I’ve been keeping myself preoccupied between SFM, cooking a kick ass breakfast this morning, and finally getting things together for the Digital Ocean transition. The first project is setting up the mumble server, which is pretty much done other than having to tweak a few settings and manually putting in a startup service to auto launch the server after a reboot. I setup a droplet with the latest version of CentOS. Once I have that completely setup I’ll look into moving the websites and additional files I plan to fast host for Quake 3 and TF2.
I’ll go over it again with a fresh set of eyes tomorrow.
I normally like ending the year with games that I’ve finished; But this year is a little different because we’re not just going into a new year. I wanted to recollect moments that made gaming even cooler for me over the last decade.
Gaming Under Linux
When I first caught wind of Left 4 Dead 2 being able to run under Linux I thought it was pretty cool. I’ve grown up playing with Linux since I was a kid, and at the time I was running (and still am) dedicated servers. The very idea of being able to install a free open source alternative to Windows seemed like a good direction. I was invited to the beta second wave, and I remember installing Ubuntu, figuring out how to install the proprietary AMD drivers and wanting to strangle someone whenever I borked the OS. But I got it all figured out and got Steam to run. The library was really small back then. Only a few GoldSrc titles like Half Life and Counter Strike were available to play. But eventually Left 4 Dead 2 was released to everyone in the beta, and eventually more games were ported over, Wine started improving, OBS became available outside Windows, and now thanks the birth of the Vulkan API and Steam’s version of Wine called “Proton” the gaming library under Linux is much more vast than it was earlier in the decade. I definately use Linux much more than I used to, and I’m happy to say at the end of the decade I’m using Linux more than I use Windows. I earned my TF2 Tux fair and square!
Preordering The Steam Controller
There are rare occasions where I will preorder a game, and in one particular case this controller. I remember reading early announcements about it and looking at prototype models they would tease, and the idea of having a fully programmable controller tickled my brain, and the built in gyroscope immediately sold me on the idea. Like with most of my preorder purchases I made a good gamble. See, when I was growing up I wanted the comfort of playing full PC games on the couch, and not just platformers and sidescrollers, but FPS’s and anything that felt more comfortable with a manual aim that I could never achieve with a Dualshock or XBox type controller. The Steam Controller enabled me to basically use an air mouse with the additional buttons and layout of a controller. It’s unfortunate that Steam is no longer making these versatile controllers, it seems too many people couldn’t grasp the concept of fully modifying their controller. They just wanted the plug and play console experience with a game working perfectly out of the box… sorry but if tweaking a config a bit is too much then you really need to re-evaluate why you bought the controller; You’re probably better suited for a console. I haven’t had any issues with mine, and even ordered another three during their last call to purchase them. I hope we see even cooler controllers in the future, and that possibly Steam will release their 2nd revision of the Steam Controller that was leaked awhile back. One can dream anyway.
The Birth Of Adobe Alternatives
I’ve always liked making and editing videos of one kind or another. I first played with Premiere Pro CS2 during my early years of YouTubing, and later on moved onto CS4, then eventually CS6. When Adobe announced that their newer version would be subscription based I pretty much signed off CS5 as my final Adobe Suite. I wasn’t going to pay a monthly fee for something I don’t have the time to do everyday. One day I ran into an audio issue that couldn’t be taken care of in CS6. After trying a few alternatives I finally settled on Shotcut; an Open Source free alternative that has a lot of cool editing features and is always being updated, and can also run under Linux (meaning all of my video creation can be done under there from start to finish). I’ve been editing with Shotcut for a couple of years now, and now my Adobe suites have collected cobwebs.
Open Source Game Recordings
In the beginning there was only FRAPS for recording your desktop, but over the years there were other pay softwares that cropped up, and eventually NVidia and AMD made their own recording and streaming software for their GPU’s, and then eventually we had OBS and later on OBS Studio. OBS was once recommended to me by a friend on Steam when I was having issues with FRAPS after upgrading to an R9 290. I didn’t use it too much in the beginning other than for recordings. Later on when OBS Studio came out and they added a plugin to record directly from your GPU and stream using the CPU simultaneously I was quite happy with the results. Unlike FRAPS there are a bunch of optional plugins you can install, and if some of them become popular enough they will eventually be introduced into a newer version. I’ve tried AMD’s recorder, and I played a bit with PlayClaw and Shadowplay, and OBS Studio is always there for me. Now if they could add Vulkan support I can die happy.
