There’s been a ton of stuff going on lately, here are some highlights:

T-SHIRTS

People have been asking me about producing t-shirts for a long time. I’ve never really made much progress with it because I’m really not a businessman at heart, I always rather focus on making more videos, so t-shirt production has been constantly postponed. Fortunately, a personal friend of mine, Evan Anderson, has been VERY interested in helping me print t-shirts and take over the business aspect of things so I don’t have to mess with it. His enthusiasm level for this reminds me of Steve Ballmer, if Ballmer didn’t act like someone who was on cocaine.

We’re still just starting off, but there will be a trial run of SHIRTS FOR SALE AT THE MEETUPS coming July 22nd and August 4th. They will be basic ones, most with the Freeman’s Mind logo, and a smaller amount with the Civil Protection logo. The price for one will be 0. Our plans are for Evan to sell shirts in the parking lot of the amusement parks until he runs out. Right now we’re looking at having around 200 shirts total at the North meetup and then see what happens after that.

For everyone else, don’t worry, there are plans to get an online store going on the site for selling shirts and maybe other things like coffee mugs. I’ll be in charge of which designs go on the shirts, my friend Evan will be handling pretty much everything else. Besides the logos for the shows, I have plans to print some of the better one-liners from Freeman’s Mind along with accompanying artwork to go with them. It will be a gradual process, since setting up a small business can be very complex, but I want to let people know that it’s coming. Also while it’s probable the shipping costs will be higher, I’ll make sure that future shirts will be available to be shipped internationally.
 

MOVIE DOWNLOADS

Good news, all the downloadable copies of the videos have been converted to x264 MKV copies. This means that the copies you download on the site will be about as high quality as possible for the space size. You may still see some minor compression artifacts in the older Freeman’s Mind episodes, but that has more to do with me not following great archive practices rather than the codec itself. Even with the minor compression artifacts, you can know that all the downloadable copies of the videos on the site now are pretty much the highest quality copies available. During this process I also spotted an error with the previous copies that may have caused the sound to skip in places. That has since been corrected, so if you were having that problem, try redownloading the episodes. I also fixed episodes that were released too dark or too bright.

I was able to update most of the links on the website for the videos, but I wasn’t able to add new ones. The movie links are still very haphazard with their accuracy, I apologize about that. I was hoping to have a new and improved movie page section rolled out about 2 weeks ago, but it’s hard to say when that will actually happen, since I don’t do the website programming. I decided to make this announcement now because if we had to wait until things were final, it might be months from now. Expect things to be more organized sometime in the near future.

If you need help finding a player for MKV files, after rigorous testing, I can recommend the program PotPlayer. I do NOT recommend VLC Player, I’ve found it produces some errors in playback of some of the videos, so the quality may not look as good if you are using that.
 

SOURCE FILMMAKER

I’ve received over a dozen emails since yesterday regarding the Source Filmmaker. This is a new set of tools being released by Valve that could assist a lot with machinima making in the Source engine. Some people want to know what my thoughts are on this, so here they are:

-I’m a little bitter this is coming out NOW when a WORKING COPY of this was leaked about 5 years ago. If these tools had been more public back then, it might have saved me hundreds of hours of time collectively over the years. But, better late than never.

-By only allowing this in Team Fortress 2 that normally would limit a lot of things over HL2 games, because TF2 doesn’t really allow for NPC manipulation. However, the Filmmaker does seem to have much more robust animation tools that could largely compensate for this. I think there will be a loss of a lot of AI functions that can make some aspects easier, but the tools added seem to make up for it.

-I think this will add a LOT of functionality to the Source Engine. I think it will mostly fix camerawork and recording issues and allow more animation options via keyframing. But I don’t know if it will address many other issues I’ve encountered using Source that have almost completely shut down my videos in the past. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I NEVER want to have to throw out weeks or months of work because there’s a bug in the software that I don’t know how to fix. Working with the Source SDK for years has made me feel like that is a VERY real possibility and it’s been almost pure luck that I’ve been able to produce the videos I have without everything falling apart.

-Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m not sure this software has any features that aren’t already included by default in the Unreal Development Kit. While the filmmaker is enough to make me see Source as less of an outright liability, I’m not sure it’s enough to avert me from steering away from the engine in the long term. I’m going to end up using whatever software allows me to get the most things done and still look decent. At the very least, this makes Source worth re-considering instead of me proclaiming it outright doomed like I was ready to in January.

-This software really needs to needs to have open access (instead of closed beta) before I can do much with it, otherwise the only people who can assist me have to also have beta access (assuming I even get it). Let’s hope this will happen before another 5 years!

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4keTxDO6hk
ADHD version: Shirts for sale at meetup! Movie downloads are now high quality! Source Filmmaker makes the Source Engine look less masochistic!

Since so many people are interested in the meetup idea from the earlier poll, I’ve decided to split things up into TWO meetups instead. I don’t have all the details yet, but I wanted to give people as much notice as possible on the dates and locations, so here they are:

It’s over!

