Ross Scott

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.

Yeah, I've asked Jexius to fix this about 30 times.

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).

My understanding is that fossil fuels still go into the manufacturing of solar panels, which will keep costs a certain level, plus they wear out after several years (I believe 5-10, but maybe that's changed). While solar power has potential, you really have to consider the level of resources that go into the entire process in terms of its sustainability. In terms of atmosphere change however, the footprint for solar is immensely lower than something like coal.

Hey, sorry to veto whoever stickied this, but I see Machinima.com more as an outlet rather than my focus, so I'm changing it back to just a regular topic. I mean Machinima.com have delays, but I've been guilty of that as well from working on other things. It's not like they're preventing from me working on more videos.

I find it interesting that every game on your poll is a sequel.

I saw this review on the game, and it's pretty damning: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2011/06/duke-nukem-forever-review-barely-playable-unfunny-and-rampantly-offensive.ars I haven't played it, but typically the bigger the budget for a game, the less forgiving I am of things like poor writing. For anyone who's played it, the only thing I want to know is how does it compare to the 2001 trailer? I thought that looked fantastic at the time and it still looks like it would be a lot of fun. I love the lines like "Duke, they have the president" and "What are you going to do, save the world all by yourself?" Here's a link, though I'm sure people here have seen it:

Path of Exile, I can't wait for this one. It's free to play and I've liked everything I've seen about it so far. I was kind of disappointed by Diablo 2 and this game seems to have much more of the tone of the original. Also the skill tree I've seen for it is just staggering.

Never mind, looks like I'm just ignorant.

Well I like the "Machine" track from it, looks like it was one of those games that was out before MP3 usage was common as the music is at 22khz.

Well Clay got it, though I guess rock bottom counts as well, although I didn't even realize that myself.

Due to me doing multiple takes for every line, recovering from shouting, editing, and thinking up the script at the same time, if I'm working ALL day on FM, I can get about 3 - 3.5 minutes done for an FM episode. It's an awful ratio, but it really is that slow for me. As for behind the scenes, I don't have a video camera besides a webcam and that would be demanding on the system to the point of interfering with actual work on the episode. Also it might disillusion people seeing lots of footage of me since I currently don't look like Freeman at the moment, though I could if I cut my hair.

I don't know about MIT but many universities require you to learn at least 2 other languages in order to earn a PhD.

Mostly, I haven't really figured out how gradually I want it to be though.

Download 848x480 WMV (127MB) 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.

It's not going to get a continuous storyline for several reasons. First, it's very limiting in having to pick up exactly where the last episode left off. If I want to get into more exotic ideas or want to jump around in time, the format doesn't lend itself to that. Second, it requires viewers to have to watch the previous episodes in order to fully enjoy a new one. I prefer people with NO background on the series being able to watch any of the episodes and enjoy them. Finally, I think it's a little less predictable this way. You can't just skip ahead and watch the next episode and know what happened, it's self-contained. However, I have ideas for CP that would take a lot of time to play out and would be closer to movie-length, so while some episodes will be sketch comedy, I hope EVENTUALLY I'll be able to make ones with much more of a storyline to them.

It's irrelevant, Source recorder can output the footage from demos frame-by-frame. I record Freeman's Mind at 180fps with 4x4 Supersampling AA and that's NOT in real-time. Some of the Civil Protection episodes CRAWLED during filming. I just play it at lower settings and then at higher ones for demo playback. Also I have a Phenom II X3 720, 2GB of RAM, and a Geforce 9800 GTX that was donated to me by a viewer when my old card died. As for Black Mesa, I was kind of on the fence about it anyway for doing FM, I'll just keep moving with the original game.

Ah people can complain if they want as long as they're civil about it.

Sorry, I've been extremely busy, I ended up forgetting about it. It should be up now.

Download 672x384 WMV (77MB) 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.

Guitar Hero + Rock Band