alliance of awesome Archives - Page 2 of 5

Hitbox is Beta

July 18, 2014 by Belghast

Changing Religion

I honestly do not remember when I first signed up for Hitbox.tv but it has been some time ago. I have this habit of signing up for everything that comes out if for not other reason than to reserve the name “Belghast” on any given network. I have belghast at outlook.com for example but will likely never use that email for anything considering I am joined to the hip with google products. In all honesty it was not until this week that I even considered using Hitbox for anything… until oftentimes tastemaker Scopique mentioned in a post that he was planning on using it for his website Levelcapped.com in part because he was actually able to get the name Levelcapped.

So being a sometimes devoted member of the internet Zeitgeist I gave it another look. It turns out that Hitbox has the single “killer feature” that I had been longing for from Twitch. As part of the default interface you are able to organize into “teams”, which is a functionality locked away on twitch until you become a partner. There is no way in hell I will ever have enough viewers to reach partner status on any network, let alone twitch. That said I still wanted to be able to create a shared channel for all of the Alliance of Awesome streamers so that we could give that out as sort of a television channel to anyone who was curious what all was going on in a given evening.

The other “killer feature” is the ability to have a configurable delay. By default everything on twitch is delayed by at least 30 seconds. In practice if you are doing HD streaming… this delay tends to be considerably more. Ultimately this delay was factored in for the purpose of competitive match play, but since I don’t really compete doing anything… it just becomes a pain in the ass to deal with when trying to respond to folks in chat. I’m a carebear and so rarely doing anything where prior knowledge of what I am doing… would actually matter at all. So while the stream is not actually instant either it is far more manageable, and probably something similar to the conditions that our oceanic gamer friends have to deal with on US servers.

Hitbox is Beta

The problem with the switch to Hitbox is that Twitch has become so damned ubiquitous that it works with almost everything simply by default. So while the livestreaming and video playback functionality work amazingly well, little things that I have come to just expect don’t function at all. For example after playing with it, I can seem to find no way that actually embeds a video from hitbox into my blog, nor does the documented embed a stream seem to work either. This would not be a huge deal since I try not to embed twitch either… but for the time being both their download your stream and export to youtube functionality also seems to be broken. They mentioned a few days ago on the @hitboxliveHelp twitter account that they should have a fix tomorrow… but at this point that tomorrow was two days ago.

In a day and age when “Beta” has come to mean a highly polished public preview… it is both refreshing and frustrating at the same time to see that Hitbox in fact really uses beta in the appropriate sense of the word. However none of us is really enough to scare me away from the service. For starters it seems like there might be a better integration point between my favorite little social network that could Anook and Hitbox in the near future. Also there are just so many things that are nicer for the streamer. Built in polls, and contests and the whole popout dashboard is extremely all nice. There are so many times that you have a few technical hurdles when you start up your stream, and having twitch spam your friends each time you start and stop OBS gets old. Having a panel that automates the message for you when you are good and ready is awesome. Additionally it seems to actually remember my channel title and the game I am playing, unlike with twitch when I seem to have to rename things half a dozen times each time I switch games.

The Results

All of this doesn’t really matter unless the results are nice. I’ve streamed for roughly five hours now and a combination of three different games. So far I think the end product has been excellent. There was a little bit of tweaking in my OBS settings, but I think all of that is working nicely. If you are curious check out some of the broadcasts below… since you know I can’t export them to youtube or embed them directly yet.

I think overall the stream looks really good, or at least good enough to keep me using the service given all the other advantages. The biggest thing for me is the ability to have the Alliance of Awesome team. So if you are using Hitbox or want to use Hitbox and already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… let me know and I will throw you an invite to the team.

Blaugust Update

I am still very much working on a mega prompts post, that I will likely make a little closer to the event. So far I have had a bit of interest in the proceedings and this makes me happy. My goal is to have sixty or more prompts that folks can pick from when in need of a topic. In part this is going to give me something to fall back on as well when I am having one of those blah mornings where I can’t think of anything to write. One thing that I wanted to make sure folks knew about is the Blaugust Anook community. If you are going to participate please pop out there and join the nook, as I am going to give folks elevated access to advertise their new posts out there.

