Frostiken

Keeping up the momentum in the episode may also hurry up and get the series done before, you know, I die or something God knows if we ever wanted to see FM: HL2, the heat death of the universe would happen at this rate

Doesn't have to be, but it would be more akin to, for the month of July, having 35, 36, and 37 as one big episode.

Has any thought been given to perhaps making longer individual episodes to make up for a longer production schedule? Generally speaking, it's usually quicker to do one twelve-minute project than two six-minute ones. I can't be the only one who finds it frustrating waiting ages for an episode and it's 'Gordon' bumbling around in circles trying to open locked doors, and then the episode ends six minutes later roughly two hundred feet from where it started. I can't speak for certain on the development process of an FM episode, and I admit to being spoiled on the weekly updates, but I think I'd acquiesce to bi-weekly or longer updates if the episodes themselves were notably longer. It doesn't have to be 1:1, but if we're talking monthly updates, a single twenty-five minute episode might not be unreasonable (vs. say, four weeks of eight minute episodes). We get a nice chunk of FM content, you trim what is effectively an entire week of production off, everyone wins. I just don't think I could stand another production pause (hopefully not as absurd as when The Tunnel brought FM to a halt for like, half a year) and then just get six minutes of actual content So um. Yeah.

Ensuring that your words imply your meaning, and reading that meaning in other people's words are what those of us with what you may call an 'EDUKASHUN' do. Maybe you should stick with Thomas the Tank Engine, and let the real fans read and write posts on the internet. c wut i did thar? See, I took your pretentious attitude towards other people on the topic of codecs and turned it around against you, egotistically telling you that you're stupid and should stop writing posts, because you don't comply with my ridiculous standards. If you didn't want your words to imply that everyone is stupider than you, maybe you shouldn't have written your idiotic thoughts out in the way you did. I'm not even sympathetic to that, because it's so painfully, blindingly obvious that your codec-fueled nerd rage brewed such stirring hate-speech towards anyone who doesn't know that 29.82387423 is the *BEST* FPS to use that, well, of course you're going to deny implying that. Because you're thick, see. So far we've established that: "People who want anything other than my codecs don't care about quality and have no business downloading these videos, they're only for the real fans anyway." "Anyone who uses VLC is a retard because it once screwed up my animes!" "Anyone who would ever use .avi is a retard." "XVID is for idiots who hate quality." Good discussion guys. Maybe someone should suggest that we encode with something like .rm just so we can decide what else makes you a retard.

"which made me laugh for a moment, then it just made me sad." Yeah, good argument there. You outright imply that everyone who voted for it is incredibly stupid, but that's not the best part. The best is that you're so fucking pretentious and stuck up your own ass that you don't even explain why you look upon everyone who voted for it with such disdain. Did smelling your own farts cut too much oxygen to your brain and you forgot the whole 'actual arguments' part? Not to mention the whole 'had a laugh' is language you would use to describe, I don't know, seeing a small child answer a question with a cute but stupid answer. Though I doubt you actually laughed, or were even sad, only saw an opportunity to try to elevate yourself and your pathetic, useless and mostly baseless "knowledge" of codecs above the rest of us mainstream Eichmanns, you melodramatic nerd.

I'll bet you also used Opera back in the day too and bitched about everyone who was stupid enough to use Firefox instead. I guarantee you if you lined up a whole series of codecs of the same video shot and encoded differently, people like you wouldn't actually be able to point out the 'best' one, even by your own lofty standards. He's recording on, by his own admission, a crappy $20 mic in his house, and you're stressing out about lossiness of the audio codec as if you're listening for submarines. Yeah, tell us how we're all "retards" and should go use Youtube with the rest of the mainstream sheeple and that we don't deserve to download the videos, which are for REAL fans.

Go figure that a discussion about something as pathetic and menial as codecs turns into a bunch of ego-inflated nerds calling anyone who uses anything even remotely 'mainstream' a "retard", and then start arguing about problems that barely even exist. It's a god damn video of a game with graphics from 1998. It's not like we're imaging cancer slides or trying to find Russian missiles. If you seriously need to download a "1080p" copy (which is wrong on so many levels) to enjoy it, seriously, what the fuck is the matter with you? You're going to piss and moan and throw an epic fucking shit-fit nerd-rage-gasm because a certain audio codec is "lossy" (because you say so because your super-human dog-like hearing can tell that it's clipped in the 25khz range), yet you're not going to rage about the fact that Ross isn't recording in a professional studio with sound-proofed baffling to eliminate echoes, recording on a $45,000 mic with $200k of mixing equipment?

