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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.

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Youtube

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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.

Hey everyone, just a quick update if you’re wondering why not much seems to be happening. It’s mostly been being busy with getting re-situated since my move and more lately, taxes. Taxes are always an enormous pain for me due to how I get paid and where I’ve lived. I will be turning in no less than SEVEN forms to the IRS and State this year and it’s been taking me days to try and figure it all out. I’m tempted to just mail a check for about how much money I think I owe along with a note that says “I DON’T FUCKING UNDERSTAND HOW TO DO ALL OF THIS AND I CAN’T AFFORD A PERSONAL ACCOUNTANT” but I think think that would just lead to me going to jail; but it wouldn’t if EVERYONE did that. The whole experience has been leaving me bitter, but I’ve tried to stay positive by imagining the people who designed these forms and/or process them as doing a Pee Wee Herman laugh the entire time. The way the language is worded on these forms seems fitting for that kind of individual.

Fun Fact: Your donations for 2011 (before taxes) come to a total of ,639.69. I’ve tried to thank every donator individually for that, but a big thanks again if you’ve been missed. This sum will go towards the movie project once I’m finally done filling out forms. I’m still open to suggestions of extra things I can do for donators that won’t eat too much into my time. The webmaster for the site has suggested adding recognition labels next to people’s names in the forum, which may not be a bad idea.

CIVIL PROTECTION:

Well as some of you may have guessed, yesterday’s video was not actually a new game engine. It was the work of Michael Breazzeal, who has done other game-related animations. He contacted me last year about a Freeman’s Mind animation he made and offered to help with the videos. I thought this style of animation would be good for an idea that had some sort of time pressure on it, since this is much faster than animating in 3D. All the animation for this was done in under a week, though he was working feverishly on it during that time. Because of the time constraints, he wanted me to emphasize that this is not his best work and is capable of better quality.

This was originally meant to be a triple feature, though one of the episode ideas was scrapped to make sure everything came out on time. I have dozens of ideas for CP in my head, these were two I thought work work well with this animated style. “Reception” was just a quick joke one that I thought wouldn’t lose anything by not being rendered in 3D. “Lift” was one that due to other projects I have planned would likely have been years before I got around to it. While some of “Lift” would be possible in the Source engine, doing something like that without having the lighting being screwed up would have required a LOT of tricks and may not have been possible in Source.

This double feature was also another reminder as to why I try to avoid deadlines. While the animation work was done well ahead of schedule, the sound editing was not and a lot of it ended up being done at the last minute by a backup backup sound editor and myself. I had no less than four people bail on me during the duration of this episode and it was really down the to wire getting it in on time. Also while his name isn’t in the credits, “Chuck the 2nd” gets an honorable mention for volume balancing work that just didn’t happen in time because the pipeline was so jammed up.

Finally, working on this and not having to do ANY of the animation work was kind of intoxicating. I love writing and directing videos, but animation work is usually an exercise is misery for me. While I do appreciate the cinematic feel that 3D graphics can provide, I could see doing more animation projects, so long as I don’t have to be the one animating it. Any ideas that I feel like won’t massively benefit from being done in 3D or else require too many resources might get transferred to animation projects instead, provided people will be able to animate it. I prefer the look of 3D graphics, however, I would much rather have more of my ideas get out in a different medium than not at all.

NEW ENGINE / MOVIE PROJECT:

Progress on the movie project is going slowly, but is very encouraging. I am definitely seeing benefits of allowing myself more time to write and develop the script, I think the eventual payoff on this will be enormous. I’m taking every effort to make sure this script is extremely fine tuned and is some of the best material I can come up with, a practice I think even Hollywood doesn’t exercise most of the time.

As for the engine, I actually did research all the engines mentioned in yesterday’s post. Based on my research, I’ve decided to transition to the Unreal 3 engine for multiple reasons:

-It appears to be far less buggy since when it was launched, and I think likely has much more functionality than Source at this point.
-I’ve seen machinima from other games successfully ported over to it
-It seems to have the most overall community support, so I won’t be on my own when I have problems
-Despite trends in the industry, it doesn’t actually HAVE to have desaturated color, the whole screen in a tinted color, and excessive bloom everywhere. It is capable of very good graphics, so much so that I don’t see obvious advantages of other engines like Crytech or Unigine.

I am still learning the engine however, which will take me time. If you wish to help with the movie project, the #1 thing I want to focus on at this phase is being able to have a dozen or two rigged human models, capable of lip sync and facial expressions. I think it’s unrealistic to do this all from scratch and variations to some sort of template model would be best for this. I’ve also heard Poser or Daz Studio may be well equipped for this job. If you have experience creating or modifying faces of 3D models and wish to help on this project, please contact me.

FREEMAN’S MIND:

More Freeman’s Mind is coming, the next episode is about a quarter done. I actually was planning to have another video done for March, but I ended up moving again (I don’t want to be a nomad even though I seem to live that way), which consumed a lot of my time, also I was trying to ensure the April Fool’s Day video got done in time. Progress will resume on it very soon.

ADHD version: Ross is working on more videos.