Ross Scott

It's the same way I've attached other objects ever since Episode 1 came out (attaching them in HL2 original was hell). The flashlight is a prop_dynamic. Before the real scene starts, I set an animation that they'll hold still on. I then use setparentattachmentmaintainoffset command in hammer, then after some trial and error it will be aligned for the scene. Ryan McDonald created the general animation for the CP looking like he was holding a flashlight in Softimage XSI and the flashlight model.

Thanks for the pictures, it's interesting how SSAA seems to produce the best image quality in some games, but causes more blurring than fixes on others. I wouldn't mind seeing some shots of Mass Effect (any area that's loaded with shader aliasing) especially, or additional shots of Rainbow Six Vegas in areas where there is shader aliasing or deferred rendering (your existing test was good, the gun rack in the background obviously has it). I'd say you don't have to bother with every mode however. I think 2 shots would be fine. Maybe one with 4x box AA / 16x AF and one with 4x SSAA, still box.

Hey, Well I'm definitely interested in seeing the comparisons, however a torrent isn't the best option when you're the only host. Would you mind uploading them to someplace like www.megaupload.com, 4shared, or some other free hosting site instead?

None of the filtering methods mentioned are SSAA however. While it's structured differently from the other options in the control panel, I believe selecting SSAA overrides other AA modes, that's how it works on Nvidia cards at least. ATI's could be structured differently so that it does one full AA mode on top of another, but that wouldn't make a lot of sense since I think enabling any AA at all picks one of the modes mentioned by default. I could be wrong on this, but I'd need some solid proof established first (if you can get notable benchmark differences between the different modes WITHOUT ssaa, that would be the first step, we can test that as well.) Right now I think saying it makes a big difference with SSAA is like saying wide tent makes a big different with narrow tent; it doesn't, it's a completely separate mode. I'm quite familiar with Adaptive AA, I used it in some of the earlier CP episodes even. It was a badly needed mode when it came out back in 2005. You'd think it would be the best of all worlds, but unfortunately it doesn't do anything for shader aliasing or deferred rendering, which are increasingly common in some games now. Dude, I understand how it works, but game-to-game image quality, benchmark differences versus video memory and chipset manufacturers, and flat out game COMPATIBILITY are all big unknowns to me. The help file isn't even completely accurate. If everything worked perfectly, SSAA would always give better image quality, but as it stands, bugs exist. Try running HL2 Episode 2 with SSAA v. MSAA and see how much blurrier it is. In those cases, the quality is inferior, it's a real tossup between Nvidia, ATI (AMD) and the games being run.

Well that's a lot of games to cover, I'll look over all screenshots / benchmarks you're willing to send however. I'll be surprised if Dead Space 2 in particular works, the original one was notorious for not working with ANY AA modes. The ONLY method that works on that at this time is ATI's MLAA mode, which is a post-processing technique rather than "real" AA (still better than nothing though). As for box, wide tent, etc. I THINK by enabling SSAA, that will override all those modes, so it won't matter. The trick is to find games or areas in games where "normal" AA modes like the ones you mentioned still don't smooth all the jagged edges due to shaders or whatever. For instance, HL2 isn't a great game for that, since regular AA modes clean up so much of the image as it is. Anything based on Unreal 3 is particularly good for finding shader aliasing however. I'd say run your settings at 4x for comparison (I never notice huge differences beyond 4x), pick a filtering mode you want, maybe put anisotropic filtering to 16x. Finally, my guess is SSAA performance is equally punitive on both cards, but the big question I've never had answered is how big a difference the amount of video memory makes. Take the 2GB Geforce 460 for example. In 99% of applications that most people run, the extra 1GB of memory makes NO difference in performance. But for something like supersampling, it MIGHT, I don't know; I've never seen a comparison or know just how much video memory a card can really use for SSAA. The very nature of supersampling suggests that it could use a LOT of memory. Also for some games apparently the SSAA image quality on Nvidia cards can be blurrier, but I've barely seen ANY information on the topic to make an informed opinion on it.

