Video Editing Hell - Linux to the Rescue!

I'm the proud owner of the oldest and crappiest computers here at Frictional Games. This is very unfortunate, to say the least, considering I'm the one usually recording videos of our work, editing and then publishing it. For the Penumbra games it worked pretty OK, for Amnesia it works surprisingly well to record videos, probably thanks to a much more polished and optimized game engine. But as online videos increase in quality it puts more strain on my poor computers and I bet that "Security Update" is a synonym for "Force User To Upgrade Computer", which really does not help at all.

I record videos on my PC using Fraps and CamStudio, the former for doing full screen capture of in-game scenes and the latter for partial screen recordings of the editors. These programs save in specific formats that I have to convert into other formats in order to import the videos into the editing software. I have not been really happy with the software that I have used for these conversions, VirtualDub, while it works it has problems using many of the codecs that I have installed, often resulting in error screens. My first step on this "Improve The Video Editing Workflow With Out Spending Any Cash On Software Or Hardware"-journey ("It vew wosaco soh"-reescha as the Swedish Chef would say) was therefore to find a new converting tool, should be the easiest thing to find in the world I thought. Hell no!

Video converters seems to be a typical piece of software that encourages it creators to add a lot of advertisements in them or to limit them a lot for the "free" part. Those that are truly free tend to be a bit too basic, while I'm happy to not have to tweak a lot of settings there is some essentials configurations you want to be able to control. It think I tried 4-5 different "free" converters until I finally found MediaCoder. MediaCoder is quite nice once you get past two obstacles. The first is that the homepage and download site is filled with advertisements, placed so that it is difficult to know if you are clicking on an advertisement or the actual link. This continues on with a lot of advertisement in the software itself, it gives a bit of a bad impression because you get worried that the software might be filled with spyware and the alike! But as far as I know it is not :) The other obstacle is that it is very detailed with settings and configurations for all the codecs. However, it has a nice setup wizard which smooths it all out a bit and once you have configured a codec the way you want you do not have to do it again.

I continued my "It vew wosaco soh"-reescha by looking into video editor options.

For editing I have been using good old iMove running on my super fast 1.4 Ghz PowerPC Mac. iMovie is simple and quite enough for doing our type of demonstration videos (infact all trailers for the Penumbra games made by us were created using iMovie). But as YouTube allows for larger and larger resolutions these days, the videos have been more and more time consuming to make, not to mention painfully slow on the interface when everything lags around, the computer struggling to render the previews in real time. The export of the final videos also take quite some time on that old Mac, when it was created there were no such fancy things has h.264 codecs.

This really led me to start looking into some options for video editing on my PC, a real monster machine powered by an AMD Athlon 2.2 Ghz (*sniff* Yes, I know, it's not really a monster at all). I searched long and hard to find some suitable free software, something that was not very complicated, yet feature rich enough to do the type of editing we have in our videos. I finally found VideoSpin by Pinnacle, which at first seemed to be pretty nice, but while trying to use it to edit our next video, it was clear it was way to simplistic. Of course there is Movie Maker, but that really didn't cut it either, so I searched long and hard but could not really find anything usable for Windows. But, for Linux there were 5 options that seemed very promising. I figured why not try some Linux editing, I do have Ubuntu installed too, so it would be easy to test some software.

I downloaded Kino, PiTiVi, kdenlive, Open Movie Editor and Cinelerra-cv (maybe LiVES too). Kino and PiTiVi was very rudimentary, Kino the better. Open Movie Editor was almost right but, I'm almost ashamed for it, it wasn't a very visually appealing interface. Cinelerra was promising, but the interface a tad to cluttered, not very pretty and for our editing needs too complicated. I was starting to get a bit worried, kdenlive was low on my list because it looked to be as simple as Kino and PiTiVi, but kdenlive really shined! It's about the same level as iMovie, a bit more functions and a killer with the amount of supported codecs (not a unique feature, but well implemented). I'm not sure if it was due to running kdenlive on the latest Ubuntu release or if it is a common problem, but it took a bit of tinkering to get all the codecs to work properly. I'm guessing the latest Ubuntu release as it has caused quite a bit of problems for our own Penumbra games.

I've been working with the software (converter & editor) during the day and after a lot of baby steps of testing I'm starting to get quite comfortable with them both. To summarise, the "It vew wosaco soh"-reescha was quite successful, it takes a while to get used to a new program but this setup is definitely an improvement over the old. At least it buys this dying computer of mine a bit more time until the day of doom. Our next YouTube video will also be in HD, making it our first contribution to the bandwidth monster.

