Ross Scott

Here's some news on what's going on this month: APRIL FOOL'S DAY I seem to have disappointed more people than usual this year, and I admit, this might be the meanest AF joke I've done. Sorry about that, my intent wasn't to make people feel bad, this was just the only idea I was able to come up with in time. I had some other ideas, but they were more elaborate and I didn't think I'd be able to do them this year. I literally thought I wasn't going to have anything this year, which would have been a first. The fundraiser was a huge morale boost however, and after I finished the last FM episode, I had the Freeman Across The Universe idea and decided I had enough time to go through with it. To be clear, I'm not planning on making Freeman Across The Universe. It's not that I want to disappoint people, it's that I REALLY want to make the machinima movie idea I have. I have confidence the movie will be the best video I've ever made and top Freeman's Mind AND Civil Protection. It's still going to take a long time however, and it's just not feasible if I'm busy expanding FM to other games as well. Also I wasn't lying when I said I forgot what game that screenshot is from. I think it's from a zombie survival mod for Unreal Tournament 2003 or 2004, but I COULD NOT find it again, I tried. Whatever mod it was, it came out no later than September 2004 if anyone wants to try and find it. DOTA 2 VOICE PACK *** EDIT: Below is the original post I made on this, but you can call off the dogs. Since my pack was rejected, Valve has since updated their guidelines (which they KEEP CHANGING) so that mine is no longer applicable. I'll re-revise it to their current iteration and try again. This will likely take a few weeks. *** A few people have asked me what the status on this is. The answer is sadness and frustration. As stated before, Valve sent me an email months ago saying "the developers of "Dota 2" had to flag it as "incompatible", so it cannot be used within "Dota 2", yet the entry on the Steam Workshop is still pending. This is frustrating me to no end, because I can not get an answer WHY it is incompatible. They may be rejecting it based on the name, which is an easy fix, but it could be other mystery reasons also. I tried to follow the guidelines to the letter. The fact that they can't give me a REASON as to what's wrong with it I think is very unprofessional. Since then I have tried emailing [email protected] twice, [email protected] once, and made two separate posts in different DOTA 2 dev forums with NO REPLY. I honestly don't know what to do next. The only thought that comes to mind next is to resubmit the pack as the "Ross Scott Voice Pack" instead of the "Freeman's Mind" one (the pack doesn't contain overt Half-Life references). My guess is if I do that, I'll get another rejection notice, months from now, with NO REASON given again either. Frankly, I think this is bullshit. I spent months working on this, if someone actually did look this over, they could at least pick from some pre-selected reasons as to WHY it's not compatible (improper database format, audio quality, etc.). If Valve doesn't want my voice pack, I can live with that. But not even giving me a REASON so I know how to FIX it feels very dysfunctional and passive-aggressive from my perspective considering how much time and work I put into it. I feel like if they can't even give an honest reply why they reject a pack with thousands of votes, maybe they're not really ready to be operating the steam workshop for voice packs, or else they're understaffed. Since I've tried doing this cordially with no results, I'm thinking my next step is to gradually get more obnoxious about it. Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions how to contact SOMEONE at Valve about this, please let me know, or feel free to make noise about this to get their attention on my behalf. GORILLA GONG We have a BIG redesign coming to Gorilla Gong soon, it's going to add a bunch of new features, have a better layout, I'm really looking forward to it. I should have another post on that in a few days. MORE VIDEOS I plan to keep moving forward with more videos, but it may get held up a little bit as I have to do my taxes for two different countries, and the person who was going to send me the 500GB SSD says it broke in transit from Fed Ex, so I may end up having to get one myself afterall. Regardless, my plan is to get to a certain point in the game for Freeman's Mind (I think it's 2-3 episodes away), then do a small Game Dungeon spree afterwards, so I'll be alternating between those two series for the near future. I have some other things planned, but those are less definite at this time. REPLYING TO PEOPLE I am still WAY behind on replies, but I do still intend to reply to all emails. I kind of put that on hold so I could make the last Freeman's Mind episode and April Fool's Trailer. If I haven't replied to you yet, it's not me intentionally ignoring you. - - - ADHD version: Ross isn't making Freeman Across The Universe, he wants to make a badass movie instead, sorry. Valve isn't replying to Ross about the DOTA pack and it's kind of pissing him off. More videos coming! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

So anyone recognize all the games used in the video?