Not yet. I'm going to have a BIG subtitle announcement as soon as I get things transitioned over to the new host. Right now things still aren't completely stable. Ross

I'll consider that one game SSAA doesn't work on for Radeon cards for now then ( I can try and take a screenshot on my Geforce sometime later). Definitely give the Unreal 3 engine games a shot however. EDIT: I forgot to mention that I think the Radeon's SSAA only works in DirectX 9 mode. I don't know if Fallout 3 is DirectX 10 or not, but if so, forcing it 9 might get it working.

Hmm, well thanks for the screenshots, but I'm not sure it's working in Fallout 3 for you. SSAA gets rid of basically ALL jagged edges, but I'm not seeing much of a difference between that and regular MSAA from your shot. Look at the bar sticking out from ground next to the chair on the right. It's jagged in both AA shots. If you want to be certain it's working, you might try turning off in-game AA, but keep it enabled from the control panel and see if it still works. If it doesn't, it means that for whatever reason it's not working in Fallout 3 for you. Benchmarks are another quick test. If the framerate is about the same between both AA modes, it means it's not working. Even on the best hardware SSAA causes a big framerate drop. You may have better luck with bulletstorm however. Here's an example of what to expect for SSAA mode (though hopefully not this blurry in most games): http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTI1MzU4OTM1NVlDbXBla3ZKZm5fNl8xMF9sLnBuZw==

Srake: I generally don't touch MMOs or any game with a subscription fee. While I appreciate the idea of an enormous RPG world to do things in, it feels hollow to me without some sort of cohesive story to it. You don't really "beat" WoW, Everquest, Guild Wars, etc. thedude190: Give me a break, there are way more complicated RTSs out there. That's one of the reason I haven't been able to get too far into Homeworld. As for micromanagement, I definitely disagree. Considering the scale you're dealing with, the micromanagement is great. Your units will fire while moving, attack on their own, you can give them coordinated attack orders, you can tell unit buildings to "loop" so can forget about them. I've found the micromanagement on that game more forgiving than most RTSs I've played. The only thing I thought it needed there was an "autofix" for the engineer units. Axeldeath: I played Gothic before I played Morrowind and later Oblivion, which maybe spoiled me. It's difficult to put my finger on it, but the whole world felt kind of hollow. They use the same few voice actors for everyone, no one sounded especially emotive or like your presence there really made much of a difference, cities felt kind of deserted, there were too many copy-paste areas, I didn't get a distinct feel for characters or places. I think the game didn't really engage me on any intellectual level and the art direction didn't feel interesting enough for me to get into. Fallout 3 was better, but it started feeling hollow the longer I played it for similar reasons. In general their games to me feel like sandbox games with 1000 small quests you can take rather than a cohesive storyline and RPG experience. Their games are technical marvels though, an immense amount of work has gone into these.