When Source Filmmaker Was Made Public
I always liked the idea of making my own videos, and have always been interested in animation since an early age. When I heard that Valve was officially releasing their tool, which has been used for every Valve title like Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2, the Left 4 Deads etc I was pretty stoked to finally get my hands on professional free software. I’ve dicked with it on and off over the years and finally was inspired to change up my video format a bit and create these abominations, as referenced in the most recent video:
Before Source Filmmaker was officially released back in 2012 I used Garry’s Mod for animating, and while that was fun I wanted something that could produce something semi-serious with a cartoonish edge and better animation tools for a better story telling experience, after all this software was designed by people who used to work at Pixar. I’m still finding surprises in this old software. In the future I can use it to render in 4K plus I found out recently that I can use a command line function to render using more than one thread on my CPU; Meaning I can export even faster. More on that another time though.
Playing With Friends Near And Far
This was a more recent feature to pop up over the decade and I imagine it will get better and better assuming broadband companies don’t gauge people to the point of online gaming being impossible. Sometimes you want to play a game with a friend, but it doesn’t have an online option, or they don’t own the game. Now as long as its supported you can invite a friend from anywhere in the world to play with you, as if they have their controller plugged into your system!
I would list games over the last decade but I think the list is long and wordy to the point that only two or three people may read it before venturing off to the next shiny thing. If anyone would like to share memories of the last decade, be it tech, games or whatever I’d like to see it below.
Happy New Year, and many decades and melons to come. :melon:
It has been amazing watching what would be considered Console Exclusives finally giving PC Gamers long awaited access to titles that should have been sold across the board from the start.
I caught one of my British friends (MaddogSuperior) streaming the newly released PC version of the Halo Masterchief Collection these last couple of days, and I’ll usually leave Twitch on a 2nd monitor while I’m working on videos and stuff. The gameplay looked fun, but from what I also heard the input lag is quite terrible when driving vehicles. I’ll probably pick it up sometime down the road, right now it isn’t a big priority to me and I’d rather they work out any growing pains before I give Microsoft any money. Though I have to say I am surprised to see that at least the Single Player Campaign works nicely under Proton, which gets more and more awesome everyday it seems. It also seems that at least in Single Player you can mod the game to your heart’s content… moddable games are always a bonus for me.
Yo Dawg I heard you like steam so I got you more steam so you could steam while you steam.
So I was minding my own business, switching over from Windows to Linux to begin working on compiling another video when I decided to launch Steam as I usually do, and ran into a random bug that causes the system to halt while the client updates (seems to happen randomly). When I regained control of the system I noticed Steam wasn’t running still, even in Task Manager. I launched the client again, and when it popped up on the screen I noticed another window on the left monitor; the update window usually seen before the steam client even launches. I was intrigued enough to see what happened next, and here it is. Two instances of Steam on the same operating system. For the hell of it I installed the Windows version of Steam via Play On Linux and managed to get a third client running for shits and giggles:
Wine can sometimes lead to multiplying
Some interesting side effects when running more than one client. You’ll notice the linux client on the right is offline, but I was actually able to type a status and then refresh the page on the left linux client. Unfortunately the client on the right froze on that status screen. What was funny was that the Windows client had the same issues, but thought of itself as online.
My only remaining question is this; can I multiply the 17 cents in my Steam wallet and place them into one client? :trollface:
I have an Elgato Streamdeck that I use for my livestreams, and for what I use it for it can be quite useful. Unfortunately I mostly use linux now, and devices like this don’t really have much support, that is until now.
Linux Compatible: Enables usage of all Stream Deck devices on Linux without needing to code.
Multi-device: Enables connecting and configuring multiple Stream Deck devices on one computer.
Brightness Control: Supports controlling the brightness from both the configuration UI and buttons on the device itself.
Configurable Button Display: Icons + Text, Icon Only, and Text Only configurable per button on the Stream Deck.
