It’s been a productive weekend! Thanks to Shotcut I’ve been getting my video releases in order, lots of gameplay footage to release between now and November! Made a few thumbnails for said videos in Krita, and I’ve even been upping my OBS game for future vids!
Installed a few plugins to try, there was one I even noticed that’s bundled with the current OBS that allows you to capture individual audio streams from different programs. Handy if you want to have your game audio and voice chat audio on separate tracks! Another plugin I found on the OBS Forums makes green screening a hell of a lot easier, and I even downloaded a status bar to mess with. I’ll need to rebuild a few scenes before I consider streaming again, but one of these weekends I’d like to make it happen!
I ran some tests with AMID EVIL last night, they released the new Black Labrynth Campaign. I figured it would be perfect for my testing needs. Didn’t overload the encoder once, and no lag whatsoever on audio or graphics. Thanks to the new audio plugin I now use 5 different audio channels for one game recording, and they consist of:
Game Audio
Voice Chat Audio
Microphone Audio
Music Channel (Only for Livestreaming)
Downmix (All Channels Mixed Together)
All of it done without the need of third party programs like voicemeeter! That means I can do this under both Windows AND Linux! Now if Creative would fucking support their sound cards under Linux I’d spend 99% of my time there on Desktop!
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:
I’ve been plagued with a weird problem in OBS as of late, and I even thought I had it nailed down today… but during a livestream I decided to do tonight OBS decided to go tits up. It’s been doing this thing lately where it won’t stop recording, and I have to terminate the process via task manager. In most cases it corrupts my video making it impossible to watch. I’m thinking that I should probably switch from mp4 to mkv as I’ve read that file extension has a better chance of survival. After all Shotcut can read mkv files so it’s not like I have to remux my recording for proper import.
But tonight while recording and streaming it just decided to come to a screeching halt, and when I tried to stop and start it decided to hang; resulting in me terminating the process and restarting my stream… annoying. Reading around online doesn’t seem to give me much info. One of the tricks someone recommended was running OBS in administrative mode but so far that seems to do fuckall. Now I’m going to experiment using the h.264 codec for recording instead of h.265 to see if that makes any difference. I haven’t had as much time to record gameplay lately, and it’s bad enough that I keep losing data because of these random hangs.
If this continues to persist I’ll consult the gurus over at the OBS forums. I think I have an account there from years ago. I do also have my laptop setup to receive my desktop stream if push comes to shove, but I prefer to leave that for Vulkan and DX12 based titles rather than be the ultimate solution. In most of my cases my desktop is more than powerful to handle games like Skyrim and Okami while both streaming and recording from the same system at the same time.
Last year I acquired a PS3 for $10; this included two controllers and their cables, two HDMI cables, and a copy of GTA4 I’ll never use. I figured for that kind of money it would be worth grabbing it to play games that never quite made it to any other platform, plus it’s a first generation PS3 capable of playing games going back to the PS2 and PS1. I tend to stick to emulators still, like with Klonoa for example, but you never know… it could come in handy.
After getting my hands on it I was interested in the idea of possibly streaming gameplay on the rare chance something like that could happen. But upon researching I found that could be problematic as the console has HDCP encryption preventing you from streaming or recording to an external device unless you record via composite. Unfortunately I have an Elgato HD60 Pro which only supports HDMI, and I was not going to invest in yet another capture device, especially since I don’t really use it much anymore thanks to AMD’s AVC Encoder in OBS Studio.
But I didn’t give up! I found out through continued research that using an HDMI splitter would do the trick just fine (as seen above), but not all HDMI splitters will do the job. I picked up this model on Amazon, and that bypasses the HDCP encryption perfectly. So all you really need to get it to work with your HD60 Pro is one HDMI splitter and three HDMI cables. One to go from the PS3 to the splitter, one to go from the splitter to your monitor/TV, and one to go to from the splitter to your capture card. Definitely much cheaper than getting another unit all together.