Location: Carowinds - Charlotte, North Carolina
Date: August 4th
Price: 1 for August 4th if you use this link to purchase tickets. (6 + BS “processing” fee.)

My apologies about the prices of these places, these were really the minimum I was able to get the ticket prices down to after a lot of phone calls.

-Freeman’s Mind and Civil Protection T-shirts will be for sale!

-More detailed info will be up soon!

Youtube

Download 848x480 MKV (85MB)

At long last, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. Your enjoyment of this episode may be proportional to how much you like dams. As a bit of a spoiler, I didn’t intend for the helicopter encounter to go quite how it did, but I’ll just keep moving forward with the game.

As I mentioned in the last episode post, I kept a log of how long the entire process for creating this episode took (image below). This ended up being an ideal episode to pick for this experiment. This turned out to be a pretty average episode I think in terms of time. It wasn’t especially long and some minor mistakes happened, which always adds to the time. Also I already had the existing titles and flyby intro created, which also cut down on the time.

This episode was also such a good choice for measuring the time because it perfectly illustrates why I CAN NOT promise release dates. If you look at the log, you may notice that one entry stands out a little bit more than the others, by about about 4 weeks. I thought I was going to have this episode done about 3 weeks ago. That’s obviously not what happened. While in the earlier episodes I did EVERYTHING myself, nowadays I depend on volunteer help in various areas. While I COULD do all the sound editing myself, it’s really worth it for me not to. Even though the sound editor (Otto) took a long time on this episode, during that time I was learning more of the Unreal 3 engine and making some progress on the movie project. That’s time I didn’t have to spent scouring for sound effects and editing. And before people start forming lynch mobs against Otto for taking so long, I really have to come to his defense. He CAN be quite fast, having had a turnaround of about two days or so before. Also he does an OUTSTANDING job on the sound effects, better than I think even I can do now, and better than other volunteers I’ve worked with (though I appreciate their help too). Finally, out of the people who have assisted me as long as he has, I can easily say he is the MOST RELIABLE volunteer I’ve had during that length of time. That should give you an idea of some of the other people I’ve worked with. That said, I’m open to having more sound effects help on Freeman’s Mind. If you have experience with that sort of thing, go ahead and email me and I can arrange a trial test for you.

Now you business majors out there may look at this time log and think “Why, with a fast sound editor Ross could make an episode every 2 days!” While that’s been true once or twice, it only happens under certain conditions. First, I have to be in a good mood to think up lines; otherwise I won’t have anything funny and nobody wants that. Second, when an episode has a lot of shouting, I need several hours for my voice to recover during recording sessions. Finally, I can’t be working on ANYTHING else, and most of the time I’m working on several different things. Usually I only spend a couple hours each day on Freeman’s Mind. If I was good at improv comedy, this process would be approximately 50x faster, but I’m not.

Speaking of other things, before I progress too far on the next episode, my next goal is to update a LOT of the movie links and get a bunch more MKV copies of the older videos up on the site. I don’t think I’ll fix everything, but I plan to spend the next few days getting the videos more organized on the site.

ADHD version: This episode took a while. Expect updates to the site soon.

Acting on the philosophy of “It’s better to regret something you have done, than regret something you haven’t done”, I’ve had an idea for a while to see if anyone was interested in doing a meetup for Accursed Farms. You would get to meet me, maybe F.C. Meixell (voice of the shadow man from CP), and maybe Craig Mengel (voice of Dave from CP) although Craig may decline on account of him thinking you people are psychos. Right now I have no solid plans at all, I just wanted to see if there was any interest in this. I was leaning towards going to an amusement park as a venue for this. That way if nobody shows up, I still get to go to an amusement park. If hundreds show up, I don’t have to worry about facilities to handle that.

I currently live in Blacksburg, Virginia, so you can look that up on a map to figure out where a good location for everyone might be. The farther away from me the location is, the less likely I want to travel there for this; especially since I don’t currently have a car, but I can try to figure something out for that. Again, there are no definite plans for this right now, I don’t know when, where, or if it will happen, but if there’s enough interest in this, I’m up for it.

Finally, I was hoping to have this post after the next Freeman’s Mind was released, but since that’s gotten delayed a few weeks due to a sound editing hold-up, that unfortunately won’t be for a little while still.

[poll id=”6”]

Youtube

Download 848x480 MKV (109MB)

After many delays, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. I’m hoping to get a lot more out soon, though we’ll see what happens. If you like explosions, you’ll probably like this episode.

I ran into a bizarre bug in this episode where the skybox texture would randomly become very bright. Fortunately I was able to re-record the footage on a different system, thus you won’t see it in the episode. I’ll have to do some experiments to determine if the problem is something wrong with my system software or if Nvidia has decided to outsource its driver development to monkeys.

For the next episode I’ll be trying something new and will record exactly how much time is involved with making an episode. I plan for this to be a one-time thing, but I’ll give a full breakdown of how much time is spent on every aspect of Freeman’s Mind #42.