My Unreal Sunday Of Gaming

Made some progress in Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night! I discovered a secret lab, which contained secret monsters, and a clone of myself that needed to be defeated. I played this in between my Steam Deck and my Desktop – Cloud Saving FTW.

Then it was onto multiplayer activities! Yutram and I braved more Borderlands 2 DLC, and squared off against credits that were almost as long as the DLC itself. Actually, we’re still going through it, but we had credits forced down our throat before it was over because reasons. We did earn an achievement though, so that was something. I’m not sure if the collected footage will be of any value, but I’m currently saving it to one of my recording drives. I’ve already nearly filled one of them up again! That 4K footage just eats up even more room.

Returning To Another Fantasy

The planets aligned in such a way that Yutram and I were able to play a game together! We settled on Borderlands 2, as we remembered we were playing the Tiny Tina’s Assault On Dragon Keep DLC being a barrel o’ laughs. Other than a glitch with one of the boss battles tonight we not only had a good time, but finished it! Well, the main storyline in the DLC anyway… there are still some sidequests to finish/pick up. My only other complaint about the DLC would probably be the credits, they felt longer than the actual content.

From The Demonic Hordes Of Mars To The Rednecks Of Pandora

It was another cold and foggy day; perfect for warm tea and catching up on a digital universe or two. I played DOOM Eternal, now with Ray Tracing! I also tackled some long overdue Borderlands 2 DLC with Yutram. We decided to begin our assault on Dragon Keep in Tiny Tina’s DLC, and so far this might be my favourite on a comedic scale. We’re definitely going to have to return to this one at a later date, and I might have to actually film it! 😛 I was happy enough just being able to play!

An Annoying Robot And A Cursed XBox Walk Into A Bar… Somehow

I’m almost done on the ending for the BL2 video! I’ll tweak it a bit more and then it should be good to render. I might even be able to finish it tomorrow! It’d be nice to have another one canned and ready to go, then it’ll be onto the next monstrosity. 😛

Inside The Overlord’s Studio

So far the hardest part of my current project is having to listen through Claptrap’s dialogue. This will probably take a little longer than I thought; I didn’t account for all the individual models I’d be animating, even for such a tiny ending. I’m thinking it’ll be another week, maybe two tops if my brain doesn’t think of other goofy shit to add.

Protip: The Pizza Makes It a LAN Party.

Got to work on making the scene look a little more “lived in”. Dressing our characters, as well as the scene. Tomorrow I will begin the animation process; I’m really looking forward to it! For some reason I’m really digging the idea of going to another game universe with a friend to have a small LAN party that takes place in the same universe.

You would think something that meta could break the universe, but then again Pandora itself is pretty broken. 😛

 

I Learned A Lot About Borderlands 2 This Evening

Tonight I sat down and played a long overdue session of Borderlands 2. I wanted to do a recording as I do with a lot of things that I play, and as per tradition the encoder in OBS was overloaded, even on settings I usually use. Out of curiosity I decided to use the same settings under the Linux version, and while I’m happy to say that it worked perfectly out of the box with only a slightly lower framerate, the client itself seems to have become a time capsule of sorts of early adventures in Linux porting. I copied my Windows save over to the Linux side and found that my shield and certain weapons were missing, items that happened to be in the Commander Lilith DLC which they never ported outside of Windows (along with some other DLC packs).

Our content is in another castle

I did some further investigation and found that Aspyr is working on an update for the Linux and Mac clients, but until then if I want to play the Linux version it has to be with other Linux and Mac users on a much more ancient build of the game. I have to confess; finding that out after getting a successful recording under Linux was kind of a kick in the crotch to me. I have all of this power and capability now, squandered by missing content, alas… At least they’re working on it though, maybe if we’re lucky they’ll update the graphics a bit? (For the record D3D9 = DirectX 9 and OpenGL is OpenGL)

D3D9
OpenGL
D3D9
OpenGL

It isn’t a dealbreaker or anything, but if Valve can get their games running under Linux with little to no visual sacrifice, then Randy Bitchford should be able to part with some of his Bitchford Bucks to pay for a better Linux experience (though I do like the ad free experience in the old version.  :v ). That said, I was reading the Linux requirements and found that AMD and Intel GPU’s aren’t officially supported (Fuck NVidia). I wonder what an NVidia GPU under Linux would look like? Perhaps something for a future project on my gaming laptop.

Meanwhile, back in Windows; I researched that a bit as well and found some interesting tips that seem to get rid of the encoding problem, at least for my setup. Disabling Ambient Occlusion and switching from borderless window to fullscreen seemed to do the trick. I’m not sure why, but switching from borderless to fullscreen increased my framerate (the opposite if what I would expect), and disabling AO made the encoder overload error go away, at least for local recordings. The true test will be recording and livestreaming it at the same time. If I can do that then my soul will be at peace… until NVidia fucks it up again.

If you’re looking to make some tweaks to your install, no matter what OS platform you’re on I highly recommend the PC Gaming Wiki. They’ve helped me fix up a couple of games thanks to their community provided tips and tricks!