I showcased the best part of it too. No, but my screenshot's dated 9/30/04.

No, I almost included that one for the trailer actually Nah, though it does have a similar look.

Good news! The fundraiser ended up being so wildly successful, that I've decided to expand Freeman's Mind to EVERY first-person game made! Check out the trailer below for a small taste of what's in store: This is of course a large undertaking, so I've decided to cancel the full-length machinima movie I was working on so I have enough time to cover every first-person game made. Now I admit of being a little deceptive in this trailer in that it's at 1080p. As a result, a few shots have some framerate drop, but it's nothing too crazy. Freeman's Mind will still be at 720p for now as there's a BIG difference between capturing a 1080p clip at 180fps for 10 seconds v. 10 minutes. A difference of 60. BONUS! I did not cover all the games I wanted to in this trailer! One game was so obscure even I forgot the name of it! I have kept proof of its existence below: If you know what game this is, let me know in the comments! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Well it seemed too predictable. I actually meant to saying "plasma pack", then realized after the fact I should have said photon pack. Freeman has received head trauma.

I forgot to normalize the audio to this episode, so it's going to be too quiet. I'm going to nuke the original link soon and replace it, otherwise it will be identical.

(Downloadable copy will be up later) Here's the latest episode of Freeman's Mind, now in HD! This episode is about average, it has a lot of the hallway wandering Half-Life is known for, but is broken up with the action. I didn't remember which way to go when I played this again, and could have easily broken about 2-3 episode into 5-6 pointless ones if I recorded this the first time through. I would argue the game even steers you towards the wrong objective way too early, leaving you lost. While old school FPSs can have a lot going for them, I've never been a fan of maze-like level design that tries to trap you. Also for the time being, I'm discontinuing releasing new videos on blip.tv, but will continue to leave the old ones up there. The reason being is ever since Maker Studios bought them out (shortly after my joining blip), the performance of the site has kind of gone downhill for me, so for now, future episodes will just be coming out on Youtube. Thanks again to everyone who donated, you're the direct reason this episode is in HD right now. I actually didn't wait until any of the parts to arrive since I wanted to get it out ASAP and it absolutely was every bit of a pain in the ass to process as I anticipated on my system. The next episodes won't be released until I get the computer parts, but I can keep working on them in low definition and swap it out later. I'm still afraid to go to 1080, though I'm looking into possible options for that in the future. Also, as of the time of this posting, I THINK I have responded to everyone who has donated money, which has come to roughly ~850 people since the fundraiser started. I still have yet to respond to most other normal emails, but I'll get to them as soon as I can. More videos coming! In HD! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Ooh shit. Someone get to work on a proper Freeman's Mind: Black Mesa dub ASAP!! These are in high quality MP3s. If somebody REALLY wants the original WAVs, I can send them, though they were almost a GB then using maximum 7z compression.

