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Well here continues the currently weekly march of Freeman’s Mind. This pacing should be treated like an isotope, it’s hard to say how long it will remain stable. I think this one may be a little bit below average. I tried going a slightly different direction with it to avoid making things feel too mundane, but I’m not sure it really had the effect I wanted. Bonus points if you can find the pun used in this episode, I’m guessing a lot of people will miss it.

Since the last few uploads to Machinima.com have had the color and brightness distorted when they go on Youtube, this time I intentionally screwed up the picture in the OPPOSITE way to try and counteract what I’m guessing they were doing and it looks like it mostly worked. They’re still uploading 640x360 content as 1280x720 however, so next episode I may just upscale the original 848x480 footage to 1280x720 so while it won’t be HD quality, it will at least be sharper.

I’ve seen many posts before asking me to use mods to improve the graphics for Half-Life Source, with this episode being a good spot in the series to change things. I’ve experimented with every mod I could find for it and they ALL had problems. Some shaders would be overblown and/or not transfer to Source recorder, some models would be missing textures or not behave when recorded in a demo, some textures would make some areas look much better, but stick out horrendously in others, and most of them change some of the original weapons. For all these reasons I’m not planning on using visual enhancement mods for the game. I doubt people were really watching a game this old for the eye candy anyway.

Since I’ve increased the pacing of FM, I’m currently falling behind on Civil Protection, emails, subtitles, website improvements, and several other things. So if it looks like everything else is being neglected, it is, but not intentionally. I’ll get caught up again at some point.

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Here’s the “mystery episode” that was alluded to in the progress bar. I’m sure some of you predicted this, hopefully no one’s expectations were ruined too badly. I thought about doing a training course episode before, but parts of it conflict with how I’ve been playing through the game, trying to make it seem more realistic. This episode is a compromise between not doing it and going through the whole thing. I’ve been informed after the fact that the creator of “Barney’s Mind” did the exact same thing of showing the training course after being unconscious, but it was just a coincidence on my part. When I originally created Freeman’s Mind I received a few emails from people who told me they were thinking of doing or had done the exact same thing, so I guess coincidences are inevitable.

I’m going to try and keep up Freeman’s Mind on a weekly rate for a while, but I eventually may slow it down some as I don’t want to neglect Civil Protection either. In either event, I don’t think I’ll have situations again soon where I go months at a time without a release. At least not until FM is done anyway.

EDIT:

It looks like the video was darkened again for Youtube and uploaded at 1280x720 again, despite the source being requested at 640x360. Ah well, the downloadable copy will look correct once I encode it.

Hey everyone, here’s a link to a group Q&A session I did a week or two ago with people creating “mind” series for other games with mostly silent protagonists, of which there are many. I was invited to it directly after the caboos15 interview and since “The Tunnel” has been completed for a while now, I don’t mind doing PR stuff again. It’s a long discussion session and I don’t remember everything that was said while recording or before/after, but you’re welcome to check it out:

Youtube

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This episode is a bit of a milestone in the game. If you haven’t played Half-Life already, you’ll find out why. It’s also one of the shorter episodes. This is because I split them when there’s a good stopping point, and it doesn’t get much more obvious than this one. It’s been proposed before that I switch over to the Black Mesa mod after this episode, but since that’s not out yet, I’ll just continue with regular half-life. You can expect something a little different for the next video as a kind of intermission after this one.

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Freeman’s Mind continues with a new episode. I’m mostly happy with this one, though it becomes difficult for me to tell what’s good or not the more of these I do. I’ll continue to update the progress chart, though I may forget some days.

This episode got delayed for release more than most. This is part of the reason I never like to give release dates, I never know them myself. Machinima.com works in mysterious ways. The progress chart on the right will tell you at least what’s been completed.

The brightness / contrast levels seem to be off in this episode on the Youtube version. The downloadable copy will have the original game light levels once it goes up. Also the resolution is being reported at 1280x720 on youtube, which is incorrect. I was told to submit it at 640x360 for Youtube. The original footage is now recorded at 848x480. Going to HD resolution really isn’t worth the slowdown in processing for me for Freeman’s Mind, since this is just Half-Life, there’s not much to show off visually. I plan on releasing copies of all the videos at original resolution and with higher quality codecs/formats in the future, it’s just something I haven’t gotten around to yet. That and some people appreciate smaller copies to download. So the current 672x384 WMV copies are just a temporary compromise between higher quality, lower size, and player compatibility.

You can look forward to more videos coming one way or another.