What are your suggestions for good video editing tools for Linux / Windows?

Why Horror Games Suck!

Inspired by Ron Gilbert's article "Why adventure games suck" I decided to do my own list. To be fair I do not think that all horror games suck (in fact some are really good!), but there are some common problems that pretty much all the games have. These issues hold horror games back from using the medium's full potential and I am convinced that games can be a lot more scary and engaging than what we have seen so far.

I also want to point out that the Penumbra games all have their share of flaws from the stuff below and are by no means exceptions from the rule. However, it is always a start to notice what kind of flaws that exist, so that one can work upon fixing them. It is our goal that our upcoming game Amnesia will minimize on these sucky aspects! Now that I have lined up the mistakes, it would be quite stupid to step into them.


Control is taken away when things get scary
"The protagonist enters a seemingly empty room, starts looking around when suddenly a strange sound is heard from outside. Something is about to enter and it's time to hide. At this point the game removes the player's control and a cut-scene is started showing how the protagonist hides and just barely manages to remain unseen by the approaching monster."

This is a very common situation and I have seen it in just about every horror game that I have played. Just about when things are about to get really scary, the player's control is taken away. Why does this keep happening in games? It's been over 10 years since Half-Life skipped having cut-scenes and it seem rational that all horror games should be using this approach by now.
I think the major reason for still using cut-scenes like this is because a certain scenes requires "special moves" (like hiding) from the protagonist and/or will lead to a strange situation if the player does play along (tries to kill the approaching monster or similar). This does not mean that the cut-scenes are needed though and scenes can be rewritten or game mechanics can be changed to make it work. It is also possible to allow players to do really stupid decisions as long as they has been given a fairly good hint on what a good action would be. If some of the players insist on walking up to the man seen butchering his victims then just put them up against him in an unwinnable fight. Next time they should be a lot more careful...
Another reason for designers to add cut-scenes is because they do not want the player to miss something. In horror games this could mean a shadow briefly seen in the distance or similar. Often this is very sloppy design and some simple changes can make the shadow almost impossible to miss. Let's not forget that it is an interactive medium either and it is often trivial to add some line-of sight check and activate the shadow when the player is actually looking in that direction. Sure, a small percentage of the players might miss it, but that is something one has to live with when working in an interactive medium.
If one needs to have a cut-scenes in a horror game, then make sure not to have it during the actual horror segments. Doing that is like having Mario enter a cut scene when he is about to jump from one platform to another.


Combat is designed to be fun
Many horror games are fairly combat oriented and because of this a great deal of design time is spent making sure that combat is fun. If players will spend a lot of time killing stuff, is it not reasonable to make the combat fun? Unless the goal is not to make a really scary horror game then the answer to this is "NO".
If fighting the monster is the best part of the game, then this what players will want to do. In horror games, where enemies almost always are the main mechanics for making the player scared, this approach is counterproductive. Players are supposed to fear the monsters, but if killing them is what makes the game worth playing then enemies are bound to be a lot less scary. If one gains positive feedback whenever an enemy is encountered then approaching sounds might give a reactions like: "Oh, that might be an enemy! Goodie!". This is of course the completely opposite of what a horror games strives for.
But if combat is not "fun", then will it not be boring, meaning that the game will be boring too? I would like to answer this with a loud "NO" this time too. First of all, combat can be "unfun" for many different reasons and some reasons are better than others. For example, the combat still needs to be pretty fair, responsive and not feel too frustrating. A good way to make the combat feel unfun is by resources, an example being System Shock 2 where ammo is very sparse and weapons will degrade (and eventually break) whenever used. In Silent Hill (the older titles anyways) combat use responsive controls but aiming can be imprecise and a bit clumsy, making it feel more like a last resort than the basis of fun in the game.
These examples have their own flaws, but point at least in the right direction. Also, with all the problems that combat give rise to, one might consider skipping it altogether. Even though it might be hard to believe, violence is not the only way to drive gameplay...


Overusing the same enemy
Usually a monster in a horror game has some kind of spooky encounter at which they are quite frightening, but then an hour into gameplay, they have become cannon fodder. For some reason, designers seem to think that all hope is lost after this encounter and that they might as well scatter thousands of copies into the rest of the game. Or perhaps they think that if it was scary once it will be scary every other time too (embarrassingly, I am guilty of this myself in the past). Horror is tightly connected to the unknown and if something becomes too familiar then the impact that it first had will be lost. This means that for an enemy to remain scary, the way it is presented needs to vary and the player can not be exposed to it too much. Players will eventually learn patterns, what to expect and the moment this happen, pretty much all scariness connected to the enemy is lost.
I think the main reason that this flaw is present in just about every horror game is because content is so expensive and time consuming to make. Players need to have something to do when playing and the easiest way to do this is to scatter enemies around the levels. This is far from good horror design though and just leads to repetitive and predictable gameplay instead a truly frightening and engaging experience.