The truth behind this initiative is a simple one. Newbie Blogger Initiative is like this shot of adrenaline in the arm of the blogging community. While it is going on everything is active and vibrant and regularly updated. That said a few months after the proceedings… folks start to wane a bit. My idea was to have Blaugust a few months after the initiative as a way of maybe kicking up the volume again. For some of the folks who have responded thusfar, this seems to be doing exactly that. At this point however I have no clue just how many people will be participating, but I am hopeful.

#HitBox #Blaugust

Shaders in Minecraft

July 16, 2014 by Belghast

Modding State of Mind

The other day I decided to try and mod Fallout 3 to look like a series of images that I had seen… and it seems to have opened up a rabbit hole that I am still falling down. Yesterday I decided to try and get shaders working in Minecraft. For some time I have seen videos of minecraft that just look insanely detailed for what is essentially the blockiest of games. I would do a small bit of research and pretty much halt when I heard that it involved a modification to the game. Granted I have applied a ton of mods to minecraft, primarily adding in a minimap to make connecting tunnels up easier. Ultimately this involved me configuring something called the “Magic Launcher” to mod my game JAR file on the fly.

Once upon a time you used to have to open the JAR file in 7zip and manually replace individual files inside of the archive. This was tedious and also involved a lot of trial and error as you were ever quite certain what order you had to load the files in with. When I started down the path of trying to figure out shaders a long while back… this was still the method of getting them to work. However a wonderful invention seems to have sprung up in the Minecraft world called Forge. Once installed it essentially allows you to fiddle with mods on the fly from within the game itself, and gives you a “Mods” directory to dump things in.

Shaders in Minecraft

So while this process is a bit of a pain still… as you can see from the above photo the end result is very worth it. It feels like a bit of an understatement, but this completely changes the feel of the minecraft experience. So many things just feel better from the way fire reacts, to the way spider eyes glow out in the instance of the night… to the fact that the day night cycle actually feels like something that is more predictable. When you get close to evening it starts to feel like maybe you better duck in for the night as the light begins to significantly dim as the sun nears the horizon. Granted you can install shaders without the use of a custom resource pack, but I decided to take the advice of SonicEther the creator of the shader preset I am using and go with the ChromaHills texture pack.

I mean everything about Minecraft is still very much a blocky game, but for some reason adding realistic lighting makes everything immediately feel that more real. There are little touches that I think are adorable like the fact that at this moment I had just gotten into a fight with a skeleton. You can see the shadow of all of the arrows sticking out of my head as I prepare to fight a zombie that has caught fire and is still lumbering towards me. But I have to say the place where it gets most impressive is underground, giving an entirely different feel to moving about in the long tunnels I am prone to build. When you are down there it feels like you are playing some updated version of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D and not really a building game. I would imagine that bow sniping in this mode would be extremely fun.

Faffing about with Blocks

Last night I streamed some Minecraft for roughly an hour mostly to show off the shaders in action. The true effect really only hits you when you see it in motion, with the depth of field and the way the shadows and lights work. My primary project of the night was to work on my tunnel system and try and burrow out far enough to get somewhere interesting. Legdur one of the other users on the server at some point during the night came over and gifted me an insane silk touch diamond pick and thats when the construction really kicked into overdrive. I go over this in the video but basically I started out in a small cave and then built out from there over top of the water forming my first “base”. Instead of abandoning the cave I opted to simply connect it to the tower.

One of the things I have learned about myself thanks to Minecraft, is that I am most comfortable when underground. As a result instead of building pathways on the surface or roads… I end up building deep tunnel systems that get me where I want to be. Primarily I think it is that when I am underground I have more control and am ultimately safer because I can control my surroundings. As a result I have three main tunnels that lead out of my initial base. One of which leads back to the spawn point and I have crafted a little hut of sorts to mark the entrance to my territory. Think of it almost like a subway terminal or the Dragon Age deeproads. Another tunnel I simply dug until I broke ground in what is a nice secluded valley. I have not actually done anything with this path but I intend to have it be another intended place of expansion.

The tunnel that I built last night, or completed last night connects up to this building that I am currently working on. Ultimately it will be significantly larger than the island tower I initially built primarily because I have a hell of a lot more resources stockpiled right now. It is nothing terribly special yet but I am working on it slowly. Essentially right now it is spider proof and generally monster proof and hopefully I can use it as a way to lure some chickens down into my complex. Animal husbandry is one of the things I dig about Minecraft and sooner or later I always develop an underground farm that allows me to harvest and breed animals for food. I try to generally place said farm as far away from my main area as humanly possible… because the looped sounds of chickens, cows and sheep will drive you to drinking.

