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.

Hey everyone, I’ve received a couple emails asking about what I’m working on right now and I thought this would be a good news update in case people think I’m just twiddling my thumbs. If you don’t want to read this, I’ve made an ADHD version at the bottom. Here’s a breakdown of most things:

* * *

THE WEBSITE - While most of the actual work is being done by Zachary Reidell and Jexius, I’m trying to manage some changes to the website I hope to get implemented. In short, I want it easier to create new episode pages and have more information added to each of the episode pages as well, including some notes I have for some of the episodes. I also plan on updating the FAQ and make it easier to navigate.

UPGRADING TO WINDOWS 7 - While this might be a simple procedure for some, I’ve been using Windows XP for a long time and I have a cornucopia of specialized software that I use, some of which is not compatible with 7 or at least the 64 bit version. I plan on setting up a virtual machine for the most incompatible stuff, but I’m trying to clean up all my files and determine everything I’ll need to reconfigure or reinstall. I also already use a custom GUI I made via Litestep, so adapting to a new OS can be an involved process for me.

VIDEO ENCODING TESTS - Since opinions are so divided on what format people want to download the videos in, I want to do some encoding tests on MKV and MP4 and see how they hold up, even when using VLC player.

CIVIL PROTECTION - There are some important bugs to isolate with the engine that I encountered when making The Tunnel. Once I can have the reproduced reliably, I’ll be looking for coding help to try and fix them, or else revert back to an earlier version of the source engine.

FREEMAN’S MIND - I want to stay true to my intention of being more regular with releases. While I haven’t decided on a new microphone to get yet, the next episode shouldn’t have too much shouting, so I plan on starting on that in the next day or two.

MOTION CAPTURE - I’m very interested in getting this up and running to see how much I can implement it into Civil Protection. I have the hardware I need, I just need more time to put into it.

SUBTITLES - With the help of some volunteers, I’m reviewing some of the submitted subtitles for the different episodes and hope to get more up soon.

SOUND EDITING MINI-CONTEST - I could use a backup sound editing person for future jobs that need extra help in the sound editing department. I plan to make an announcement on this later, but I have the perfect test in mind if people want to audition for this part. I don’t have the files ready yet, but I plan to get them done soon. All I can say is if you enjoy sound editing, you should enjoy this test. If you’re a sound editor and want to help out, let me know what video format for previews is most useful for you to work with when editing.

COMPOSER SHOWCASES - I still plan on having some posts dedicated to different composers who contributed towards “The Tunnel,” even if their music didn’t make it into the episode.

MICROPHONE RESEARCH - I’ve received lots of feedback on what microphones I should look into, which I need to sort through. I’ve also had at least one person claim that my problem lies with a lack of a compressor moreso than the mic, so I’m looking into that too.

ENGINE RESEARCH - While I really have my hands full with Civil Protection and Freeman’s Mind, I have tons of ideas for videos I want to work on, and one of which will be a very different format than anything I’ve done before (many different characters, continous storyline, longer content, etc.). It will still be comedy, but set in a medieval fantasy environment. Based on my research, I think the Dragon Age engine (Eclipse engine) will be the best choice for attempting this, even though the storyline won’t be based on anything from the game itself. This means I’ll have a new game engine to learn, which is likely to take a while.

T-SHIRTS - This is a low priority for me, but I eventually hope to get some t-shirts made due to viewer request with the show logos and/or some quotes with Freeman’s Mind along with accompanying artwork.

EMAILS - While I’ve caught up on a bunch of them, I still have many to reply to. I should reiterate that if your email is asking questions that are in the FAQ, you may not get a reply. Also type “cl_drawhud 0” in the game console to get rid of the HUD in Source-based games, since about 5-10% of my emails seem to be about that question alone.

GAMES - While this isn’t consuming a large portion of my time, I am YEARS behind on games I’ve been interested in playing. I actually haven’t had much downtime at all over the past several months. I went straight from finishing The Tunnel, to moving, to doing a series of Freeman’s Mind videos. In addition to catching up on everything else, I’m trying to at least have some more fun in between.

* * *

ADHD version: Ross is working on lots of different things. He will start a new Freeman’s Mind soon.