Wow. It's been a week, but my brain is still adjusting to the new reality of what's happened. You guys not only sent more money than I was due to earn this year (without additional work), but this is easily the most money I've ever received at once in my life. Receiving this money has been like a weight being lifted, it should buy me all the time I need to get my life stabilized financially again. When I made the fundraiser video (which I was hesitant about doing in the first place), I thought the odds of getting enough money for the SSD were pretty good. The 12k figure I put on the funds raised thermometer was just a pipe dream. That was just me calculating how much I would need (with taxes) to supplement my own income so that I wouldn't need ANYTHING for a year, and could focus just on making videos. I never expected to GET that much. I thought MAYBE I'd hit the 1k mark. Some people have asked if I've been super happy and excited about this. I was initially, around the 1k mark. Since then, I've mostly been in shock as I've never had anything like this happen to me before. But since it has happened, I'll put it to use! This is the second-most thankful I've felt in my life (the first being when I accidentally had my carotid artery sliced open as a kid, was bleeding profusely and almost died), so, thanks! How I feel about all this FUNDRAISER OVER? There was never really an expiration on the fundraiser, but I will be disabling the counter showing how much has been raised in the near future. The reason being is that only counts how much money is in my Paypal account, so if I withdraw anything, you would see the number go back down, not showing how much has been raised since. I'm still ALWAYS happy for donations and the "prize" of any line you want voiced is still applicable, for both past and future donators. Also I have added a link to all the isolated voice tracks to Freeman's Mind so far (597MB) as a bonus. Also, due to popular demand, I've implemented some cryptocurrency donations as an option: // // // I honestly have NO IDEA where cryptocurrency is headed, but hey, I'll give it a shot if people want to send me some! As always, anyone who donated will receive a "thank you" email from me, although I need more time to catch up on email replies to everyone, the response I've received has been overwhelming, it's gong to take me a little longer to get through it all (also if you donate via cryptocurrency, I won't know who you are to thank unless you also email me). I've spent most of this past week focusing on Freeman's Mind. WHERE IS THE MONEY GOING? I've heard many stories before about people who win the lottery going broke after a few months because they spent it all. My brain is simply not wired that way. I've had enough financial stress over the past year that I'm going to make sure this money lasts as LONG AS POSSIBLE. I don't want to go on a shopping spree and be back where I was the next day. I want to make smart decisions and still be making videos decades from now. If you're curious, here's what I have planned: -Reserve cash to supplement food and rent: I want to make sure I'm always several months ahead for groceries and rent. This one thing reduces my stress more than anything else and is where the majority of the money will go. -Smaller purchases I could have used for months: Stuff like replacing my broken shoes, replacing a ripped pair of paints, replacing my partially-broken headphones, in short, stuff I would have bought a long time ago if I hadn't been economizing as much as possible. -Some money for long-term volunteers: This is money for a small number of people who have given me a tremendous amount of help with the site or videos over the years. -Computer parts: Maybe! Josh Phillips of LPC Gaming has offered to donate a 500GB SSD drive and some other viewers (thanks to Chris Cogdon, Joe McJoey, and CyDrake583) have offered to donate some parts as well. So while this fundraiser was originally for the SSD, you guys have me covered there as well! -Gorilla Gong: Besides making my videos, I want to improve the Gorilla Gong site, we have BIG plans for it, hoping to really make it explode with some of the features we have coming. I can't reveal everything now, but it's going to be awesome. -Re-opening t-shirt shop: This is a low priority, but I do want to make this happen. The t-shirt will likely relaunch sometime in the future at a lower price to buyers with less money going to me (like $1 a shirt), but many, many more designs to choose from. -Long term stocks investing and MAYBE some trading: Now before everyone panics, I'm going to pursue this very, very cautiously. I've wanted to learn more about stocks for a while now since I want to put my money where my mouth is regarding things like peak oil and the economy declining. Additionally, I know of a trader whose advice I respect, so I may dabble in this, but not without expert advice. In any event, I will not be risking a significant amount of income in this, I'm not much of a gambler. -More videos: Most of these don't actually COST anything (besides the food and rent part), but I have promised to complete Half-Life for FM this year, also you can expect a lot more Game Dungeon later on. For the long term, I hope to divert some funds later for making the full length machinima movie I've mentioned before. -Robot attack dogs: Some Japanese company is working on it. They're having bugs in the AI where the dog doesn't discriminate against the owner and got set back by some casualties. So, while my plans are pretty conservative and not as entertaining as a kickstarter scandal, they should lead to more videos in the long haul. MISC STUFF: On thankfulness + guilt: I'm amazed how many people feel bad because they ONLY donated a small amount. Guys, I can get a leg of chicken + thigh meat from the deli for about $1.50 here. It ALL counts to me. Also, if you can't afford to donate and feel guilty about it, don't. It's not like you OWE me the money, I'm happy to have you as fans. As long as I can stay afloat one way or another, mission accomplished. On SrcDemo2: Many people informed me of this piece of software and certainly threw me a curve ball regarding motion blur. Now that I've had time to test it, my conclusion is it WILL cut down on the sizes needed some due to .PNG compression. However, I will probably continue using my motion blur technique as SrcDemo2's requires a MUCH higher framerate to approximate the quality of mine, so the load on the CPU doesn't make it very practical. On RAID 0: While two fast drives in RAID 0 might handle most of what I need in terms of capturing, since I'm being donated a SSD, I plan to stick with my original plan, plus I was leaning towards that anyway since SSDs beat out RAID 0 in noise levels any day. On Freeman's Mind: I've completed the dialogue for the next episode, just waiting on some help with sound effects. I won't be waiting for the SSD to arrive for THIS episode, so I'm going to clear up a ton of space to record this episode in HD. In any event, I'm working to get the next episode out ASAP. - - - ADHD version: You guys have sent Ross a lot of money! This has changed Ross's outlook on life, thank you! New Freeman's Mind episode coming ASAP! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Not enough Kind of like the scene in Speed where they get everyone off the bus and it detonates, but they don't have Dennis Hopper yet. I feel a bit overwhelmed, but have a more positive outlook than I've had in over a year. As for a movie, the one I plan on making I think will surprise people, in terms of writing and direction it's going to be an order of magnitude above anything else I've done before. Yeah I almost thought of mentioning maybe Assassin's Creed will do one in the video. That's fantastic, from the look of the teaser trailer it could be great. The video definitely has the right vibe! Honestly, just about any game I buy, I also get an offline crack for it (unless it's meant to be multiplayer). I think it's bullshit that a game company dictates when you can play the game you paid for.

