Hello Awesome Folks !
The FaceRig Beta Keys have been sent out today to the Indiegogo backers. The process (as expected) did not go totally smooth, but we will take action and correct any miss-haps over the next 24 to 48 hours (it will just take a bit of time because we have to check and double check anything related to program keys). We have described the most frequent miss-haps in posts on our FaceBook and G+ Pages. Public beta access for those who have missed the IGG campaign will open most likely on Friday.
The program itself does seem to work for the majority of the users which is good, but some also experience glitches and crashes (after all it is an early Beta so this was to be expected). We are collecting data and will investigate this as fast as we can and we will ultimately correct all of the bugs (that's part why we made this public after all), but it may take a while (we are a very small indie dev team and we need occasional sleep to keep functioning :) ). We do apologize to those who cannot use the early Beta right away.
We have planned the next weeks to be 100% bug response mode (no new features are being included in the next weeks, we are just fixing the bugs that you will be reporting to us). The best way to give us bug and crash data is via the Steam infrastructure (it may get lost on Facebook).
The Website
The Facerig website ( facerig.com ) went down shortly after we have sent out the keys. Fortunately the forums here on Steam work just as well for providing support so we are not without back-up. TeamWEB our web-dev contractors are on the job. They have told us that this is not a server overload issue, but rather an issue with the hosting provider 1and1.com .
Temporary third party software
The native "Save a replay as a rendered movie on disk" functionality is disabled right now (more because of licensing reasons related to codecs than anything else). It will be most likely sorted out in the following weeks.
That means that in the current version, saving a rendered movie out of FaceRig will be done with external gaming video capture software. There are quite a few of those out there. A Google search on "free streaming software" will give you more options than you will ever need (both totally free and commercial). This is temporary of course.
We have already let you know that the virtual microphone driver will come later, but we didn't tell you where you can get a free third party temporary replacement (if you want to use the voice effects via real time streaming right away). A good virtual microphone driver is VB-Audio Virtual Cable and can be found at http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Cable/index.htm (Scroll down until you find the orange download button . There are other virtual microphone drivers out there too, but this is a good free one. Of course we make no warranties about it but a ton of folks use it and it is cool:). Again this is temporary until we will write our own virtual microphone driver.
Documentation
Here is our in-progress manual: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-99Ww6ro_aocWs4ajFRNmdvaDg/
The documentation for the custom avatars import process may lag a bit behind the launch on the 29'th as we may prioritize the documentation for importing custom props over full custom avatars as that is less complex (as in less scary) , and it should ease people into content creation. The import process is where we expect to have the most bugs and issues at first. We do plan to offer quite a few of the starting avatars in "ready to import" formats too, so you can tinker with them (and their textures) as a means to learn about custom avatar creation.
Avatars
We have spent a lot of time thinking about it and we have placed ALL the avatars that we have designed and built so far in the initial free/included pack (not just ten). The licensed avatars from the video will come a bit later, in their own free DLC's, (it is best practice not to bundle them with the program, because of licensing legal matters).
Best regards,
The FaceRig Team