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Here’s Episode 31. I think the writing is a little better here than the last one, I was rusty having not done Freeman’s Mind for a while. Some of you may think I’ve been manipulating the enemy AI for this episode or the past two, but I haven’t. While it’s not the case in all episodes, the enemy behavior for the past few has been exactly how it played out in the game. The next episode I think will be more exciting.

Unfortunately I’m sick with something at the moment and it’s affected my throat, so there won’t be anything voice-related until it gets better. There’s no shortage of other things to work on however. “The Tunnel” is getting really close to done except primarily for sound effects, plus I still want to get the forums and more subtitles up, and respond to the many emails I’ve received. As soon as my throat gets better, I’ll resume recording and update the progress bar, though there’s a real chance you’ll see Civil Protection next before the next Freeman’s Mind episode.

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The lull of Freeman’s Mind is over, here is Episode 30, with more that are going to be coming all year. Thanks to everyone who emailed me, letting me know it got posted. I think this one is pretty average, though I tend to think that about all the FM episodes now. One interesting bit of information is that all the radio chatter in this episode is as it was heard in the game. Many audio embellishments are added to the episodes, but that wasn’t one of them.

For the near future, my attention is a bit divided between The Tunnel, Episode 31, and miscellaneous stuff like forums and subtitles. So if one area lags, it’s a safe bet I’m working on another. I plan to continue using the progress graphic to the right for future episodes so you’ll know where things stand. I’ll have more to say once “The Tunnel” is out.

EDIT:

I screwed up and forgot to normalize the final audio volume, so the Youtube version may be too quiet. The downloadable copy has been fixed however.

EDIT 2:

I uploaded Episode 31 to Machinima.com a few days ago, but as usual, I never know when it will go up.

While the progress bar to the right tells most of what’s going on, here’s a more verbal update for people. Right now “The Tunnel” is almost all done visually. I have some minor fixes to do in editing still along with the main credits, but there’s still a little ways to go on the audio. The sound work involved for this episode is quite extensive and I’m getting great help on it, it just needs a little more time. This has freed me up to work on Freeman’s Mind in the meantime. As of the time of this post, I’ve finished the footage and dialogue for Episode 30, though the episode still needs volume balancing and some extra effects. Since I’m getting help here as well, I’ll just go ahead and start on Episode 31 soon so I can keep things rolling.

I’m unfortunately still quite a bit behind on emails, I currently have about 230 left to reply to. If you’ve contacted me about subtitles, your emails are likely much more delayed than usual since I’m trying to get a new system in place for that. In short, I want to get the English ones up first, so all people making subtitles have a better copy to work from for translations in other languages. There are currently two people working on that for the remaining episodes. Once I get more up, I’ll unveil “phase 2” of plans for getting more subtitles up on the site in other languages.

For now I’m not going to rush anything, but I intend to work on Freeman’s Mind every day I’m able, so you’ll be seeing a surge in new episodes soon, even if there’s some lag time between when I finish voicing an episode and when it goes online. I’ll announce more on long-term plans after “The Tunnel” is out.

EDIT: Episode 30 is done and has been uploaded to Machinima.com. It will go up on their Youtube channel first, but I don’t know when. If anyone sees it go up and I haven’t made a post on it yet, feel free to email me and say so. Also for the OCD people, as a tip, they usually only upload between 9 - 5 (GMT -08:00).

Hey everyone, I’m reporting that the filming for “The Tunnel” is now completely done. I still have some editing to do, but that should be pretty minor time-wise compared to the death march the rest of this episode has felt like. There’s still a lot of soundwork to be done, but the majority of that is being done by other people, which finally gives me a breather to work on something else. I’m very happy with how the episode is turning out and I think it’s going to be the best one yet atmosphere-wise.

I was going to have a couple new Freeman’s Mind episodes this month, but I found out on the 11th that the last day to submit videos to Machinima.com was the 13th, so unfortunately I can’t publish anything during this time. The earliest I can submit a new video is January 3rd, so it’s my intent to have at least one Freeman’s Mind episode completed before then. I’ll go ahead and expand the progress chart for the Freeman’s Mind episodes as well so you can monitor that if you’re curious. I plan to get started on episode 30 in the next day or two. It looks like I’m going to be eating my words about 2010 being more videos than ever, I really underestimated just how much work “The Tunnel” really was, I’ll talk more about that after the episode is out.

For non-video stuff, my main focus is replying to my very large backlog of emails, getting more subtitles up (I still need to review a lot of them), and hopefully getting a forum up and running at some point in the near future.

More videos are coming!

EDIT:

I’d like people’s feedback about what topic categories they would like to see for the future forum. For example, one possibility is something like this:

-Civil Protection
-Freeman’s Mind
-Other Videos
-Gaming in general
-Source Engine information

Or maybe CP, FM, and everything else should just be under one category of “Accursed Farms Videos.” It doesn’t have to be necessarily related to the videos, gaming, or machinima, just has enough interest that people coming here would want to discuss the topic. Feel free to list your suggestions in the comments, or you can email directly.

Hey everyone, this is just a minor update. My original plan was to not do another update until the filming was done, but 2+ weeks after I thought I’d be done with that, I’m still finishing things up, so I’m giving a quick status report. The reason things are still taking so long is because a lot of things I thought were done, I’ve found on closer inspection have problems with lighting, continuity errors, bugs in the engine, etc. One thing I haven’t updated much on the progress bar of the next episode is the NEGATIVE progress, where things that I thought were complete had to get fixed. The update was frozen for a long time because of this, but I THINK it’s all progress now.

I currently have ~1.1 scenes left to film, then the filming is done. The final scene I’m finishing has more engine bugs than most, so many that I’m going to have to redo part of it using the Half-Life 2: Episode 1 engine, as opposed to the Episode 2 engine. I plan to go into more detail on this at a later date, but this episode has been informative into just how many situations the animations will screw up in-game. The HL2 Episode 2 engine seems to be the culprit for most, if not all of this. I have half a dozen different situations where animations glitch out where they didn’t in Episode 1. It’s probably happening much more frequently than I’m noticing, but a lot of the time the difference is subtle, but for other situations it’s horrid. If the code can’t be fixed at a later date, for future episodes I may have to revert back to the Episode 1 engine altogether.

I have at least 2 more days of work before the filming is done, so we’ll see what the actual time ends up being. I can’t give any estimates on the remaining time for the music/audio, however I will resume Freeman’s Mind as soon as the video editing is done for this episode.