So you like Halloween, huh? You like using the silly spells in Team Fortress 2?
Well, so do I. But isn't Halloween supposed to be scary? Then what's with all this having a good time bullshit?
Listen, man. For your sake, I hope you don't do it,
But if you really want a scary time, drop TF2 for a bit and visit its deranged cousin over in the...
SOFTWARE SECTION.
SOURCE FILMMAKER [sp00ky music]
"Oh my Goooooood!"
This program haunts me in my dreams!
And I know it's trying to kill me!
But the amount of glitches I experienced while making "How it feels to play Engineer."
I'm telling you this shit's possessed!
Gather round all of you this Halloween,
I have a frightful story for you.
The story of the time I had to ADD THE WRANGLER TO A SOURCE FILMMAKER SCENE
*scream*
My story starts with a prayer.
Please Valve, please update Source Filmmaker so that it doesn't use a 2008 version of TF2!
Why do you curse me to manually animate things as simple as picking up Engineer buildings and using The Wrangler?
But they only responded with:
Dota, Dota, Counter-Strike.
I didn't understand.
So onwards I pressed to manually animate the Wrangler.
The Sentry shield is simple enough
it's its own model, but this god forsaken LASER
This laser has stolen so many hours of my life that I'll never get back!
"How?" you ask?
Listen to my tale of woe.
I began by importing the laser, but alas! It was PINK!
That's not right!
It needs to be red!
So I googled how to color it.
Turns out that it's controlled by what I like to call,
"Source Spaghetti."
But first a quick explanation. This is a ControlPoint.
It represents a point in space and can be used to move and rotate objects
Particles usually have very simple ControlPoints.
Medic's beam has two ControlPoints.
One for where the beam starts, and one for where it ends.
HOWEVER,
the Wrangler laser has this THIRD ControlPoint that controls its color?
*generic female scream, thunder*
And this is where the "Source Spaghetti" starts.
This control point's positional X, Y, and Z coordinates correspond to the laser's red, green, and blue values using a scale of negative 255
to positive 255, which necessitates the equation "X times 2 minus 255",
where X is the RGB value that you want.
What? You didn't get that?
THAT'S BECAUSE IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE!
Even if you don't get it, I got it.
However, no matter what I did with ControlPoint 2, the laser's color NEVER CHANGED!
*another scream, this time male*
"Well," I said, "this isn't my first rodeo. Surely, i can fix this in a jiffy."
But how wrong I was.
Firstly, I went into the particle editor to see if there was a color value in there.
Eureka! There was.
But no matter what you do to it and its surrounding values, nothing happens!
Then I wondered, "Just a moment
the laser is pink and, when a texture is missing in source,
the default replacement is pink and black. Maybe the particles texture is missing or broken."
So I asked all throughout town. If someone could please lend me their version of every file related to this laser.
I imported them into my directory and it was STILL PINK.
By then I was banging my head against my keyboard and finally decided that it's time to concede
and verify the integrity of the game cache.
*gasp*
Reinstall the whole program and deal with all the bugs that THAT causes.
BUT EVEN THEN IT WAS STILL PINK!!!!!!!!!!!!
At this point I couldn't help but think, "Ha! All this wasted time being a perfectionist and I could just use a different laser."
So I installed this custom laser from the workshop that is supposed to be a Star Wars blaster.
It's a model instead of a particle. So it took a while to customize it. It doesn't look great, but it works, right?
WRONG!
When the camera looks at the laser from certain angles it just
Disappe-he-hears!!!
Then I tried using this laser particle and I don't even remember what happened with this one
but I assure you it didnt work!
So we're back to this laser.
After brainstorming with other SFM villagers
I imported the laser into a different map and realized...
what the fuck?
Why is it blue on this map?
And that's when it hit me.
Every map has a different default point.
Where things load in when they have no other point of reference.
You can see here that Badwater's default point is some where
below red team's spawn
It has no rhyme or reason
The Wrangler laser has been loading in and using the default point on the map for its ControlPoint2 value
It's a different color on every map,
but it doesn't change no matter what I do,
so I figured "All right.
My program is successfully reading the ControlPoint2 value, but just not changing it!"
Alaxe, friend, can you please take my SFM project.
Move ControlPoint2 to make the laser red and then send it back to me?"
He promptly sent me this in response.
*unholy screams, distorted music, windows error sounds*
That's right, his computer couldn't even handle the project,
so he had to make a new project
that was just the laser on Badwater,
which I then had to import into my project,
which is its own scary unintuitive process!
But finally, here we are.
It works!
Despite reinstalling the program,
despite verifying the game's cache,
despite replacing the particle files outright.
My ControlPoint2 is just irreversibly broken
My theory?
There's a ghost in my machine,
but hey! At least it worked eventually, right?
But that's not the only thing I had to do manually. Once a sentry gun is placed,
it stops being a gameplay object and just becomes part of the scene. That means that I have to manually control its shooting,
which means manually adding each individual muzzle flash.
That's right,
I had to copy and paste like 50 sets of these muzzle flashes
and then manually tell the program "This muzzle flash occurs one twentieth of a second later,
and THIS muzzle flash occurs another twentieth of a second later,
ANDTHISMUZZLEFLASH
*repeat ad nauseum*
*repeat ad nauseum, evil, deep laugh*
*out of breath* ..and THIS muzzle flash occurs ANOTHER bwehbehbewh..