I've been a junkie about antialiasing ever since the feature first emerged in videocards. I love how it cleans up the image and try to enable it in every 3D thing I do. A lot of more modern games however either don't support antialiasing at ALL or else have really spotty coverage so you have what's called "shader aliasing", where some edges look perfectly clean, but others with special light shader effects look pixellated and ignore AA settings. In these cases, sometimes supersampling antialiasing (SSAA) is the only way to clean up an image, even if it takes a massive performance hit. Both AMD and Nvidia offer different SSAA settings, but I've only seen a minimal amount written on the topic and poor documentation on it in general. I'd like to get more information on which cards are more compatible, look better, and run faster for SSAA. Some cards make be more compatible, but cause blurring, others may take a massive speed hit, who knows. If you have a Geforce 400 / 500 series card, or a Radeon 5000 / 6000 series card, you can help out. You can do this in one of the following ways: Method 1: Find an area in a game you have where "normal" multisampling or MSAA/SSAA combo AA doesn't work well and you can still see a CLEAR "stairstep" look to some edges. Most games based off the Unreal 3 engine are like this. Take a screenshot of that, then enable pure SSAA and take another screenshot, to show the difference. Please don't post stand-alone screenshots here if you don't have anything to compare them to. Method 2: Make a benchmark of one of your games in the following modes: A. No AA being used B. "normal" 4x AA being used C. 4x4 SSAA being used Be sure to state what videocard you have along with how much memory it has (the rest of your specs isn't super important, since I'm interested in the difference between the modes, not overall performance). Be sure to keep other detail settings the same for each benchmark. Also a warning that 4x4 SSAA can be EXTREMELY slow. You may change your mind about how fast your computer is once you try this out. If the game is suddenly massively slower, don't worry, that means it's working. Method 3: List any games you have where antialiasing simply will NOT work for you. Or list games where SSAA works, but it causes the image to be very blurry (Half-Life 2 Episode 2 is an example of this). The more information I get, the better. It will probably influence the next videocard I buy. Thanks in advance to anyone who contributes information. - - - HOW TO ENABLE SUPERSAMPLING For Nvidia users: Download the program "Nvidia Inspector" then change the following settings for the game: If you see any settings related to "rotated grid" definitely mention them here. I currently have a Geforce 9800 GTX, so I may not have as many options as you. For ATI/AMD users: Go to the Catalyst Control center under AA, and find a slider towards the bottom: Change it to "Super-Sample AA." I recommend doing it in 4x mode instead of 8x since then tends to hit a good balance between picture fidelity and too much blurring. Also to the best of my knowledge, ATI's SSAA only works in DirectX 9 mode or lower (not 10 or 11).

I'd love to. They are putting advertisements at the end of their videos now, about some stupid World Of Warcraft Live Stream. Really annoy's the heck out of me. Heck, why not? That almost happened to "The Tunnel" thank god I got lucky and it was posted in between times they were doing. Imagine having those hard-encoded onto the video forever.

Well that's what Craig told me, I guess he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Oh I have no problem with that. You're the one of the few who did it right then. And it's not the fact that it didn't make much of an impact. It's the fact that both of those petitions had a very large percentage of the people who signed them also buying and playing the games as soon as they came out. You couldn't ask for a better example of hypocrisy.

Well I mean it more literally. I'm never going to link to the Rick Astley video or make a variant of it. I still have a couple of ideas to genuinely fool people, but it would take way more preparation.

it called accoutic foam and they use that for hard cases for transporting weapons like pistols and for what i can find they cost like €30 for like 4 sheets of 1m x 1m http://www.thomann.de/gb/the_takustik_noppenschaum_1030_4er_set.htm this site is good because if ross you are in poland this could be delivered to you in 3 days is it's hosted in germany and you using the same currency then all you need is double sided tape and 3 or 4 of this 4 set and you got he whole room covered but if you don't have the money use my idea I really don't have a echo with my mics i use Pretty tempting. And they use ZLOTYS not Euros.

That might definitely be the easiest way. I could use some finishing nails in the corners and I doubt the landlord would notice. The problem with these eggcarton recommendations is I'm not sure of the best way to fasten them. I'm thinking staples wouldn't be very stable when moving it around to install it. The room is kind of small, but the ceiling is maybe 10 feet high, so I'm going to need a lot of egg cartons if I go that route. Yeah that happens pretty much every April Fool's Day. I used to think I'd shed a certain portion of my fanbase each year, but I'm guessing these are the same people that signed the Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare boycotts.

The CPU usage was a combination of a forum bug related to hashing of the WP passwords, bots looking through the forums, and I've been told a misconfiguration on the host's end, who has been too busy to look at it. The latter problem will be solved by me hosting it myself, I just didn't have time to look into it before the AFD videos were done. As for egg cartons I've heard that too. I'd have to find a place that sells them in bulk, then figure out a way to attach them to the wall, it's a high-ish ceiling unfortunately.