Installing the Shaders

At this point you may want to follow me down the rabbithole that is modding Minecraft and installing these spiffy shaderpacks. Like I said yesterday one of the things that has always frustrated me about the modding community is how arcane the directions can be, and how it is generally a fairly exclusionary group by nature. You have to have a certain level of knowledge of the inner workings of a game before anything that folks are saying on the forums will make any sense at all. Here goes my attempt to explain how the installation process works so that my readers can follow along in this journey.

Downloads Needed

Minecraft Forge [webpage][download you need]
GLSL Shaders Mod [webpage][download you need]
Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders [webpage][download you need]
ChromaHills Resource Pack [webpage][download you need]

So after collecting all these bits you should have a handful of files…

forge-1.7.10-10.13.0.1180-installer.jar
ShadersModCore-v2.3.18-mc1.7.10-f1179.jar
SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF.rar
ChromaHills-64×1.7_1.0.8.rar

Creating the File System

So for this part of the tutorial… I will admit I am a windows user. I realize that Minecraft can run on a Macintosh, but I have no clue how that works. I have a Macbook 1440 sitting in the closet, and that is the last time I have used anything vaguely resembling the Mac operating system. So if you are not a windows user you are pretty much shit out of luck. My steps might make sense to you, and if so hopefully you can follow along enough to make sense of what you actually have to do in your file system.

First we need to make sure we have the directories that we are going to need for this to work. We have to navigate to our minecraft directory, and to get there the easiest way is to use the hotkey [Windows Button] and [r key] at the same time. This should bring up the run prompt. I pretty much do all filesystem navigation by typing in directories that I want to go to in the run prompt. As my friend points out regularly I am a “power user” but quite honestly I have no clue how to get to this directory through the file system without typing it in. Basically in the run prompt you want to type “%appdata%” without the quotes. This is a windows shortcut that gets you to the application data roaming directory. Inside of there you should see a “.minecraft” directory. This is where your system actually has minecraft installed.

We will need to make sure your folder has three directories. If they are not there then you need to create them. All of these directories are lowercase names, and I am not sure if that matters but since Java is a language capable of case sensitivity… I would suggest you just save yourself some hassle and name them lowercase as well. Create/verify that you have the following directories…

resourcepacks
shaderpacks
mods

Setting Things Up

Now we get to the point where we actually have to do some things. First you need to install forge-1.7.10-10.13.0.1180-installer.jar and if Java is configured correctly on your system… you should just need to double click this file to install it. Accept the defaults and this will install forge and create a profile called Forge under your Minecraft installation. Next we are going to need to copy the appropriate files into the right directories.

Copy “ShadersModCore-v2.3.18-mc1.7.10-f1179.jar” to the “mods” directory
Copy “ChromaHills-64×1.7_1.0.8.rar” to the “resourcepacks” directory
Unzip “SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF.rar” to the “shaderpacks” directory

If you do not have a way of unzipping a RAR file, then I highly suggest you check out 7zip for all your archiving needs.

If you open the Minecraft launcher you should now have a profile in the drop down called “Forge” go ahead and log into Minecraft and hit the play button for that profile. If everything went correctly with the installation of Forge, you should now see a [Mods] button on the front menu for Minecraft that looks a little something like this.

Now we need to turn on the shader which should be possible if the Mods button is showing up. To get there you click [Options] and you should see a new option called [Shaders] appearing there in Options Menu.

When you click shaders you get a menu system that looks a little something like this. Make sure you have selected the SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF option. I have a few more things in my menu than you will have if you have followed this guide. There are lots of different shader packs out there that you can play with, but that is for another day.

Finally we want to turn on our resource pack. At this point your menus will look a little different because I have the ChromaHills pack already turned on when I am recording these screenshots. But to get there you want to back out to the Options menu and select [Resource Packs].

Again I have another resourcepack in my list that you will not have if you are following the guide to the letter, but the important thing here is that you want to make sure ChromaHills is on the right hand side of the screen meaning that it will be used. When you hit done, your system might freeze for a bit but this is completely normal. The game is essentially unloading all of the textures and reloading the ones from the resource pack which includes the various menu textures as well.

