Well today is the last day to submit entries for the sound editing contest. If you need additional time, email me today and let me know and I can provide a small extension. Otherwise I’ll review all the entires (about 8 or 10 total I think) and announce the winner in a few days.

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 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!

Hey everyone, I’m having some technical difficulties with my system, you can see the current state of things in the picture below:

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 848x480 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.

This is another post I’ve been meaning to make for a while. In the last episode of Civil Protection, I encountered major, major bugs that would have prevented the episode from being made if I hadn’t received help with modifying the code for the game. Since then, there are still some significant bugs that I could really use help with. I’ve already sent this information to four programmers in the Source engine, but haven’t heard back from any of them. Thus, I’m trying to expand the number of eyes that can look at this. You’ll have to have some experience working with the Source engine to be of much help.
 
HIGH PRIORITY BUGS:

-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 [email protected]. 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.