Source engine rant Freeman’s Mind update
Well I know you guys like updates, so here’s what’s happening:
Progress is continuing steadily on The Tunnel, but it’s going slowly. To give you an idea of why things take so long, I did animation work on two scenes I though I was going to be able to complete in one night. The actual time ended up coming out to seven days. These weren’t especially complicated or complex scenes either, it’s just the nature of animating in the Source engine. The Source engine is such a convoluted means of animating scenes. Every little detail requires about 12 steps to complete. I’m often animating the scenes blind, meaning I don’t know what will happen until I compile a map. It involves crossover work between two programs where you can only make rough guesses on the timing and how everything interact, leading to a LOT of trial and error to get things to look right, and this is when everything is functioning smoothly with no bugs, which frequently doesn’t happen. The whole experience leaves me kind of bitter and I hope that at some point I can find a more efficient method of animating in the future, either on Source or something else. Most other engines I’m familiar with either don’t have good animation tools at all, or else suffer from a different set of problems and/or limitations.
I’m absolutely going to continue The Tunnel to completion, however I realize this is taking significantly longer than I hoped and there’s literally nothing I can do to speed it up. This is nothing new to the series, but since the fanbase is much larger than it used to be, I realize it’s frustrating more people than ever before, not just myself. On that note, I’m going back on what I said and will produce one more Freeman’s Mind episode, then go back to working on The Tunnel. I’ll try and make it a longer one, hopefully this will tide some of you over since Civil Protection is taking so long. I am giving no more time estimates for The Tunnel; I can’t, there’s too many variables. Freeman’s Mind is a much simpler affair however, I think I can safely say it will be done by next week.