If Everything Went Right

Then BAM! You’ve got shaders. If you have any pointed questions about the process let me know, but I tried to make this as straight forward as possible. If you have specific questions about the various items, I posted both the webpage link and the actual download link. It is possible that at a later date some of the download links I posted may not work. If that is the case refer back to the webpage link because they have probably iterated the version of whatever the item is. So far I am loving Minecraft with more realistic lighting, and hopefully you will too. Happy digging!

#Minecraft

We Kill Routers

July 13, 2014 by Belghast

Running About in OKC

My wife and I first got hooked on Half Priced Books during a random trip to Dallas Texas. I had heard of the chain before, but had never been to one. At that point we had a Garmin GPS and we punched “book” into the POI search and happened to find one nearby. From that point onwards when we went to a new area we immediately searched to see if they had any of the stores. During a trip to Madison Wisconsin we managed to hit three different stores up there, and on our last trip to Dallas I think we hit around fifteen of them. Tulsa unfortunately does not have any yet, but an hour and a half from Tulsa in Oklahoma City they have three of them in the metro area. So every now and then we make a trip down there just for the purpose of hitting all three of them.

I was trying to explain to my coworkers what makes them special, and if you have never been… and especially if you not a bibliophile it just would never make any sense. One of the most magic things about the store is they have a rather large used role-playing games section. On past trips I have found all sorts of wonders, but just the simple fact that a store exists in Oklahoma with this sort of stuff makes me happy. This trip I honestly didn’t walk away with much from HBP. I picked up a Minecraft book by scholastic, that is obviously targeting children but manages to explain Redstone wiring in a simple enough manner that I think I can “grok” it. Additionally I picked up the second book in the Odd Thomas series, and the Silent Hill Collection for the PS3 since I have never actually played 2 or 3 in that series but loved the hell out of the first one.

Carpet Jesus

Another thing we did yesterday was run around to a series of pawn shops in my search for “cheap” Xbox 360 and PS3 games. I managed to stumble onto a cache of $5 a piece PS3 games here in Tulsa at a Cash America pawn shop, and I knew that in OKC they had at least 11 of them. We tried to hit as many of them as we could while weaving across town to hit all three of the HBP stores. The lesson of the day seemed to be that OKC wanted more for their stuff than I was willing to pay for it. Locally the most you will ever pay for a game in a pawn shop is $15, and while wandering across OKC I routinely saw them for as much as $30 in the same pawn shop chains we have here in town. I even managed to hit a Game XChange which is a chain that used to be really big around here… and there they were selling PS4 games that you can buy brand new at Target for $39.95 for $54.

When I see a price like that, maybe it is horrible of me… but the first thing that goes through my head is “that’s adorable”. I feel like maybe Oklahoma City in general just doesn’t know how to price things. During our travels we stumbled across a fairly nice looking thrift store and the carpet jesus picture above hails from it. Among the various baubles is a brand new sealed box for an Intel EtherExpress LAN Adapter. The one pictured above is an ISA card… designed to go in an IBM 286/386 machine and Novell Netware that is advertised on the back side. This is pretty much the best technology Intel had to offer in 1992, and seems to be pulled off the shelf of someone’s closet and donated to charity. The pricetag is not a mistake… they apparently do want $59 for this mint in box artifact of the pre-internet age. Oklahoma City apparently lives in a bubble where they don’t have a clue what anything is actually worth.

We Kill Routers

This morning I woke to the fun surprise of having no internet in our house. Apparently between the time that I recorded our podcast and edited it last night, and this morning our Asus router died. The thing is we are exceptionally hard on routers it seems, because it seems that at least once a year I end up replacing one. I have to think it is because we have so many internet connected devices. We have 5 laptops, 3 desktops, 2 phones, 2 tablets, 3 chromecasts, and 5 gaming consoles connected to our wireless router pretty much all of the time. That is a lot of strain on any device and they seem to just explode after awhile. So this morning I connected the internet directly into my main desktop and got on long enough to do some research and write this blog post.

I found a device at our local Best Buy that looks like it might do the job. It is supposedly designed to handle multiple devices at the same time, so we will see if we end up killing this one as well. The last one only manages to survive 6 months… and honestly it might still be under warranty and I will try and dig that information up and try and replace it. It would make a nice little router for the lake to be honest. I did the in store pickup option on the new one, so right now I am just waiting on the email to let me know it is ready to go. I had heard really good things about the Netgear Nighthawk, so we will see if it lives up to the marketing hype.