Plus, as you can see I’ve already got a game lined up. :v:
I’ve spent most of the day playing Aragami and experimenting with OBS Studio trying to fix a problem I’ve been having for the last couple of GPU driver updates. For whatever reason I can’t stream and record locally at the same time. Well, I can… But both the stream and local recording lag the fuck out. I don’t get it either, before the ReLive update everything worked fine when I went to stream and record at the same time. But then even rolling back didn’t fix the problem, same with rolling back OBS Studio. This sucks because if I want to stream something I won’t have a local copy for potential highlights.
I did play a bit with AMD ReLive, sadly that doesn’t allow me to simultaneously stream and record. Recording is actually quite good, while streaming seems to suck no matter which setting. I also don’t care for the interface, why does everything have to be tiles and buttons? OBS Studio gives you all these sliders and options, and it looks more organized. Not filled with a bunch of friggin tiles. I hope AMD improves their GUI design, because if they want to incorporate game capture (which is a really good idea and does run well on the local recording side) they need a cleaner design.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to setup OBS Studio on my laptop. What’s really strange is that even if I maintain my gameplay above 60 FPS my output is below 30 even when specified at 60. I thought something was up with the NVidia codec, so I upgraded to the latest driver.
That was my first mistake…
After that I ran OBS Studio and the graphics card wanted to eject itself, then if I did anything else that would utilize my GPU the system would lock up solid. So I tried going back to the version before it, no dice. Then a couple restarts later Windows decided to put in it’s own driver and prompted me to do another restart. I restarted and got stuck in an infinite load cycle. After running System Restore everything was back to normal (even though Windows said it failed, gotta love Microsoft’s consistency in being totally accurate!). Then tried to install/uninstall my drivers only to find I couldn’t. After some dicking around I got it to install, but I had to use the device manager instead of NVidia’s installer, fabu…
After more testing I confirmed that OBS Studio for whatever reason sucks on my laptop. Meanwhile Classic OBS runs just peachy. So I guess if I record anything I’ll have to use Classic instead of Studio, which isn’t that big of a deal to me TBH. I just wanted to have OBS Studio on both systems for the sake of consistency. But NVENC works fine on Classic.
I’ve been playing with the idea of recording my gameplay during lunch (when I can) and turning it into vlogs. Maybe about why I played that particular game, what I like/hate about it, what I had for lunch, what form of insanity unfolded to make me play such a thing, food, etc.
Speaking of YouTubing, I did another Classic Tomb Raider Stream earlier this evening.
I have a local copy to go through in my spare time, as I’m sure there are a few highlights I can pinpoint within that long run of film, or I would at least HOPE there would be something in over an hour and a half’s worth of footage. 😛
Apart from some technical difficulties between YouTube and OBS with LOTS of teeth gritting trying to get the damn thing to run tonight I completed another test run, this time with Skyrim. We tested audio levels between my microphone, mumble chat and the game. I think I’m about ready to do a public event of some kind. 😀 I wanted to do Obduction, but with it’s bugs and the memory leak issue I don’t think I’d be a happy camper, unless I stream it from my laptop to my desktop THEN to YouTube… Ugh.
I haven’t decided if I’m going to livestream Skyrim or not, since my playstyle might bore people… I’m overpowered, but then again my selection of mods might keep it interesting. What I’d REALLY love to livestream is some team based stuff, like the Lara Croft games, Broforce, etc.
Played around more with OBS-Studio today. I’m getting myself familiar with scenes and playing with the new source types I never saw in classic. That way when I stream to Twitch or YouTube I can be fabulous. Now all I need to focus on is balancing audio which I’ll have to play by ear (no pun intended). I figure I might as well get a polish on things so that when I finally do have time to do a livestream I’ll be somewhat ready.
As far as Streaming goes I’ll probably be mainly streaming to YouTube until Twitch gets their shite together. Since my friends are giving up on Adobe Flash it would make sense to use a streaming service that accommodates those who want to give up that nasty trash.
Of course now I’ll have to ponder what my first public live stream should be.