My immensely practical stance: 1) This happens all the time on Youtube. It's stupid and annoying. Horray for reporting it. 2) However attached you are to it, did you really need to make a thread about it? 3) Yes, we all like Ross Scott and Freeman's Mind, however let me give you a little nugget of common sense - almost everyone on here with an avatar has probably committed copyright infringement, if you've ever posted an image that wasn't yours on a forum that you didn't make, that's copyright infringement, and regardless of what the MPAA wants you to believe it's all pretty much the same thing, so before you go all armchair legal nazi about "stealing" (and what he's doing is NOT STEALING), keep in mind everyone is guilty of doing the same thing at some point in time.

Honestly the mechanical animations kinda ruin the nice first-person animations. Why is everything in Black Mesa shaking and bouncing like it's all driven by a shitty old steam engine?

Man I got spoiled, I keep checking to see if there's a new episode up... I'd really like the description for how each episode is made and where the biggest timesinks are. The other minds were done pretty quickly, though the writing in them was more or less complete shit, so maybe it's the script that eats up all his time... I mean, it's not like it seems like there's that much to do, his work flowchart is more or less [Walk Through Level] -> [say Witty Things]

Not a lot of mod to it. He's got godmode on, HUD off, uses NoClip on occasion, and damage values are tweaked to make things die faster.

i think you mean "is that a sub machine-gun? it is! now i can solve up to 800 problems a minute" It's actually "Is that an MP5? It is! Now i can solve up to 800 problems a minute" +1 I want that on a T-shirt.

He reminds me of me. Minus the drugs and clubbing. Honestly, I work for the government, so half the lines sound like things I've said or, now that I've heard them, I appropriated to say myself.

I never understood the 'pierced ear' thing. Unless the bullet was incredibly tiny wouldn't it just tear off most of the ear?

He should at least give all the weapons a try, at least to have a comment on them...

The only thing more retarded than raging about Machinima.com being slow, is being an apologist about it. Yeah that means you, OP. Nobody wants to see more bitching about how long it's taking. We get it already. All the same, nobody also wants to hear ridiculous reasons of why we should all be holding hands and singing praises about it, 'because it could be worse'. It once took me three weeks to get my hot water fixed. Does that mean that if my hot water goes out for only two weeks next time, I shouldn't complain about it until the third week? Derp. Here's how I see it: 1) Ross said he can crank out an FM episode in just a few days - two, maybe three was his estimate. It *is* just about 7 minutes of audio that he's dealing with. 2) We love FM and have been starved for it as of late. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. 3) Machinima.com exists in the business of uploading these videos, and Ross has to use them in order to get anything out of the vids. 4) Machinima.com not uploading the videos is like a service station putting your car on the lift and leaving it there for the week without working on it. We lose, they lose, Ross loses, what the fuck is the point? Just because it took unreasonable amounts of time between episodes in the past doesn't change the fact that the videos are ready *now*, and the company whose ENTIRE EXISTENCE REVOLVES AROUND UPLOADING YOUTUBE VIDEOS, is not uploading the videos. Therefore, I think it's a fair complaint. Cue negative rep avalanche for not being a 'glass is half full' lemming.

In your opinion maybe. But Shephard's, Chell's, even Barney's Mind can actually be pretty funny. To be fair, I stopped watching Shephard and Barney's Mind because Barney's Mind was just him running around saying 'Daaaamn!' at everything, and Shephard's Mind felt like he would run through once and call it 'good enough', with the entire thing feeling like I was watching an idiot play a game while some thirteen year old kid provided commentary. In the case of the latter, it'd have been funnier if the creator actually knew a damn thing about the military - rather ruined the whole 'mind' premise when the mind doesn't fit. Both of them promise they 'get better' after six, eight episodes, like that's some sort of excuse... there were so awful I never bothered beyond a couple episodes. Maybe they really do get better - or maybe the creators of them should've actually stopped to look at what they made instead of recording one run-through, breathing into their mic and recording some words to go with it, and uploading it straight to YouTube. Then again, I'm also one of those few people who sees Will Ferrel for the untalented irritating douchebag he is so maybe I should be finding it funny but don't.

Yeah, that would be because all the mind knockoffs aren't funny.

I wonder how huge a backlog of episodes Ross can turn out Get the whole game done by the end of June, but still be getting episodes by November...

"The Black Mesa Hazard Course decathlon will commence this Friday..." "Oh man, I forgot about that! I need to practice!" Yeah I don't think he's been through it.

It would be nice if you could link to this info posted by one of the team members. I've talked with some of the ex-BMS mappers and basically it would go along the lines of: "Make ____" "Okay, here's ____" "That's not what I wanted. Make it better." "Okay, how about this?" "No, but we don't need that area any more, so start on _____" Basically they would discard enormous amounts of content or make them completely flush their work in lieu of something 'better'. The entire thing is basically second to DNF in terms of team mismanagement.

I actually had this same criticism of Half-Life 2. All the story of why everything is as it is is "explained" by way of a single bulletin board in Eli's lab that I completely missed in my first playthrough. I wanted to know what actually happened and how things came to be, and interestingly enough, the only explanation that exists is to be had by reading 3rd party websites where people speculate on what happened. In-game, at face value, you wake up on a train, and just like in Half-Life 1, you're thrust from one event to another. Somehow a bunch of rebels start following you, even though you just fell into them by circumstance. In fact, had I not played Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2 might be one of the most poorly presented, confusing game ever. Consider the fact that Barney is a meta-joke from Half-Life 1, how all the guards look and sound alike, and in Half-Life 2 we're supposed to be great friends. Thoughts might go along with "Where am I? Why are there aliens? Why am I in Russia (never did figure that out)? Who is this guy? What's a combine?" None of those questions are officially answered in the game. If anything, it makes the G-Man's speech at the beginning more interesting, because he seems to know that Freeman is a bumbling seemingly immortal fuckup and everything he touches falls to total shit, so just throw him into the machinery and watch it all grind to a halt. Of course I complained about that when Half-Life 2 came out but I got accused of having to be 'spoon-fed' the plot

I think you guys need to step back and look at HL1 as a whole, and then realize how silly the premise is. Freeman's character in FM is simply working within this absurd premise. - Everyone else is stupid, useless, and dies all the time. You get stuck outside doors and people won't let you through, and everyone seems to know exactly what has to be done yet nobody is doing it. - Freeman is still just a physicist. I mean, really, are you telling me the USMC can't handle aliens? That it's Freeman's job to wipe them all out? The only thing Freeman has is the HEV suit, and even that's a bit of a stretch since for one, there's PILES of HEV suits (there a dozen or so lying around Zen alone). - You can't just go anywhere, you have hundreds of absurd obstacles in your way. Like the silly spinning blade thing, locked doors and having to crawl through miles of vents, even firing the missile. I'll give you an example - a gut-shot Barney tells him that the track power is off, and knows what you need to do to restart it, yet doesn't explain exactly how much work it is. After the absurdity of that entire level in terms of size and obstacle after obstacle, you finally get the power on, and kill the Gargantua with, of all things, an enormous TESLA COIL. You then get back on your train, and come across some concrete dividers that crumble "like Styrofoam". Immediately on the other side is another Barney who's been standing there, apparently hoping you'd make it through the ridiculous aforementioned obstacles, and suggests that some scientists already came through that exact same way (sans obstacles?), and somehow knew Freeman was coming that way, and additionally they knew all about the teleport satellite, the lambda complex, and the plan to teleport to Xen. Note that you learn none of this until you're actually at the Lambda complex. I'll also note that these 'scientists' seem to always be ahead of you yet have done nothing themselves, ie: launch the damn missile. Additionally, put yourself in that reality - what is more likely, that you would assume that you and YOU ALONE are the one who can stop the 'alien invasion' (note that Freeman has no idea it's an invasion), or that it's probably likely that, given all the shit you have managed to do so far, other people elsewhere are actually trying to stop it too? I mean, the guys at Lambda have access to heaps of HEV suits and the most powerful weaponry in the game. Yet all they've done is stand there and die waiting for you. Gordon reacting with confusion is extremely likely as if I had encountered the above in real life I'd probably lose my shit too.