Hey everyone, I thought I'd give some commentary on my most involved and most sloppily executed April Fool's Day videos yet. I wanted to try for a "double feature" for about a month or two. It almost didn't happen. In addition to my move setting me back quite a bit, audio editor Otto Beumelberg completely disappeared days before the deadline (turns out his computer had fried) and there simply wasn't enough time for me to do all the editing and recording AND the sound editing on both the videos. For the Halo video, I recorded the footage for that before I left and I just barely was able to coordinate it with enough people I could contact to get it done in time. Even then, there was a very small window of time to record the main scene. Try coordinating something with 7+ people you know and see how stable it is. Even once I had the footage, I left and my computer wasn't reassembled until a while afterwards and I had been very busy without having done much editing. The Zombie Panic video was even more close. I managed to line up good voice actors in time, but had multiple bailouts and some slow responses. On the morning of April 30th, I still had NONE of the lines recorded by the voice actors (except one, whom I needed a redo from), and I still didn't know if the new guy I picked for sound editing (Phai Giron) was going to flake out with everyone else. Thankfully it all came together, but not without a couple all-nighters for me of recording, coordinating and editing. In the middle of all this, I was contacted by the host for the site about the forums causing CPU usage problems again and he was threatening to take the site down immediately unless I paid him for the extra usage. It felt kind of like a ransom payoff. I paid him, but the timing couldn't have been worse for that, so I'll be looking into hosting the site myself in the near future, you're welcome to suggest options. To add to the fun, Machinima.com offered to host these videos (I thought they would be too bizarre for them actually), so that meant I had to get all the videos in at least a day ahead of time. I just barely made the deadline for that. On top of that, they told me it would be released 5pm their time, but then decided to release the Zombie Panic vid 6 hours early without telling me, so I guess they managed to play an April Fool's joke on me! Anyway, I'm happy it all came together. I think the sound editing could have been a little better, but considering how short the notice was on everything, it's amazing it got made at all. I'm especially happy with the Zombie Panic video, I think it's my favorite April Fool's Day one so far. That was recorded in a demo last year (back when I actually had some time for games) where it's the longest killing spree I've ever gotten as a zombie. For those unfamiliar with the game, if you can get two kills as a zombie before you die, you're doing very well. I got EIGHT in this demo, which basically never happens. It was a perfect storm of things going wrong for the survivors and I thought adding the commentary made it even funnier. I was worried I wouldn't fool anybody this year since April Fool's Day is the one deadline I manage to meet each year (so far), but a quick look at Youtube comments show otherwise. Machinima.com decided to put a Freeman's Mind thumbnail for the zombie video to trick more people, which led to all sorts of good will being expressed by the viewers. I don't know what I'll do next year, it's a challenge doing something different each time. The only thing you can count on is that I'll never Rickroll anyone, that's just mean. Since I was so busy on the videos, I didn't have time to look at much on the internet yesterday, so if you saw some especially good AF jokes, go ahead and post them on the forums. All I saw was some stuff from Google and Blizzard. Finally, while not horrid, the new place I've moved to could use some improvement for recording quality. If anyone has suggestions on cheap material I could line the walls with (not permanently, I'm only renting) to absorb more sound and dampen echo, let me know.

I actually have an idea for this and it's probably not what you're thinking at all, but as people have mentioned, the workload for a proper action scene increases exponentially. I need a better process period and probably several engine improvements before I could even attempt what I want to try. As for my ability to do one, you can take a preview from the flashback sequence from "Oil's Well"

Hell yeah, paint those Tories red.

I recognize that super solvers guy from Midnight Rescue and Treasure Mountain. That's how all cool people dressed in the 90s. Puffy jacket with popped collar, cap covering your face, and boxer shorts.

Hey everyone, well I have some good news and bad news. The bad news is I'm getting sued by Valve and can't make any more Freeman's Mind or Civil Protection videos forever. The good news is I have some new series to replace them! The first (which I thought was going to be the second, but Machinima.com decided to post it 6 hours earlier than they said, ha) is Diary of A Zombie. A touching tale about a zombie. Check it out here: 1280×720 WMV (130MB) Also I lied. There's not one, but TWO videos today! Stay tuned for the next one!

This sounds more like a philosophical / religious debate rather than addressing a concrete issue. I'm going to move this to the "General" section. Nice ICP messiah pic btw.