Each episode is basically like making a small mod. Well when I signed up with Machinima, there weren't really other options. Hell, until 2013, when Valve officially made a statement, there were NO copyright protections for having content up and there have been plenty of copyright witch hunts since then. Nowadays it's much less of a worry for the stuff I do, and yeah, I don't exactly have a burning desire to hook up with another corporation. From a fan from 2010: " I e-mailed you a while ago concerning a problem with the demo playback issue with the Steam version of Half-Life: Source, well we found a fix for it, and if you fancy using the Steam version over the emulator, here it is. It turns out the "demoheader.tmp" file is totally missing from the game files. What I did was, having Half-Life Deathmatch: Source installed, copied "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\\half-life deathmatch source\hl1mp\demoheader.tmp" over to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\\half-life source\hl1 and C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\\half-life source\hl2 You won't be able to play older demos, but new ones should work. I've e-mailed this to Valve, but I doubt they'll apply an update to fix this any time soon " I have them all, I'll release them in the near future. Great price, but one step at a time, I consider this money "fuel" for the whole year. Although not having to pay rent might even itself out pretty fast. Maybe he watched the short version. I don't know, I literally haven't played past the point I'm at in many years. I might consider stuff like this in the future, but for now I may as well finish HL first. Not necessarily, but I would have to figure out how to do something else.