Exclusionary Subcultures

Last night we managed to get the entire AggroChat podcast crew together once again for another broadcast. Tonight we talk at length about the various things we have been doing including Minecraft, VVVVVV, Adventure Time Battle Party, and a few other things. The bulk of the show however is a discussion about various subcultures. Gaming and geekdom in general can be a very exclusionary place. Not that we solve any of the worlds problems, but we at least have a discussion about them. We ran a bit longer than normal this time, but we had a lot of stuff to talk about.

Tunnel Works

July 12, 2014 by Belghast

Hurry Up and Blog

This mornings blog post is likely going to be a quick and abbreviated one as we need to get on the road soon. The wife and I are going off to Oklahoma City today in search of the illusive Half Priced Books store and my mission for the day… lots and lots of Cash America pawn shops. Last weekend I managed to pick up some amazing deals on used PS3 games at that chain, and there are far more of them in OKC than here in Tulsa. Basically I am cheap, and I would love to pick up more PS3 and Xbox 360 games… but I only really want to pay $5-$10 for them. I had a blast playing Fallout 3 on the PS3 even though I had played it countless times on the PC, so I would be interested in visiting lots of titles I had played on the PC as well.

In part because playing on a console is so easy… you pop the disc in and go. The negative however is that you can never really improve the experience. Example here is a modded up version of Fallout 3 that greatly improves the look and feel. Seeing this yesterday pretty much guarantees that I will play through the game at least one more time on the PC as well. Another prime example of better living through software is the whole Skywind project, where they are completely redoing Morrowind using the Skyrim engine. These things will never be able to function on a console, but I have to admit there is something nice about the simplicity of just pressing play. My only complaint right now is that I wish the modern generation of consoles would allow me to install the disc to the hard drive and then not have to worry about having the disc any longer. That is the thing I like the most about my PlayStation Plus titles, the ability to have lots of them “on tap”.

Tunnel Works

Most of last night was spent working on my extensive tunnel network… or what will soon BE an extensive tunnel network. Across a bridge from my main building is the first area I started out that I am using as some what of a stone quarry. At base floor I started a tunnel to see just what I might intercept digging in a straight line. Generally speaking I dig 3×3 tunnels because they feel about right, not too closed in and not too open. After quite a ways of torching every 7 blocks I came out on the other side in what appears to be a riverside valley. There is a cobblestone wall there so I am not sure who has been building in the area. Hopefully I am not impeding on someone else’s land too badly, but I like as many entrances and exits from my area as possible.

I built up a really simple fenced in area so that hopefully I won’t end up with too many creepers lurking there. One of the interesting things about the lockette mod we are using is that supposedly if you lock a wooden door it makes it so that zombies cannot beat it down. Traditionally I have used fence gates to bar entrance into my areas, because villagers cannot open them and zombies cannot break them. However I have started trying out the whole locked door thing to see if it works. I am not purposefully really trying to keep people out of my stuff, but more that I don’t want to come home and find everything full of mob spawns.

Cactus Shield

The other thing that I worked on last night was redoing the approach to my house. I ended up extending the path to make it far less likely for me to kill myself trying to leave it by hitting lots of cactus. This almost happened a few times as I seem to be unable to walk a straight line. Essentially I started the dual tier row of cactus a block further out so I have a 3 block walkway to get in and out of my area. I might add a third row of cactus because I actually managed to have a creeper make it through earlier. Granted the creeper only took a single hit to kill after being chewed up pretty badly by the cactus to get to me… but this in part was because some of the cactus has not fully grown to 3 block height yet. The creeper was able to hop up onto a single block height one and use it to make his way in.

Now that I feel like my base is fairly defensible, it is just about time for me to start back working on the “mine to bedrock” project. Essentially in every build I have done in Minecraft I eventually create a tunnel network that goes all the way to bedrock and start branch mining for diamonds. It is my hope that I picked a decent spot to mine, because so often you get down to bedrock and struggle with lava. Right now the project has been derailed in that I hit a fully enclosed cave system, but I need to build my way through it and continue digging. So far I am finding playing on the Alliance of Awesome server to be fun and refreshing, since more or less I am having to play legitimately again. If you are interested ping Zelibeli and she can get you white listed… but of note this is open to existing members of the AofA community and its requisite groups.