Home to Civil Protection and Freeman’s Mind
February 7th: Videochat with fans
All above will be live at twitch.tv/rossbroadcast at 6PM UTC.
(download will be up later)
Well this took longer than I expected, mostly due to paperwork not related to the video, then me getting sick. I still am sick, so all videos are unfortunately on hold until I get better. Once I am better, I plan to keep coming out with more all through December. I don’t have a lot else to say because I’m sick. It fills my thoughts mostly with “blaaaaaaaah” and want to roll on the floor like a dog.
Hey everyone, I’m still very sick, but at least now my head no longer feels like it’s caught in a vice. The next Freeman’s Mind episode is coming soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to make a news update on the status of the Freeman’s Mind Announcer Pack for DOTA 2 as it just hit 10k votes on Steam. As promised, I’ve release a downloadable copy of the trailer for those of you interested in it (I’ll have an episode page on the site made for it later). More importantly I wanted to give you an update on the status of the pack itself. Right now the pack is currently in limbo. A few weeks ago I received the following email from Valve:
“
Thank you for your Steam Workshop Contribution Freeman’s Mind Announcer Pack.
Unfortunately, for various reasons, the developers of “Dota 2” had to flag it as “incompatible”, so it cannot be used within “Dota 2”.
You can learn more about what kinds of items are accepted and why certain items are marked as “incompatible” here: http://www.dota2.com/workshop/
The Steam Support Team
http://www.steampowered.com
“
Unfortunately they have not told me WHY it’s incompatible. I can only assume it has partially due to the title containing the word “Freeman” as they may feel that hits too close to home with their intellectual property. If that’s the case, I’ll just rename the pack to something else, like “Ross Scott announcer pack.” Really that should be the only issue as far as IP goes. A bit of a spoiler, but the pack does NOT contain lines like “this one time at Black Mesa I saw this” or “that looks like a vortigaunt”, none of the lines themselves contain any direct references to Valve’s IP. Instead, I wrote all the lines with the same sort of personality established in Freeman’s Mind, so it’s more like Freeman “After Hours” rather than being full of HL2 references.
It’s also possible Valve has changed the rules for announcer pack submissions again in the time I submitted it to the time I received that email. It’s also possible they don’t like one line and it needs to be changed, or they just don’t like the sound of my voice, the point is I have NO IDEA why it’s being marked as incompatible. So while I could just try renaming the pack and resubmitting it, but my intuition tells me if I do that, I’ll just receive an email identical to the one above a few months from now with no other explanation. I do think this is kind of lame of them to send an email like that, but then give no other explanation and no means to contact them.
Despite being told it’s “incompatible” via email, the actual entry on Steam has NOT yet been marked as “incompatible” or “rejected”, so that makes me think there is hope for this still seeing the light of day.
I do not know who I should contact about this. The email sent to me was from [email protected]. I’ve tried contacting their front desk email, but have received no reply. If anyone has information how to actually communicate with someone at Valve about what needs to be fixed, please let me know. Until then, I’m completely in the dark on this.
ADHD version: Ross is still sick. Valve is playing “guess what number I’m thinking of” with the DOTA 2 voice pack.
Hey this is just some quick news:
I am sick as a DOG right now. I feel like Pinhead from Hellraiser. I guess it’s some kind of flu or something. I forced myself to finish the dialogue to the next Freeman’s Mind on Thursday however, right now I’m just waiting on getting the sound effects back, then I’ll finish the video and put it up right afterwards. All other video production is halted until I get well again, I’ve been in agony the past couple days. Once I am better, I’ll do another FM episode (after the next one) and RGD as planned, but I don’t see it happening for November anymore though.
Also the forums are currently under siege by spam attacks. We’re working to resolve it ASAP, but it may be a few days before it’s sorted out.
Hey everyone, I have a quick announcement, one of the videos has won an award for the Machinima Expo 6 festival (no relation to Machinima.com)! I submitted “Stranger In Need” and “Civil Protection: The Tunnel” to it this year and they both made it as finalists, with “The Tunnel” winning one of the awards! It turns out it had some prizes, which I wasn’t even aware of. It looks like I’ll be receiving an award similar to this:
It reminds me a little bit of the marker from “Dead Space”:
The people running the festival and the other contestants were all very nice. I encourage any machinima makers to submit entries to them the next time they run the festival, which I assume will be next year. I’m hoping it will get more of a turnout next year too, since the machinima community has become very fragmented in the past couple years. It’s my hope that Gorilla Gong will help remedy that so that machinima as a medium is in a better state this time next year.
I’ve gotten asked a lot if “The Tunnel” is going to get a sequel, since I think one of its biggest shortcomings was that I left it a little too open-ended. The answer is still I don’t know. I definitely have ideas for a sequel, but the animation was so brutal for the original that it almost never happened. I’ll almost certainly won’t want to do another major video in the Source engine, but there’s nothing to say I couldn’t port the assets over to a new engine at a later date, so I’ll see. If it does happen, I’m afraid it won’t be anytime soon.
In the meantime, more videos are coming out soon, I’ll make a new post as soon as the next one is done.
(download will be up later)
More Freeman’s Mind! My apologies for a longer than usual delay on this one, you can mostly blame that on the Game Dungeon, which I actually wanted to get out in August. For the foreseeable future, FM will be getting a lot more focus in the future. Right now my goal is to get 2 more FM episodes out this month and another Game Dungeon, in that order. I don’t know if I’ll actually ACHIEVE that, but that’s what I’m aiming for. There are a couple smaller things I’m working on that may show up later on, but Freeman’s Mind is going to remain the priority for quite a while.
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