Multi-Action Support: Run commands, write text and press hotkey combinations at the press of a single button on your Stream Deck.
Button Pages: streamdeck_ui supports multiple pages of buttons and dynamically setting up buttons to switch between those pages.
Auto Reconnect: Automatically and gracefully reconnects, in the case the device is unplugged and replugged in.
Import/Export: Supports saving and restoring Stream Deck configuration.
Even the features are friggen stellar. Between this and vaapi making it possible to record directly from my GPU in OBS I’ll have to look into doing some linux livestreams. I’ve been waiting for something like this to materialize for quite awhile now, and it’ll be nice to have programmable macro device under Linux again.
Today was a stay in bed day. I got up long enough to make breakfast, and do a little internet shopping (purchased a couple 4TB Hitachi’s) plus some script writing. Then suddenly an accidental nap happened, still feeling a little on the feverish side… hopefully I’ll feel better in the morning.
I also managed to do a little scene prep today. So far SFM still seems to functioning, though it still lags when moving a camera or a model. That may prove a bit problematic when animating, will have to test that theory tomorrow; I’m feeling sleepy again…
I played around a bit in SFM under Linux. So far the only issue I’ve seen crop up so far is some fps issues when manually rotating the camera. I’m thinking of transferring SFM to another one of my hot swap drives to see if it happens to be a matter of an old hard drive showing its age or if that’s just a thing with running it through Proton. I did a test render under my old Linux install and didn’t run into an issue… then again I’m starting to export my SFM projects as tga stills. I will say it does seem to crash a lot less under Linux, especially when downloading workshop files.
I also found time to jot down some silly idea scribbles, about four videos worth. One of them I don’t have much animation planned for though (related to the After Dark livestream). I might just take a break from it for the weekend though, depending on what I have planned.
Started and finished my Linux SSD setup today. Everything is back where it should be, and faster than ever before. I’ve taken the liberty of clearing off the old OS drive and plan to re-purpose it into a game/program drive for Linux, for anything I don’t want to run on an SSD. My first program is going to be SFM, of course. :melon: I may leave my computer on to let it copy over my assets from the Windows install. Now I can be just as fast going between two OS’s, just like on the gametop. :v:
I’ll get back into looking at video stuff tomorrow, maybe if I’m up for it a livestream or something. I’m in dire need of sleep mode.
My SSD arrived as scheduled, and it’s even the correct one this time! I’ve been experimenting with a few things, even tried a newer version of Mint. I think I’ll stick with 18.3, and I’ll see if I can make some time to do another reinstall tomorrow… the hours really flew by. It was a good thing to focus on today though, it was too warm to really do much gaming. I’d continue but I have to do that work thing in the morning…
I’m almost done sorting through the Broforce footage. I have about another half hour’s worth to sort through and then I can move onto tearing up the Crash Bandicoot Trilogy footage. I’m stopping myself now because I know that once I continue I’ll be up later than I should be. :v:
On the subject of my own productions I’ve done some more testing,and I’m pretty much ready to start my next set of SFM animations under Linux. I’ll probably complete the Linux setup of it after I move my install over to a new SSD. I’ve been planning it for awhile now, but since I’ve been spending more time under Linux I wanted to get it off of a mechanical drive and onto something faster. I love Linux on my NVMe, and while Mint boots up pretty quickly on my 7200rpm drive, it is beginning to show it’s old age. I’ll probably do a clean reinstall when the drive arrives then move everything over to it at my leisure… gotta love hot-swap.
It’s kinda funny… All these years I’ve been wanting to move my editing suite to Linux, and after all these years of people telling me that it wouldn’t happen I’m almost right where I want to be. Now if I could just ween myself off of Ye Olde Photoshoppe things would be cherry. All my audio and video work is done under Linux now, and now thanks to Proton Source Filmmaker too… just so long as I don’t run into any graphical glitches during rendering. I did a test image sequence earlier and it imported just as fast as it did under Windows, and from what I can tell it’s about as stable as it is under Windows too. If this works out I’ll have one large and one less reason not to use Windows anymore…
Oh don’t worry Microsoft, you’re still somewhat useful; it’s just that your list of useful properties shrinks a little more as time passes each day.
