bump because I finally got things working, see edited OP for link to watch!

fuck adobe products btw

After 8 months of on and off work, it's finally here.

This fragmovie covers the entire Main division of play across a whole season and postseason and as such it is nearly 13 minutes in length. RGL Main 6s Season 5 was an extremely competitive season and a blast to participate in, so I hope I've helped capture some of that competitiveness of play.

This is by far the most time I've ever spent on a single TF2 fragmovie and I truly appreciate the patience of all the players featured. I'd like to give special shoutouts to fanta_addiction for giving me a curated list of demos from FRESH INSTALLS: BLACK that they were originally going to make a FRESH INSTALLS team fragmovie out of for that season instead, as well as jayytee and je'mond for helping get the word out about the initial democall.

Overall, I think the movie has turned out excellent and I'm really excited to finally share this with everyone! There's a lot more I could say about the process and the development of this video but for now it's best I get to the point -

My PC beefed the the final render I had running overnight so I've had to restart that, but I'm still hoping to be able to bring it to everyone at 10 EST tonight, Thursday the 23rd.

ALRIGHT, 7 RENDER ATTEMPTS LATER, IT FINALLY WORKED!
I've set up a premiere at 2:30 EST today, the 24th you can watch it then or afterwards at this link: https://youtu.be/E2YOJBWlcco

P.S. This is in no way an "official" RGL video, just to make that clear.

Bumping this to get the word out that, barring any "act of god" level catastrophe, I'm putting the finishing touches on the fragmovie and will be premiering it on my YouTube channel in about 48 hours from the time of this post. I'll get a proper new thread up w/link once I make sure everything is in order with the render, titles, and other polish I'm adding.

https://youtu.be/0v3tv1PrCgQ
I always find myself coming back to this one, it's just so...comforting, in a way. I can't really explain why.

thespikedballofdoom is the most knowledgeable person I know about the technical side of making high quality TF2 fragmovies, mad respect to them for putting together this really comprehensive guide!

I've really benefitted from their work a lot when putting together my own stuff, super glad to see this knowledge is now out there in a concise, organized, and easily accessible form.

uh oh...

I think it's simplifying too much to say that one direction is *always* passive and one *always* aggressive since a lot of the aggression part of it depends on if the opposing team is actually gonna meet you there, which is usually a coin flip. If your team is struggling I'd consider getting more granular with your mid strategies.

e.g.:
"We're going left, we're going to take their crate aggressively and fight for it if they meet us, we play passive if they don't meet us"
OR
"We're going left, we're going to take their crate aggressively and fight for it if they meet us, if they don't meet us we'll high bomb our roamer, rotate back to the right and take a fight with them near our sewer."
etc.

Also worth considering, from a demoman POV: if their roamer fast rolls out a lot it makes aggressive left mids much harder since they can easily just land on their team's crate, deny your demo your pack, which gives their team a lot of control over that side. Obviously this is a good thing for your roamer to do often if you like playing right side passively since this one move denies a lot of potential aggression from the other team on that side early on.

It's really incredible how an otherwise innocuous image can carry so much pain in it lol

between that and the 1 in 1,000 spam kill this was the most memorable round of CS I've watched in quite a while, and a great match overall. Really happy that majors are back

(full context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbbSnXwFZbs )

Seems like you're leaning very heavily on having a competent admin available to run PUGs when people want to play - I'll definitely give this a shot at some point though

I visited Sydney when studying abroad and their public transport system blows everything in the US out of the water. I could walk 2 minutes from my apartment to the nearest train station, take a 20 minute train ride to downtown, and either walk or take a bus 1 mile to my school. Their bus system is still kinda shit honestly but it nevertheless made me upset that public transport is so awful here. Like, my city's bus system is on par with Sydney's and that's considered "good" lol. I geniunely don't think Americans who haven't visited a city like Sydney can even imagine a place where you don't actually need a car to get to 95% of places in a timely manner.

yea, rename the current version to something you'll remember and put the old version (the one linked above) in your maps folder. The game will just read whatever map file is called cp_snakewater_final1 as the version it runs when it plays the demo.

It was a reasonably good looking mobile game copy+paste of TF2.

I think the best way I can describe the quality is that they actually fixed the weird hand clipping on the Soldier's reload animation.

Seeking help from a Source engine particle whiz!

The problem: I'm attempting to use the cool PLDX explosion.pcf particle effect with lawena, but a specific element of the effect gets drawn over EVERYTHING - players, geometry, etc. for no good reason - here's a screenshot that makes it abundantly clear: https://imgur.com/a/cMFzDcR

I've been trying various methods of getting this thing to work properly all day, mostly by attempting to simply delete the offending element

-I tried editing the particle by launching TF2 with -tools, but it crashes when I try to save without editing the particle.
-I opened the particle in SFM and edited it, but something about that process makes the explosion particle simply not show up at all, instead of my desired outcome which is just removing the McDonalds-ass ember shit that gets in the way of everything.

I'm stumped - anyone have ideas on how to fix this?

I don't think this man missed a single scrim or match all season - extremely reliable attendance. Had a very low drop rate with my team overall. Takes responsibility when he makes mistakes and does his best to correct in the future. Takes the initiative to mix in the occasional Kritz play when he knows he can build enough to get kritz advantage on the opposing team, which is an excellent mixup. Smart and mature player.

In the two seasons I've played with Soala I've seen his gamesense improve a ton. He really thrives in a coordinated environment when you spot for his bombs/sacs and work with him to hit the enemy team from multiple directions during a push. Give him these things in your team and he will deliver - during one week this season I swear he had a 40-50% force/drop rate on his sacs, which is pretty absurd. Excellent mechanics, pretty reliable attendance, and very resistant to tilt.