I think that would only be true if the GPU couldn't keep up with the rate they were being recorded at, which isn't the case. So if the GPU is rendering at sub-64 fps, then yeah, the GPU is the bottleneck. Otherwise it doesn't "remove" it so much as it combines it all in one process. Here's how I see it: Step 1: Rendering the frames (this will cause things to be in slow motion, but in every recording I've ever done, this is ALWAYS faster than RECORDING the frames. You can tell by noticing the speedup when you bring up the console during recording, which halts recording) Step 2: Recording the frames (regular HL2 takes up a LOT of space doing this, that's where the hard drive bottleneck came in using my method. SrcDemo2 keeps this in memory, then Step 3: Process the motion blur, then record it to disk. Srcdemo2 does the motion blur processing on the frames right in memeory, recording to the drive at a fraction of the rate that my 180fps method does. I believe the motion blur processing is a single-threaded CPU-dependent process. Since it does the blur right there, like you said, this puts the bottleneck on the CPU instead of the GPU. You are right in that if the GPU can't stay ahead of the number of frames needed to process by the CPU, then BOTH become the bottleneck, but in this case, as long as the GPU can render 64 frames faster than it takes to condense 64 frames into one for motion blur, the CPU is still the bottleneck. Tell you what, I'll do a test later to get some hard data. I'll do one at higher quality settings (SGSSAA always takes a bite out of speed), but make sure it's still rendering ABOVE 64fps average (when not recording), then another one where I minimize EVERYTHING and see if there's any time difference between the two. If there is, I'm missing something, if not, it's as I said above.

Well I just tested it myself, it came to 8 minutes 15 seconds on my system. I may try the others later. I don't get it, that's much longer than my time, but your CPU should be a little faster than mine. Vsync was off and srcdemo2 was operating? This COULD be limiting things actually. I remember using this as a backup card when my 8800 GTS died and man, it ran some things extremely slow.

Yeah for the record, this is a totally vanilla copy of HL2 I was using, I only installed it again about a week ago.

Well here's the test to anyone who's interested: 1. Get SrcDemo2 working, and point it to an empty directory inside your Half-Life 2 folder. I'm using "blurtest" 2. Download demos I made here and add them to your HL2 directory. 3. Set your video settings to 1280x720 and turn off vsync. I don't THINK the other in-game video settings matter because the CPU will be the bottleneck. To be safe however, I suggest putting all the settings to the default. I would turn off AA and "motion blur" especially. 4. Have your settings for srcdemo2 match mine exactly (besides picking your own directories): Yes, I really want the framerate that high 5. Click "activate" then launch HL2 (don't forget to use an EMPTY subdirectory) 6. Type the following: host_framerate 1920 startmovie blurtest\nameofmovie playdemo short 7. After the demo is over, type "endmovie" (no quotes) 8. Go to the directory where you told scrdemo2 to output the image sequence. Look at the properties of the time the first frame was created and the last frame and calculate the difference. This is how long it took to process the demo. 8. Post your time and CPU specs here or else email me. Doing this may take your computer hostage and alt-tabbing will screw it up. This may NOT occur in windowed mode however, not certain. If you feel ambitious you can provide additional benchmarks: 1. Try out the "long" demo (about a minute in length realtime) 2. Try the same demos at 1920x1080 resolution instead. Thanks a bunch to anyone who tries this.

Hey everyone, I wanted to see if people were willing to help me do some benchmark tests. As it's been mentioned since my last video, the program "srcdemo2" is a game changer in terms of motion blur. It has pros and cons compared to my method, but unloads a lot of the work onto the CPU instead of the hard drive. If you're interested in helping me out, here's what you need: 1. srcdemo2 installed (requires Java + Dokan library) 2. A faster CPU than mine (Phenom II X4 955) 3. A copy of Half-Life 2 4. Ability to follow directions (if you have any experience recording demos or using console commands on the source engine, that's a big plus). Anyway, give me a reply here and I can provide some instructions later. If you can test out srcdemo2 and get it working yourself, that will save a lot of time.

