Ross Scott

I created the outside map by heavily modifying a HL2 level. "Nicadeamas" created all the other maps in the episode.

 

These maps aren't optimized at all and aren't meant to be playable. There's really not much to them besides what you see in the videos. There are multiple maps for every scene, almost none of it is all-connected. I think I asked him before if he cared if they were released, I don't know if I got an answer, I would have to check. Even if he said okay, they are not in a release state AT ALL, somebody would have to come in afterwards and clean it up. The maps also mix content from multiple mods for the objects.

Well I just noticed an announcer with 13K votes still waiting for approval since June.

 

This might take longer than you think Ross.

"Longer than I think" implies that I think there's a date Valve will eventually respond to this. I have no such expectations. I just wanted to try my best to make it visible.

 

How large part of the sales do you get Ross 80%? I would donate but I'm lacking the money to donate so I want as much of what I spend on your products to go to you!

I have no idea. It will have to get in the store first anyway.

 

It's not the words, its that the lines just feel rushed lacking emotion.

Well the thing is, within the game context, I actually wanted things a bit more neutral. When you do over 600 lines, consistency from line to line is important. Otherwise it will be a combination of super energetic clashing right back to a neutral line for when another tower is under attack with a standard announcement. I think it will sound more fitting actually in the game, with people playing it. The trailer was more to show off some highlights, but still give an idea of what the pack will be like. In other words, I didn't "cheat" and make the lines specifically for the trailer, creating a false impression. I took lines like you'll hear them in the game and strung together different situations (granted, a couple of the responses were "idle" ones though). Every line you hear in the trailer is in pack and you'll hear it in the game, given long enough gameplay.

 

At this point I just want Valve so say Yes or No to this announcer pack and get us out of this limbo. At the rate the votes are increasing it'll be weeks til it gets to 10K, and even then, who knows what the time it'll take between Valve greenlighting it and Dota releasing it.

Valve works in mysterious ways man. On one hand, someone will have to review and process my pack manually, and that takes time. On the other hand, this is a company worth billions, so you'd THINK someone could do that, but again, they work in mysterious ways. There's nothing sacred about 10k views, I just picked it as a big round number that I thought I might be able to hit. I'll be releasing the next FM episode as soon as it's done (the next one is another long one).

Congratulations on making the trailer and making it damn well! Alas I'm a egoist so I'm going to say work more I want to bask in the glory that is Ross Scott.

And this is a question to which the answer is largely irrelevant: What will the price of this glorious piece of art be?

I'm assuming $10, I don't set the price on this, Valve does.

Sigh, I hate to say it, but it sounds like you rushed the lines on many in the video. Forgive me, I want you to succeed, but I felt as if you were just reading them instead of acting. The police joke was great, and the kill level calls, but, I'm sorry, I think that you might want to go over them again, at least for the demo.

That line at the end was priceless. From the trailer I'm very impressed. I love playing dota, and I'm really hoping this announcer pack does get published. Gonna try to get my dota friends to rate it up on the workshop. Did Valve ever give any insight as to how many up votes is required to get something published? There's gotta be at least one Freeman's Mind fan over at valve that'll spread the word around the office.

No idea, I'm not even sure lots of votes are any guarantee it will get published, but I figure maybe I can get their attention then.

Yeah you can thank Xenowar for about half of the gameplay shots there, he provided the demos for me. He's in the credits, but since it's a minute and a half trailer, I made the credits pretty brief.

After my stumbling launch from last week, I finally have a trailer to go with the announcer pack I've submitted to Valve for DOTA 2. Check it out here!

 

 

 

For everyone who voted for this without seeing the trailer, thanks. For everyone else, GO VOTE FOR IT ON STEAM RIGHT NOW. Here's the link below:

 

VOTE RIGHT NOW OMG

 

1920x1080 x264 MKV (101MB) Download

 

Don't just vote yourself, try to get friends, relatives, pets, to vote for this pack. I want to see Jacksonian democracy in action here. I'm tempted to hold the next Freeman's Mind episode hostage until this gets at least 10k votes on Steam (I won't though).

 

For everyone who wants more information than just the preview trailer, here are some highlights:

-Normal lines for every standard situation in the game

-MANY alternate lines for most events in the game (attacking, destroying, denying enemy towers / barracks, etc.)

-Database configured so that you won't be spammed with the same alternate lines every game, it's spaced out a lot so it will likely take many games to hear them all.

