FREEMAN’S MIND: EPISODE 18
Here’s the newest episode. I was pretty liberal about using cheat codes this time, though my justification is for the places I use them, I’m simply doing what I personally would do if I was in the same situation Freeman happens to be in (though I doubt I would end up in the same situations myself). I think this one may be one of the better FM episodes in terms of writing, though the voice acting probably isn’t as good as it could be in areas since practically everything I’ve been producing lately has been a bit of a rush job.
I still need to upload episode 2 of FM here since the downloadable copy has been deleted by Machinima.com for a little while now. I’ve misplaced the disc where I’ve burned a copy of it, but I’ll find it and try to take care of the link tonight.
As for the downloadable copies, I’m undecided what resolution is best. I’m trying to strike a balance between higher resolution and keeping the filesize low. The series has actually undergone a shrink, though you won’t notice it on your end. I recorded old episodes at 800x600, but usually had to encode to 832x624 to avoid encoding errors. For widescreen I’ve been recording at 848x480 and am currently releasing at 672x384 since that’s pretty close to the original aspect ratio and will have a comparable download size to the 640x480 clips. If you have any preference about the resolution, leave it below, just be aware that a larger resolution increases the filesize and time to download. I’m not going any higher than my current resolution for Freeman’s Mind, the detail just isn’t there for Half-Life 1 to justify it, plus these are just gameplay videos. I’ll continue to do Civil Protection at 1280x720. Also I’m still releasing using WMV format only because it keeps hundreds of people from emailing me asking how to play the video. Next to MPG, I think it’s probably the most compatible format there is. It’s by no means the best though, I might look into releasing higher quality copies in the future. It’s not as simple as picking a format, I have to have an understanding of the encoding settings to keep a reasonable balance between size and visual quality.
I’m also far behind on responding to email, but that’s something else I hope to get caught up with soon. In the meantime, I’ll be spending all my time on The Tunnel, though I may let up a bit because the hours I’ve been putting in lately just aren’t sustainable for me.