Sure, I'll take those, I've been meaning to set up a wallet soon for that (and accept bitcoin donations). Another user contacted me about Dogecoin already. It's definitely slower than realtime, also single-threaded. Actually what your describing is what srcdemo2 does, although their method is more primitive than mine, but it DOES remove the load on the hard drive and put it on the CPU instead. I'm still experimenting with that. Also the speed may be not much of an issue as Source will wait on rendering the next frame until the first one is recorded, so it will wait on something external to process it if coded right, so no lost frames. Also the avisynth method I'm using is CPU based, doesn't touch the GPU. Check out srcdemo2, it's open source, maybe you can take something from it and combine it with my avisynth method for the best of both worlds. Yes, but sometimes I make stealth splices of footage when I screw up one section, then continue elsewhere (EP54 had a LOT of those). These are imperceptible and not the level loads that you see. It really would be a bit of a small nightmare trying to recreate it, sorry. Plus I use an emulator for HL Source since 1. I HATE auto updates that break things and 2. The updated Steam copy will flat out crash when trying to playback ANY demos. I don't mind sharing the emulation files and demos I have on hand, but again, it's nothing but agony ahead. Thanks a bunch, this is definitely going into "long-term Ross using money wisely to get sustained for life" fund. I actually own about a dozen souls from years back, I set up a booth with a friend where we bought people's souls in exchange for candy. I still have the contracts somewhere. No, I'll take either of those! I definitely have enough money for parts now, but the excess is going towards making sure I permantly stay afloat financially. Prior to now I've been eating into my savings to the point where it's basically exhausted. I AM earning more money over time, but it's been slow, so the additional funds offset all that. Besides developing my channel, which is slowly growing, I'm working on multiple projects that stand a chance of earning more income over time, just not much at the moment. This influx of income buys me a lot of time to stabilize everything. Additionally, I'm doing research into stocks (don't panic, I'm approaching this VERY slowly and I'm not a gambling person) that will likely pan out over time. That's on the "to do" list for sure. All I can say is that's going to happen AFTER Gorilla Gong gets some major upgrades. The guy helping me with that is kind of overworked. Guys, this is nothing, NOTHING compared to Civil Protection. Yes, but there is a waiting period (same with reply emails).

Well the first one is just SSD v. SSD, the other ones are single hard drive v. multiple drives, and the last one is only v. 40/80GB SSDs (SSDs tend to scale in performance along with size, so a 256GB will outdo almost all 128GB, and a 512GB will outperform most 256GB ones). I would like to see more apples to apples comparisons if you find any. I might not be able to find the data I'm looking for, but maybe I could do it manually if anyone's done a "worn down" SSD v. some of the raid 0 HDD benchmarks you posted. I will admit, I still have the perception of SSDs being less stable than hard drives, even in RAID 0. While one bad disk can compromise the array, your odds of grabbing data off it on the way down are much higher compared to a SSD where it's good one day, dead the next. This is more or less guaranteed under most scenarios. I'm mostly still in shock, I've never received this sum of money at once before, my brain doesn't have a lot of reference. That and I'm going to be scrambling to catch up with everything over the next few days, so getting an email reply might take longer than I anticipated, though I promise they're coming.

He's getting pretty low where he is in the game currently. It balances out, most enemies take less shots to kill, but I don't smash open every crate the way you do in HL normally.

It's hard for my brain to get around this concept, I was really on the fence about doing this video, the resolution was a bit of a smokescreen to see if I could get more income (though I meant everything I said in it). The reason I have reservations about this is the way I see it, people watch videos are FANS, they can always just go elsewhere and stop watching. Asking them for money feels like it cheapens the whole experience, when good will from people is the main thing I Want to preserve. Besides, I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but I plan to get a LOT of mileage out of this money. I think if I'm smart about it, I can get myself to a position where I never need money again. Hey, if you're a donator, just email me and I'll record it. I can at LEAST do that much looks pretty subdued to me. Tests of a rocket flying near someone or a rapid moving object can be some of the best (I almost had the "slicer" from HL1 for fundraiser video). No, that's against their policies. Plus even if it wasn't, I would feel more conflicted about that as I would be crowding out smaller people on their network. At least with this video, it's people coming straight to my channel.