 

What this pack does NOT have (yet):

-Lines for specific items bought

-Lines for specific heroes selected

-Even more alternate lines

 

I would have added many more lines, but Valve put the cap for submission at 600 lines, so that's what I sent. If I can actually get this in the Steam store, I'll support it as long as people are interested. I'm also willing to change or add things based on player feedback, so it can keep growing even after it's released. You know what separates me from other announcers out there? I'M DESPERATE.

 

 

 

ADHD version: CLICK ON THE LINK AND VOTE FOR THIS ON STEAM!

 

 

 

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

The person helping on After Effects isn't coming through. I'm going to have to do a simpler version of the titles myself (I don't know AE). I should have the trailer out sometime today, but it's going to be several hours before I do.

The trailer is done except for some custom titles I'm waiting on from someone helping in After Effects. After I have those, I'll put it up.

Crap, I just saw one of the announcer packs in workshop had 5 stars and almost 9000 votes! Just how long is it gonna take for Valve to implement this pack? I didn't think this would interfere too much with the rest of Mr. Scott's content, but now you have to produce a trailer. I just hope you find time in between all this to work on ep 49... and relax of course we all need our sleep. Good luck with this announcer pack getting through I hope you complete it soon!

Yeah, unfortunately this is stalling Episode 49 some. Since there wasn't clear documentation on the procedure for this, I put this up prematurely, so now I'm scrambling to get a trailer together. I'm not half-assing this though, I want to make sure it's decent. I'm TRYING to get the trailer done by Friday (I was going for Thursday, but that's looking unrealistic), but these things can have unexpected delays. I'll make a new post on the site once the trailer is up.

VERY IMPORTANT

 

You have uploaded it into the wrong category! No one can find it in the workshop without knowing what they are looking for. You put it in other, but there is an "Announcer" subsection.

Could you tell me how to do that then? These are the options I saw when submitting:

 

 

I also checked "Ability", but that doesn't seem to be what I want. Also I know I must sound illiterate by this point, but I can't find the option to change the tags for the item on Steam.

It is of the UTMOST importance to upload either a trailer or just samples. SERIOUSLY. Some people have no idea what they'd be voting for. Choose lines that your fans would like but also choose lines that are funny by themselves.

 

It's good that the Freeman character can actually exist without the Half Life universe. So try choosing lines that would make any person laugh, not just the fans.

That's exactly what I'm going to do, I need more time though. I have an idea for a trailer I think everyone will like.

 

Speaking of which, if any of you are frequent DOTA players and could provide me with demos of games with times where certain events happen (I'll be making a list of stuff I'm looking for), go ahead and email me about it. You don't have to be an especially good player, just have been in a game where there was a lot of good action.

Hmm, I don't have a workshop item, but maybe it is similar to guides.

When I visit my guide I have visibility settings. Public, Private and Hidden.

 

 

Maybe there is something similar for Workshop submissions and you have it on Private.

Thanks a bunch man, I think I figured it out based on what you said. I'm not seeing a voting option, but there is a thumbs up option. Is that what people were referring to?

Yeah, I went to go vote for it, but with it not being accessible, I can't vote.

I don't know what the hell is going on. I tried setting all the settings for my profile to full public temporarily, but that message still came up, which means people can't vote. If anyone has ideas how to fix this, let me know.

 

I'm not sure if I can trust something from "Accused Farms".

 

0/10 fake account, would not buy.

Ugh, you can see how much sleep I've been getting. At least that's fixed now.

Oh okay, I was planning on making an official trailer for it, but haven't done that yet. There's nothing Valve needs to look at prior to that step?

Best I can tell. I really don't use Steam community stuff that much, so I'm not 100%. Really all there is to the link is the thumbnail and description, so you're not missing anything. The actual files go directly to Valve. The link is there mostly just as proof this is in the works. Also if somebody does know more about Steam Workshop, they can feel free to post advice.

The announcer pack for DOTA 2 that I mentioned earlier has been submitted! It contains over 600 lines, has lots of situational humor, and the highest recording quality I've produced to date. Here is proof of it:

 

Link to DOTA submission

 

I have NO IDEA what the next step is! I guess Valve will look it over and decide if it's acceptable or not, then I'll get further instructions from there. It wouldn't surprise me if they make me change the name from "Freeman's Mind Announcer Pack", but that shouldn't affect the lines.

 

Anyway, now that this is submitted, I'll be getting back to the videos and other things. More news coming this month!

 

EDIT:

I've been informed that this will need to be voted up a bunch for Valve to look at it. I don't expect people to do that without knowing more about it, but I'll make a proper media campaign for this later. Feel free to vote on it for now, but I'll have a lot more details later.

 

 

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

You're absolutely right about natural gas, it's probably our only hope for some sort of transition fuel on the scale we need it. The problem is the massive costs associated with transitioning over to it. We probably won't be serious about it until after peak oil, in which case it's too late to prevent major economic shockwaves that will hit.

