going through the whole thing. I’ve been informed after the fact that the creator of “Barney’s Mind” did the exact same thing of showing the training course after being unconscious, but it was just a coincidence on my part. When I originally created Freeman’s Mind I received a few emails from people who told me they were thinking of doing or had done the exact same thing, so I guess coincidences are inevitable.

I’m going to try and keep up Freeman’s Mind on a weekly rate for a while, but I eventually may slow it down some as I don’t want to neglect Civil Protection either. In either event, I don’t think I’ll have situations again soon where I go months at a time without a release. At least not until FM is done anyway.

EDIT:

It looks like the video was darkened again for Youtube and uploaded at 1280×720 again, despite the source being requested at 640×360. Ah well, the downloadable copy will look correct once I encode it.

Youtube

MP3 download

I believe there were supposed to be up to 7 other people, but not everyone showed up. It’s almost 2 hours long, so I don’t recommend listening to this unless you have time to kill. It did cover some topics not discussed in other interviews I’ve done, but it might bore people who don’t work with the Source engine at some points also.

In the future I plan to make a separate section on the site for all interviews conducted so far, but that’s still on the “to do” list.

Youtube

Download 672×384 WMV (57MB)
 

This episode is a bit of a milestone in the game. If you haven’t played Half-Life already, you’ll find out why. It’s also one of the shorter episodes. This is because I split them when there’s a good stopping point, and it doesn’t get much more obvious than this one. It’s been proposed before that I switch over to the Black Mesa mod after this episode, but since that’s not out yet, I’ll just continue with regular half-life. You can expect something a little different for the next video as a kind of intermission after this one.

Youtube

Download 672×384 WMV (86MB)

Freeman’s Mind continues with a new episode. I’m mostly happy with this one, though it becomes difficult for me to tell what’s good or not the more of these I do. I’ll continue to update the progress chart, though I may forget some days.

This episode got delayed for release more than most. This is part of the reason I never like to give release dates, I never know them myself. Machinima.com works in mysterious ways. The progress chart on the right will tell you at least what’s been completed.

The brightness / contrast levels seem to be off in this episode on the Youtube version. The downloadable copy will have the original game light levels once it goes up. Also the resolution is being reported at 1280×720 on youtube, which is incorrect. I was told to submit it at 640×360 for Youtube. The original footage is now recorded at 848×480. Going to HD resolution really isn’t worth the slowdown in processing for me for Freeman’s Mind, since this is just Half-Life, there’s not much to show off visually. I plan on releasing copies of all the videos at original resolution and with higher quality codecs/formats in the future, it’s just something I haven’t gotten around to yet. That and some people appreciate smaller copies to download. So the current 672×384 WMV copies are just a temporary compromise between higher quality, lower size, and player compatibility.

You can look forward to more videos coming one way or another.

One thing I would like viewer feedback from is I’d like to do something extra for people who donate if possible, but I’m not sure what sort of things people would like. If you have ideas of little things donators might appreciate, go ahead and post them in the forums.