The monster is always shown
A well known fact in horror is that the audience's own imagination is the greatest asset. It allows the horror to be more vague and people to project their own fears into the experience. Because of this, many books and movies keep the monster hidden in darkness, not revealing its true form until the very end or not at all.
In games it is quite different. Sure, before a monster is shown there can be shadows and strange sounds, but as soon as it comes into play it's there in full high-poly detail (preferably with lots of slime and/or gore). It seems like horror games are way too anxious to show of the monsters and there are extremely few games that uses an unseen enemy as a gameplay device (and not just some foreboding ambient piece). I suggest that games should add proper gameplay mechanics to an unseen monster and if possible even refrain from showing it at all!
Some might wonder how an enemy that is not seen can affect gameplay, if it can hurt the player, surely it must be visible? I do not think this is needed and in Penumbra: Black Plague we had an enemy that was entirely sound based and never shown in the game. It was far from perfect and had a plenty of flaws but it is at least a step in the right direction. If horror is to reach new levels in games, the fear of the unknown must be used to the fullest!


The horror is slapped on as a side thing
The final reason why horror games suck sort of tie in to all of the above. For some reason it almost always seems like the horror is an afterthought in games. First the game main gameplay design is made (third person shooting, Myst-like puzzle adventure, etc) and then some kind of horror theme is slapped on top. Surely this is not the way horror games are designed, but to design the gameplay mechanics without considering the horror aspect seem fairly common. FEAR is the dictionary example of this where the horror elements are clearly separated from the main gameplay in a very obvious way. The player goes through a section of John-Woo-like shootouts and then after that is a horror section where a scary girl shows up or similar. It soon obvious that these scary sections never pose any threat to the player and the horror factor is greatly decreased. The combat also does nothing to increase the horror, instead it just lessen it by making the player feel everything but vulnerable as wave after wave of enemies are mowed down.
This divide in design is present in pretty much all games though and a lot of the gameplay is designed in isolation from the horror elements (as mentioned above, the most common thing is the entire combat system). I think this problem is fairly common in other games genres too. Instead of trying to combine the gameplay with the story told and feeling that are to be evoked, they are designed separately and then forced together. If games are to reach new heights in terms of telling stories and being emotional than this needs to be improved upon. One can not see the game as a story part and a gameplay part, but have to realize that they both need to support each other.

Until this happens in horror games (and other genres too) they will continue to suck*.

*or at least not be as good as they could :)

Horror Tip: Korsakovia

Name: Korsakovia
Type: Game (Half Life 2 Mod)
Link: Mod DB page (info + download)
Masterminded by the same guy that made Dear Esther is a highly experimental horror game about a man with Korsakov's syndrome. Its tag line goes:

"The paramedics report that they were unable to find his eyes. We think he may have eaten them."

If you like me find that awfully intriguing then go on and play the game now and read the rest of the post later!

I have put up posting a horror tip for Korsakovia for quite a while because of the simple reason that I have not been able to complete it! I have still not managed to do so, but thought it was time to make a post about it anyway. My inability to complete it highlights the strength and weakness of the game quite well: First, the game is quite demanding on your eyes and ears with a dark environments and extremely unnverving sounds at times. Secondly, the game is frustrating as hell as it is hard to orient oneself in the similarly looking environments and some gameplay parts are very unforgiving.

As said above, and different compared to Dear Esthter, Korsakovia has actual gameplay elements consisting on bashing (or avoiding) monster and some annoying first person platforming. Especially the platforming feels quite unfair and is awefully frustrating to the point where the otherwise excellently built-up atomsphere goes away. I feel that the game would have been a lot better without any of this gameplay and experiencing this makes the game extra interesting to play. It clearly shows how the player's attention diverts from being immersed to focusing on the game's mechanics when gameplay gets too frustrating.

What really shines in Korsakovia (and made me play it as long as I did!) is the haunting atomosphere and the script consisting of the protagonist talking to his doctor who may or may not be real. The game is quite abstract and there are no clear goals or motivations, yet it managed to captivate me and want me to play more. This also makes the game an excellent experiement in player motivation, as it differs quite a bit from other games. Finally, as noted above, the game is quite hard on the senses and is far from a fun experience, proving the point that games do not have to be "fun" to be engaging. Note that these "brain-fuck"parts of the game where not what eventually made me stop playing; it was the combination of that and the bad gameplay. Had the gameplay been more streamlined and solid, I am sure I would have played to the end.

