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:

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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.

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

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Well I’m gradually catching up on email and at the moment only have about 100 to reply to. In light of this, I want to get some more feedback from viewers on a couple of different topics. If you’re registered on the forums, I prefer you just reply to this there, but if not, emailing me is also an option.

VIDEO FORMATS:

All the videos here have been released in WMV format for one simple reason, at the time, it really was one of the most compatible formats out there where people didn’t have to mess with downloading codecs, or finding the right player. By and large, this led to a dead minimum of people asking me how to play the videos, which is quite an accomplishment, considering some of the questions I receive (i.e. “What game do you use for Freeman’s Mind?”). Nowadays, I’m more open-minded about what format the videos are in, so I’d like to see what the majority of viewers want. MP4, AVI, MKV, etc. You tell me what format you want. I know some viewers have expressed interest in the videos being in an iphone-compatible format, which is doable. Beyond that, I don’t know. Whatever format is decided on, I will NOT be providing technical support for how to play it, so you’ll be on your own for that. Also, if you only watch the videos on Youtube, you can ignore all this.

VIDEO ENCODING GURU:

Tying into the first topic, some help would be appreciated by someone who is a video encoding FREAK. Someone familiar with lots of different compression techniques, knows about I-frames, B-frames, quantizers, H.264 compression, different container formats, browses places like doom9.org a lot, etc. If you’re someone who is interested in getting the maximum amount of quality in the least amount of space, whatever the format, I might be interested in your help for converting all the episodes to new formats. I have all the Civil Protection episodes backed up in maximum quality Xvid-compression, and the Freeman’s Mind episodes in a slightly lower quality version. Go ahead and email me if you’re a video encoding veteran of sorts, and are familiar with many formats.

MICROPHONE RECOMMENDATIONS:

Up to date, I’ve just been using a cheap clip-on microphone from Wal-Mart for all the episodes. This combined with careful recording and sound editing means my voice comes out relatively well in the videos, however the last episode of Freeman’s Mind reminded me of its biggest downfall, which is overwhelming the microphone input with my voice. You may not be able to tell from the videos, but I can get very, very loud when recording. So loud it often limits what places I can live for fear of disturbing all neighbors in a large radius around me. With my current microphone, it doesn’t matter what recording levels I set the microphone to, it sometimes is just too much for the mic and I get volume clipping, which I hate.

One aspect I like a lot about my microphone is it picks up relatively little in the background. When I was working at Machinima.com, they were using a Blue Snowball mic, which generally gets quite good ratings and reviews. I didn’t like it however; on every setting, it simply picked up more background noise and echo than my cheap clip-on one, which is a problem for recording. So my standards for not picking up background noise are higher than what that mic provided. If you have recommendations on microphones that can handle a LOT of volume, don’t pick up much background noise at all, and are relatively inexpensive, please let me know.

Youtube

Download 848x480 WMV (93MB)
 

Here’s the next episode, and as promised, it contains more wandering around while lost, this time with more water.

I’m sure this will upset a lot of people, but this is going to be the last FM episode on a weekly rate. Believe it or not, it takes me most of my available time in the week making an episode (I’ll make a chart illustrating why later) and it’s been sucking up my time to the point where I’ve fallen behind on many other things I want to be working on. If I could do improv comedy well, the process would be at least 10x faster, but the neurons in my brain don’t quite fire fast enough for that. I don’t know when the next episode of FM will be completed since I want to catch up on subtitles, website improvements, responding to emails, bug hunting on the Source engine, getting more video formats available, and at least getting STARTED on the next CP episode. I won’t neglect FM for months at a time like I have in the past though, you can still expect more FM episodes, just not as fast as I’ve been doing them lately.

EDIT:

For fans of Freeman’s Mind Episode 2, it looks like the cold-blooded side of the debate is losing ground.

Youtube

Download 848x480 WMV (68MB)
 

Well I hope everybody likes watching someone wandering around lost and talking to themselves, because that’s what you’re getting with this episode. And the next. And the next. This is one of the less action-oriented areas of the game. I’ve noticed before that sometimes people get upset when I don’t take the most direct route in the game. In this case, I try to exhaust all options that a real person would try before going with what the game wants me to do. I am a little concerned that maybe these latest episodes are weaker because of the pace I’m putting them out, I’ll see.

I’m afraid there’s still not much progress at all in other areas due to the weekly pace of Freeman’s Mind. Once I let up on the pace, my focus will be on isolating bugs in the Source engine for Civil Protection, improving the website and links, and catching up on emails (I currently have about 380 to reply to dating back to the end of March).