Then after doing that, I have to lock each particle to the barrels of the sentry gun
INDIVIDUALLY-Y-Y
Truly nothing comes for granted in this program.
You think that adding ÜberCharge would be a simple process?
But it isn't!
The default uber in SFM is broken, for some reason, and always flashes like it's about to end.
So you have to go download some cubemaps fixes
(Thank you so much SFM community...)
and put those in the right directory.
Looks good to me!
But!
What about the weapons? And the hats, huh? That's right,
you have to manually change every single model's material that you want to be ÜberCharged!
And sometimes it doesn't even wooork!
Not only is this a time-consuming process,
it's semi-permanent!
Since you're actually changing the files themselves,
you have to be super careful or else you'll be asking yourself later on.
WHY THE HELL IS THIS PYRO LIKE HALF ÜBERED HERE?!
See these buildings?
They're not actually in Source Filmmaker for some reason!
They're like ghost buildings or something!
I had to manually add replacement buildings myself.
Nothing comes for granted in this program.
But you want to get really scared this Halloween?
Imagine rendering a scene you've slaved over for hours and it comes out like this:
*slowed, distorted engie yells*
*DUNDUNDUN!*
If you ever want to get into SFM, my friend,
please remember the acronym A.B.A.F.
All
All Beards
All Beards Are
All Beards Are Fucked.
Something about the way these things are texture doesn't mix well with SFM.
Usually there's a fix for these beards on the workshop,
..but I-I guess none of people used the Grizzled Growth?
Anyway, at complete random,
the beard will become some crazy neon color.
aNd yOU wAnt tO kNoW sOmeTHing fUNnY?
It uses the same color as the Wrangler laser uses, via the Maps default point!
Isn't that funny?!?!?!!
*crying and cackling as fucked up*
So what was my solution?
HA!
Simple really,
if I render out the glitched frames individually,
one at a time,
MANUALLY!
The beard is fine.
Sounds simple. If not, time-consuming.
Let's see how many I had to do-
462 INDIVIDUALLY
RENDERED IMAGES JUST TO FIX THIS BEARD
IN ONE SCEEEEEENE?!
And sometimes it's not even consistent!
Here you think that the color is based on the beard's position?
But look at this shit! It's blue in this camera, but green in this camera!
*laugh of defeat*
Eventually, my friend, I could take no more
And I just asked the guy who fixed the all-father if he could fix the Grizzled Growth.
Which he did!
The moral of this scary beard story is:
Oh but friend, I've scary stories to spare.
Look at this scene. Simple, right?
Well,
this is what it USED TO LOOK LIIIKE!
These lights are Satan!
They have caused an issue in every video.
For the Spy video,
I spent a full 10 hour day trying to get rid of these lights, that would bleed through all the walls. After that day,
I knew not to ever try anything with these demon-possessed lights.
But in this scene,
I had to.
I used a program to remove literally every light from the map
and you won't believe it
*electricity crackling, Merasmus theme*
THESE LIGHTS ARE SATAN!!!
Eventually
a villager from the SFM Discord discovered that you just have to type
"ent_fire env_lightglow kill" in console
*Smol sp00ky laugh*
*Big sp00ky laugh*
WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!?!
I'm certain that a ghost has possessed my computer,
but it doesn't always make itself obvious.
Sometimes the glitches are small,
like the time that this blood decal's position didn't update when I played the video forward.
But it worked when I played the video backward.
*more distorted, backwards music*
And then sometimes when I render something, every other frame becomes a blue mess.
Definitely a ghost.
And half the time I import a custom map,
Source Filmmaker just breaks all its lighting!
(classic ghost stuff)
This one is fixable, but when even the guy making the tutorial says:
I can't say it makes me very hopeful.
Of course the program does make my life easier sometimes.
"Spline curves" are pretty good at automating some animations,
but other times they put the spirit of the devil into my characters.
[Text-To-Speech]
*bones cracking*
Oh my god!
Call the Exorcist!
*another fucking scream lazy calm down*
Look at this sentry.
I just want it to go from this, to this.
A 180 degree turn
It's simple,
but for some reason
the program thinks that the most efficient way to do this
is a freaking backflip!
Back you demon, get out of my sentry gun!
Thankfully the program has a built-in stress reliever:
whenever I find myself getting exhausted,
I just move the character's pelvis to the beat of whatever music I'm listening to for endless entertainment.
*boo doo ba boo*
*BEEM!*
Truly countless hours have gone into trying to fix every single little mistaken glitch in all of my videos.
But!
Since you've made it to the end of this video,
I think I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.
There's a mistake in the Engineer video and it will probably ruin your entire perception of it.
In this scene, where I build a mini sentry on this scout,
I DON'T HAVE THE GUNSLINGER EQUIPPED IN THE SFM ANIMATION!
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
Hey! It's me! I have a T-shirt now! You can find a link to it in the description.
I also now have a secondary channel (LazierPurple), so please subscribe to that as well.
The suffering in this video was made possible by [people who donated a big amount to pour lil' soul
who was suffering all the time doing this video
or i can't find the list of people so i can't do anything to it. Sorry :(]
You all turned this suffering into a gift.