 

Well this should have happened a long time ago, but the story of my life seems to be "better late than never." Here is the re-released version of Stranger In Need, the first and probably last video I'll do in Source Filmmaker. The original version of this video was just barely done in time for a deadline and I had to cut a few corners on it that I wanted to spend a little bit longer fixing. This version has the main fixes I wanted to have the first time around. It mainly consists of slightly improved animations, adding a few effects I meant to have the first time, a more polished sound mix, etc. This the closest thing I get to a "patch" for my videos. I promise I didn't go George Lucas on this though, all the changes are very subtle, you may not even notice the difference.

 

 

Blip.tv

 

Download (110MB H.264 MKV)

 

- - -

 

I was hoping to have more news for August, but it's looking like that's not going to happen. That just means there's more news and videos coming for September though!

I'm still busy with a lot of stuff, but a new interview has gone up if you're interested. This one is for the "Max and Teddy in the Morning at Night - Sometimes" show that broadcasts on a college radio station out of Cleveland. This interview almost didn't happen, since they had a technical problem and didn't confirm they could hear me before broadcasting live, so the first 10 minutes of this is them trying to troubleshoot their equipment while I listened helplessly. The first half of this are questions I've gotten a lot in other interviews, the bottom half has ones I haven't gotten before.

 

Link to show page

 

Direct link to mp3 of the interview

 

Try to find the spot in the interview where their supervisor walked in and started talking to them also while broadcasting live!

The legal issue has more or less resolved. I got the rights back to my videos and thus no longer have to press legal action against Machinima for numerous contract violations they committed. I might go into more details on this later, for now I'm just glad to not have to deal with them anymore.

I may have to research it more to see how it affects previous predictions I've read, but the article you link is predicting 11 million barrels production a day by 2020. The USA currently consumes about 19 million barrels a day right now. I find it kind of weird that we would export when we're still consuming more than we're producing, but it could lower foreign dependence. Based on our record so far, I really don't have much in substantial energy savings until we're past a tipping point, I see consumption globally just rising until then. Once it falls due to demand outstripping supply, and KEEPS falling (this happened once already , that's when I think you'll see global shockwaves.

 

The thing is for new discoveries like this in the USA, there are more old oil fields going dry and shutting down. Our rate of new oil discovery peaked back in the 60s. Shale oil will buy us time for sure, but I'm not sure how much it really affects the timeline for peak oil itself.

If someone accosts me, and I put my hand on my pistol holster, and they run away, that is a DGU. If someone breaks into my house, and hears me chamber a round in my shotgun, and runs away, that's a DGU, even though no bullets are fired and no one is injured.

 

Regarding the 2.5 and 1.5 million number, I did a search on google for "civilians guns defended criminals per year" and this was the second article that came up:

 

http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/the-self-defense-self-delusion/

 

The short version is they're saying the numbers don't really add up to the claims. Also there is this quote:

 

"the FBI’s Crime in the United States report for 1998 found that for every instance that a civilian used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 50 people lost their lives in handgun homicides."

 

That's coming from the FBI, so I would need to see some analysis showing that figure is wildly misleading. Granted, a substantial portion of those homicides are probably from existing criminals, of which a certain portion will get guns anyway, but the rest would be from accidental deaths or heat-of-the-moment homicides. 50:1 is a big number to drop to 1:1 or less.

 

Again, I'm not arguing against shotguns or most rifles; I think those combined with non-lethal self-defense measures would get you a long way towards the criminal deterrent argument.

1. Last Legs

2. Triage At Dawn

3. Valve Theme (Extended)

4. Hard Technology Rock

5. Nuclear Mission Jam

https://www.gunowners.org/sk0802htm.htm

 

It cites sources at the bottom. Kinda blows your assumption about handguns out of the water...

 

Not necessarily, I found this fact sheet also:

 

http://smartgunlaws.org/gun-deaths-and-injuries-statistics/

 

Problem is more data is needed. Here are some of the problems noted:

 

-Your source says about 1,500 criminals are killed by civilians with guns (they didn't cite what kind of guns, and which crimes either.)

-The source I found says in 2010, guns were used for about 11,000 homicides, but it doesn't say which kinds of guns, nor whether the homicides were committed by legally registered ones (as opposed to people who were already criminals).

-The source I found also cited that homicide rates are much higher in areas with higher levels of gun ownership, but it isn't stated as to how much.

 

I need apples-to-apples data comparisons to really change my mind on this, as opposed to "here's a bucket of apples"