Okay, fair enough.

I suppose I'll go with 720p. Just about to (re)start the first recording.
For the record, I'm going to try recording it at my monitors native 1920x1200 resolution as a .dem is Half-Life 2, and then render it directly to an AVI file.

For me I'm just happy if you do the LP. Of course my opinion is still that 720p is a good compromise. But if you really want to do 1080p it's up to you.
But the other guys arguments are valid in the sense that many probably wont get the LP since the file will be really big, and many don't have the rig to run clip's in full HD. And the game is kinda old, so it doesn't look that much better in HD.
But in the end I have flat-rate on my 100 Mb/s, and my PC is fairly new, so what ever you decide i will pick it up ^_^

And especially because that game is now a bit old and doesn't have real HD resolution, there is no need for 1080p, it's not Dragon age Origins or something that uses real HD, and like JonL said it's a waste of storage and bandwith, i think it could look decent even in smaller resolution, i always go for the size then for the resolution, but that's my opinion anyway!

Rescaling the movie afterwards has absolutely no benefit. You'll get a blurred result and you'll need to compress even more to get a decent file size, so the quality will be even worse.

If you really want to use that method, I think you should test it first with a 5 minute long movie so that you can judge the result.

Just choose the resolution you want the movie to be and play the game in that resolution. That's the best way to go.

And my opinion still stands. You should not use 1080p. It is simply a waste of storage on Archive.org, a waste of bandwidth usage for Archive.org AND for everyone that's going to download the movie.

For me it is also a matter of respect for the majority of viewers out there with computers that cannot play HD contents properly. But this is only my opinion.

My answer: ^_^

Okay, thanks for the input. I'll likely end up recording it in 1080p and producing a 1080p final file, before scaling it down to 720p and 480p. Sound good?

I agree with Paisan!

One thing, more than really large files, that you have to think about is that there for people to watch. If your computer's not up to par you cant eaven watch a 720p without desyncing sound and jittry picture, so 1080p for quite a few will not be a possibility in the world to watch.
Now i have no idea if there is anything to gain from that high resolution in HL2, may be it could be some reason for it when downscaleing the movie. But for my part it's no probs. I will pick it up even if in the end the file size will be 30 GB. But i will probably not archive the file, just watch it and then delete it.
You could do a 1080p, and then downscale it to 720p, and 480p, and upload those versions to. Then guys can chose what version they prefer, or maybe can run ^_^

Thanks for that Youtube video. Actually I'm kind of disappointed. :-/
Adding some concrete grain to old low-res textures does not look that good in my opinion and certainly does not justify me including this in the longplay.

I was expecting something like Black Mesa Source but I guess I was just daydreaming ;-)

I sent you a PM

I really think you should go with the highest possible resolution.

With regards to Decay, Decay was an extra mode in Half-Life 1 for the Playstation 2, never officially ported to the PC. A couple years ago, a group of dedicated modders created a PC version of Decay (see http://decay.half-lifecreations.com/ ) nearly identical to the PS2 game.

Also, you expressed interest in seeing how Half-Life: Source looked when prettyfied with some new textures, sounds. Here's a youtube movie in 1080p I just uploaded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK2e2qukDk8

Last of all, if at all possible, contact me, I'd like to see if I could get some kind of IM contact with you.

Indeed, I am planning to record Half-Life 1 after Hexen, but as you had just said that you were about to start recording it right now, I didn't want to bitch about it and remind you.

But that's our agreement, yes. You do H-L 2 and I do H-L 1 ;-)
Never heard of Decay though. If that's an unofficial mod, than there are several mods I'd like to record first, like They Hunger or Poke 646, for instance. But this website is not really about mods if I'm not mistaken.

Anyway, about that resolution choice. Yeah it was a limitation back then, but that's the whole point of longplays, in my opinion: show people what the game looked like back then, not how good it could look with lots of modifications.

Then again, I recorded Doom and co. in 640x480 although the game could only run in 320x256 back then. I thought a lot about it and maybe I should have sticked with the original resolution. :-?
What influenced me is that I've been playing ZDoom for so long now I couldn't even see the difference with the original. I even forgot to disable blood splatter. Oh well.

JonL, I was under the impression you were doing the Half Life 1 Series. Perhaps you could PM me your Steam username so we can talk further?
Regardless, I'm uploading the "enhanced" Half-Life:Source that I talked about earlier - only about 5 mins of it. I've recorded it all in FRAPS, and although it 5mins was 9 GB from fraps, once compressed with H.264 it went down to around 300 MBs.

With your longplay of the Half-Life series, I'd strongly argue a higher resolution rather than a lower one, as not only did the developer implement the support for a higher resolution, the lower resolution was a property of the time it was created, not a stylistic choice on the part of the designer.

Don't forget that when Half-Life went on sales, it was still using a software rendering engine. I remember playing it on my Pentium with a Matrox Mystique. That means 320x256 (320x200 in the States, I guess).
At the same time, it featured an OpenGL engine with drivers for the first generation 3dfx, the resolution of which was 640x480.

So for me, the maximum resolution would be 1024x768. In any case, the game textures are not precise enough to take advantage of higher resolutions. In any resolution higher than that, they simply will look blurry.

And your movie will get bigger with no visible profit.

The 16:10 screen format appeared much, much later, by the way.


EDIT: Oh sorry, you mean Half-Life 2? Yeah, probably.
1280x720 would be nice, I think. That's what I was planning at first.

Don't forget that FRAPS creates uncompressed files. Compressing them with h264 afterwards will give you much smaller files.

No kidding! I just did a 48 second test video. 2.65 GB. Seriously?

EDIT: Is there a point of doing 60 fps?

720p, higher just makes the file size bigger, and will you really notice a significant difference? So my vote is for 720p (1280x720) 60 fps ^_^

Okay, well I've just finished my finals in college, so I should be able to start the longplay pretty soon.

Out of curiosity, what resolution do you guys want it recorded at? 1920x1200 (which is my monitors resolution) 1920x1080 (otherwise known as 1080p) or something lower?

Sure, no problem. :-)
I really look forward to watching your Half-Life 2 longplay! Especially Episode 2, as I wanted to see it again, but didn't feel like playing it anymore.

Tell you what Jon.
You can get the Half-Life 1 series done, and I'll do the Half-Life 2 series (which are the games that truly hold a place in my heart.)

Sound good?

Do you plan on doing the expansions such as Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay though I don't know if they would allow the unofficial port mod.

If you plan on doing Half-Life 2 episodes which is Half-Life 3 then you should wait until the final episode is out.

As JonL said, we want to keep the games as close to the original as possible, no fan made addons to make it look smoother or anything, the offical source version will be fine, as it is pretty much the only version available now^^ But other than that keep it original! And if you need help with anything feel free to join the irc: irc.abime.net #longplays