In conclusion, Korsakovia is very interesting game from a design perspective and I urge you all to play it as long as you can stand it. However, from a gameplay experience stand-point I think it fails, mainly becuause of some unfair and extremly frustrating sections.

To play it Half Life 2 - Ep 2 is needed (I do not think the normal hl2 works). Download the zip and extract to "steamapps\SourceMods". Then start the game through steam.

Mandelbulb comes to Mac!

Finally, to end our fractal-odyssey, the MathFuncRenderer has come to Mac!

Get it here:
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/2009/11/fractional-fun.html

As with the Linux version, Edward Rudd is that man behind the port.

If you like it, please spread the word!

Important note:
Because of some strangeness with Nvidia osx drivers, the program is unusable on some Nvidia cards. 7300 GT under Leopard under leopard is know to have this problem, and there might be more.

Mandelbulb explorable in Linux

A Linux version of the MathFuncRenderer has now been built and uploaded!
All this has been possible because of our Edward Rudd who makes all porting for Frictional Games.

Download link and stuff in this post (scroll to end):
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/2009/11/fractional-fun.html

If you like it, please spread the word :)

Mac version is also in the works and will come very soon!

For those wondering where all development and horror related post are, then I promise there will be some of that very soon! Got plenty of horror tips to share and more :)

Cold, Clothing and Fatality Risk

In just a few weeks, we will set out from sunny (currently 30 degree plus) Melbourne to Boston where there is, right now, sunny but that hasn't stopped single digit temperatures emerging. Of course, it is November and give it another few weeks and Boston will be colder than we have ever experienced. Our strategy up until this point had been to avoid all that but that point is now passed.

What this means, of course, is that neither one of us has ever muttered to our children, "don't go out like that, you'll catch your death of cold." Indeed, we were never told that by our parents either. What we are more likely to do is to cake our children in protective elements during much of the year when the sun exists. In Australia, sun cancer is such a real fear that we have thrown everything at it including what I suspect is a widespread Vitamin D deficiency that future medical researchers will enjoy pouring over. We don't want anyone going out like that and catching their death of sun.

To see the depth of the problem, this year, my now 11 year old daughter decided she liked shorts and relented to wearing anything else for just a couple of weeks of the deepest winter this year. Suffice it to say, this may not cut it in Boston. Now you might have though that one reason for this is that she would catch her death of cold. But according to the almost five minutes of research I conducted assessing the risk of fatality from cold exposure with inappropriate clothing, your risk of the common cold doesn't really increase although there might be an issue with the flu. Thanks to widespread media coverage of a shortage of swine flu vaccines in the US, we all got ourselves the 'family pack' vaccination just last week. So the flu risk seems minimal although my daughter did possibly contract a side-effect, throwing up going home from school and literally taking a tram out of commission. Talk about side effects with collateral damage!

There is, of course, a risk of being cold if you don't have appropriate clothing. Now a key parental role is to teach your children things like 'how to dress?' This is like other parental roles I wasn't aware of until alerted to them. For instance, when our daughter was one year old, we stupidly picked up a parenting manual in a bookstore and learned that she should be able to do 'pat a cake.' We asked her to do this and she couldn't. Later it transpired that it would have helped had we known how to pat cakes.

Which brings me to the issue that I, with my caking patting wisdom am forecasting, that we can't teach our children to dress because we don't know how to dress. I'm the only one of us who has lived outside of Australia and that was four years in Palo Alto. And while during my first winter there in 1990, I suffered greatly because of the sheer cold, I did learn to deal with it after purchasing my first 'coat' which was a garment you put on outside but not in. Who would have thought it? Apparently, all over the world, people are changing their clothes as they change their exposure to walls and roofs. How do they live?

So now I am going to turn to you, who have made it this far reading about my lack of knowledge of basic weather management, to suggest the items that we need to purchase in order to protect our children. Bear in mind that (a) we don't have this stuff; (b) will have to purchase at least one set of them within a day of arriving in Boston and (c) have no real idea of the terminology for things. Now another commenter suggested LL Bean as the font of all that is good in this regard except that they don't seem to exist within an hours drive of Boston (so that might be good for the extra sets that we will surely need). But what list should we take to like Macys, Target or something right on Day 1? Specifically, fill in the blank, "if you don't put on BLANK you will catch your death of cold!" Over to you.

Been there

Oh yes, fulfilling requests is hard and unrewarding; especially with regard to children's clothing. Here is Scott Adams on his attempt for perfection.