Ruining It For Everyone Else Since 2004
Today was an all work day. Still on vacation, but worked on my video and other things on a foggy/rainy evening. I’ve still been fighting on and off again nausea, in fact I didn’t feel inclined to play anything today. The good news at least is that I do have a video ready to go! I even got to play a little with some green screening!
It turns out one Broforce session is enough for me to make a decent sized video footage wise. I’ll have to sleep on how I want to piece this one together, and talk over a good way to end the video, while at the same time I’m also thinking most of the video will be gameplay footage… these games pretty much do all the entertaining.
My attempts to try and run this game into the ground have been futile. Other than issues with FOV during cutscenes Devil May Cry 5 continues to run, and at decent framerates despite the eyecandy being cranked to max. My attempts to mod this game on the other hand have proven to be a bit of an issue… I can install and run Vortex, but it only renders as a black window. I can also run Fluffy Manager 5000 but for some reason it doesn’t see the mod folder. Modding will take further science, but aside from that I’m still impressed with how well Devil May Cry 5 performs.
I’m also happy to report that I finally finished the 4th and final part of the Skyrim saga! I’m going to work on the video thumbnails tomorrow, and from there work out release dates, and of course start project prep for the Broforce vids.
I think I have everything pieced together the way I like. I’m running xfce with two tool bars. The one on the bottom is my Linux studio tools. I even installed Photoshop for shits and giggles, and the once in a blue moon chance I decide to use it. It kinda feels mac-ish sitting there on the desktop like that, only cooler looking because I’m outside of their walled garden. 😛
Now… I wonder what would be good for a future Linux livestream. 😛
I did a big oops recently. I saved a good chunk of my Windows and Linux data folders, but somehow when I transferred my Home folders over to another drive my Shotcut projects didn’t make it. Fortunately I had an even older backup from when I did a Mint reinstall for the previous build. It’s a bit more raw but I won’t have to do nearly as much work. I still don’t know how I missed those fucking files, maaaan was I livid. I probably would have said fuck it, saved the assets for later and moved onto the next project out of frustration. My previous save is a little more raw compared to what I had back in Mint, but it’s all a matter of just piecing things together and playing with audio levels. At the very least I managed to save all of my assets.
On the plus side I rendered the above video clip (the “cold opening” to one of the Skyrim videos) at 1080p 60fps with Lossless settings using the h.265 codec, and had it complete in about 3:25 minutes; safe to say that the 3900x is doing a good job.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 pretty much been sick with hay fever since last weekend, between that and work becoming more and more of a pit of everlasting despair I’ve been mentally and physically wiped. I spent a good chunk of the morning in bed today doped up on antihistamines, and trying not to gag from this damned sinus infection. After some rest I’m feeling a little better now. Maybe I can actually do something to make up for the first half of my weekend going to shit.
I did manage to complete my video! But it wasn’t easy… For some reason when I went to export the video it would die at around the 56% mark when rendering under Shotcut. I tried all kinds of tricks like lowering the resolution, changing from one preset to another, among other tricks, but it wasn’t until I added a blank video track that I found success. Finally, I can sleep knowing I did one thing right today.
Sorry for lack of postings. Work has been making me feel worn over death lately, even doing my other after work activities. My new sound card arrived yesterday! I’m probably going to have a busy weekend with that, a video release and a few other things. I sorted through my video collection, and have an idea of what I need to collect more footage for, and what to work on next. What I can now prep for release are (these are in no particular order btw):
Then I have other project folders that don’t have enough content yet for me to produce:
It will probably be a little while before I put anything out. I’m thinking I’ll spend tomorrow going through a few projects, writing down ideas for the next videos. I’m not entirely about the MGR one, mainly because the previous ones I’ve put out don’t have any animation to them other than goofy additions I added to the videos in general. I’m not sure if I should continue it in my current style, or go back and redo the others. For now I think I’ll start off on one of the other ones, like Freedom Planet possibly.
We had a surprise heatwave today, too hot for me to even want to take a nap. I ended up taking my laptop outside and play tested Prey on my Linux install, and surprisingly it works quite decently.
Speaking of Linux gaming I finished my first Linux related video. I’m not sure when I’ll release it, but it will probably be at the beginning of November at the very latest, with others hopefully following suit. I had to do a reinstall of Shotcut, the version I installed via my package manager decided that it didn’t want to launch anymore for whatever reason, so I tested with their portable version and that runs like a peach. It even has all of the same codecs I have under the Windows version… I’m wondering if I had an older version installed? Which is strange because it did report back the same version as Windows… Ponderous. If that’s the case I may start doing more of my video editing under Linux instead of keeping Linux and Windows recordings separate, and using Windows Shotcut to edit Windows video and Linux Shotcut for… well you get the idea. It’s kind of funny though when I think about it; Years ago when I first installed Linux to participate in the Steam Linux beta I couldn’t find any decent software to edit videos and always had to rely on Premiere Pro, among other programs that always had me going back to Windows (like game recording software for example). Fast forward to now, and we have several robust video editors to choose from, there are a couple options for game recording, and more and more everyday software being available to use. It’s amazing how much of this has grown since my early adventures of using Linux as a regular day to day desktop. Now here I am editing audio/video without having to rely as much or at all on Windows or Adobe for it. It feels good, real good.
As I’ve stated before though I’m nowhere near ready to completely ditch Windows yet, but the less time I spend under it the happier I am. I like having options.
Well, I managed to complete not only the last of the animation, but I’m also very close to wrapping up the project. I need to play with audio levels, render and make a thumbnail for when I finally get to upload. Probably won’t release it until at least next month. If I can I’d like to try and focus on spooky vids, and even if I don’t get to do that I can work on other things instead.
My next projects will hopefully involve something Linux related, and also a recent Portal 2 play-date. Yutram and I played custom maps made on Steam Workshop and we had quite an interesting adventure. I’ll have to sift through the footage and see what I can come up with. 😛
I’ve mentioned a few times in passing that for the most part I do my video editing with Shotcut, an open source alternative to Premiere or Vegas. I still keep Premiere installed on the off chance I need to keyframe something (like the THX logo in last weeks MGR video), but now it seems that miiiiight change considering they have officially added the ability to add keyframes to your projects!
Perhaps the most requested feature is the ability to move or smooth pan-and-zoom images or digital photos. We chose to address that in a more general manner by allowing filter parameters to be key-framed and animated rather than build something specific. Well, after long wait and much work, this has been introduced with a new Keyframes panel. It has an icon on the main toolbar to open the panel. There is much to say about this new feature and be sure to watch the videos as they become available. Keep in mind that this is new, incomplete, and a little unstable. Here are more caveats:
- No support for undo/redo (pending filter support for this)
- No keyboard shortcuts yet
- Not yet available for transitions or generators
- Only the following filters support keyframes at this time:
- Gain / Volume
- Brightness*
- Circular Frame (HTML proof-of-concept)
- Color Grading* (no simple)
- Opacity*
- Size and Position* (simple only, no curve UI)
It’s new, so I expect it to not in perfect working order, but a great start nevertheless. If they keep it up and get it at a point where it’s on par with other non-linear editors I’ll have a reason to retire premiere completely. :happy: