Tales of the Aggronaut

StreamLabs OBS

February 26, 2018 by Belghast

Lately I have been dipping my toes in the streaming pool once more. I have this weird relationship with Twitch as a whole and I have constantly tried to break out of team purple to give other services a try. For a significant amount of time I tried to make Hitbox a thing… which has apparently been either bought or rebranded to Smashcast. After that I flirted with Beam.pro the Microsoft offering, which admittedly is pretty great… but even it got rebranded to the awkward name of Mixer. As far as any semblance of regular viewers go… I have been my own worst enemy due to my indecisiveness.

The thing I noticed through all of it is that people treat Twitch as a destination that they go to for entertainment. Folks only really watched Hitbox and Mixer when I posted a link on twitter and even then… not that many because it was a largely unfamiliar interface. The key problem I have always had with Twitch is the latency between chat and screen making holding any sort of a conversation extremely awkward. That negative aside though… Twitch is the place where everyone already has an account. This means it is the location that I am already watching the streams of my friends, and when I do stream I often have random people stop by and visit. That was just not something that ever happened when I did anything on Hitbox or Mixer. So after much flailing about… I am back and committed once more to team purple.

One of the things I have been dabbling with is StreamLabs, an interface that provides some of the nifty widgets like the ability to have on screen twitch chat and notifications when events happen. The other day I was playing around on the site and noticed that they offered up a Stream Labs branded version of OBS Studio and decided to give it a shot. I have long been a proponent of OBS and while I have tried other options… it is the one I always go back to because in spite of its quirks it tends to be the most reliable. Ultimately what the StreamLabs version promised was better integration with their widgets which in truth… would have been more than enough of a reason to install it.

When first opened it asked me if I wanted to import my scenes from OBS Studio… which took away the single reservation I had about this experience. I have a bunch of scenes already set up and I was not sure how I felt about having to go through that process again like I did when I moved from OBS Classic to OBS Studio. It asked me to log into Twitch, and then managed the whole stream key thing automagically. Finally it ran a test on my internet connection and set a bit rate based on my throughput… which may be a little high given that a few people have complained about now having the internet power to watch me. I ran a speed test for reference… and as a result OBS seems to think I should be streaming about 4500kbps which seems to be a bit much for a couple of people.

For the most part the experience is exactly the same as the OBS Studio experience… that is until you hit that big green [Go Live] button and start streaming. Then it shifts to giving you a view that largely replicates the Twitch Dashboard all the while still giving you some basic control over your broadcast and allowing you to swap freely between scenes. Even better when you click the big button to start streaming… it prompts you for a Stream Title and the game you are streaming. So in theory no more going live with the wrong title and game. There is still the problem however of not giving you a great way to swap the title when you switch between games.

Essentially this one app fixes a lot of the nonsense that happened while streaming. If it somehow integrates with twitter and allows me to announce the stream it would cut down my interaction to a single screen. Previously on my second monitor I would keep OBS up in case there were issues or I wanted to swap scenes, a window of the Twitch dashboard up so I could interact with chat and check the health of the stream, and twitter to go ahead and make a post that I was going live. In all fairness there are also Discord and Slack windows up, but they are not directly related to the stream itself. The end result was a super busy experience and one that made it awkward to interact with people as they popped into chat.

Now I brought with me a bunch of elements that I had knocked out in Photoshop to give my broadcast some branding. However not everyone has that option and often times ends up needing to commission someone to create them for you. This is a great option and at some point I may even do it myself, however just to get started and piddle around with a stream… you are more than likely not going to go live with anything. Personally I use these elements to block the chat box when I am playing a MMO just to give me some semblance of privacy.

Inside of the StreamLabs client there is a Library tab that gives you access to a bunch of preset designs that you can then modify on the fly to create some sort of a style for your stream. While this is not exactly something that I am super interested in… it is really damned cool that it exists. Basically each design has a “Be Right Back” screen, a “Stream Starting Soon” screen, and then the on screen in game elements. More than enough doodads for someone to start with and then tweak and modify as they go forward and decide what the hell they want their stream to be.

I am still not a good streamer by any stretch of the imagination. I find it hard to fill the time while I am playing and externalize my inner monologue. However so far I am super happy with StreamLabs OBS and am starting to dip my toes into the other stuff like setting up a proper channel bot with games and such. Right now the biggest challenge for me is finding a time when I can set up some semblance of a proper schedule. At the moment I tend to announce my stream as I am going live and then maybe stream for an hour or two and disappear abruptly… all things that are not exactly “best practices” for streaming. For the moment though I am enjoying dabbling in this world again and I guess at the end of the day that is the most important part isn’t it?

Madness Setup

February 23, 2018 by Belghast

I spent most of last night running around hanging out with my friend Grace and doing low rank hunts with weapons I have never used before. The revelation from the night is… I really like hammer. The only problem there is I need to get better at timing my uppercut to boop things in the snoot. However I did notice I can break a leg nice and fast as well in a pinch. All in all I dig the weapon and want to play with it more and have upgraded through to currently the rarity 5 ore hammer, and am just a little bit of farming in Elder’s Recess away from the Rarity 6 version that is in parity with some of my other weapons.

I did make a solo attempted at Nergigante and got frustratingly close. I had the monster limping and with a skull icon hovering over its head… but that last phase had some brand new tricks up is sleeve that I struggled dealing with. Namely a combination of knocking shards down from the ceiling and the prolific use of dive bombing. I feel like I was pretty damned close to finishing… when he managed to pin me against a wall and get my final faint. After 36 minutes of fighting that asshole… I simply didn’t have another attempt in me so the rest of the night was fun low rank nonsense with friends.

I’ve had a few people ask me about my gaming set up, namely the fact that I am piping all of the audio for all of my systems through my PC. The primary reason for doing is for comfort while shifting between PC based voice chat like Discord and console specific offerings like Playstation Network party chat. It allows me to comfortably have one set of headphones that I like wearing and flip back and forth between platforms without much hassle. Since I had talked a little bit in the past about what I did to accomplish that, I thought I would just diagram out my entire setup this time. Yes I did do this in visio… mostly because I thought it would illustrate it the most clearly.

I like the concept of having all of my systems “on tap” and easily accessible. Namely I started down this path because I wanted to at least in theory be able to capture video and images from any console that I chose without having to swap a bunch of cables. The earliest version of this set up revolved around a 5 port HDMI switch which was relatively cheap on Amazon. As I added in a few other systems that I wanted to capture from… I had to eventually seek out a bigger option and finally landed on an 8 port HDMI switch option from Monoprice. It was more expensive than I would have preferred but the options for something with that many ports were super limited.

This 8 port switch feeds into the business end of my Elgato Game Capture HD, that I picked up for I think $30 on Craigslist. At some point I would love to upgrade to one of the more modern models, but for the time being it does what I want it to do and was nowhere close to the $150-200 price tag of an upgrade. Next up we need to defeat the HDCP lockout, or at least I wanted to… because I hate the concept of PS4 arbitrarily telling me when I can or cannot record something. This is done using a cheaply constructed HDMI splitter… so cheap that it unintentionally strips out the HDCP signal coming from the console and turns it into a open signal that the Elgato is capable of recording.

This splitter also serves the purpose of providing me a latency free copy of my video feed that goes directly into the television, as well as the leg that finally connects up to the Elgato and winds its way into my PC through USB. The first time I streamed with my new arrangement after getting the 4k television… I realized I had a problem. I had been relying entirely on the television speakers to give me access to game audio. The problem there is that while broadcasting my voice through my Yeti setup… I would end up picking up a fair amount of background audio from the game leading to a questionable feedback experience.

So the problem at hand was figuring out a way to feed the audio from the gaming systems into my headset so that I could comfortably chat away with an open mic… without causing all sorts of auditory dissonance for anyone listening in. The only audio out from the television was an optical out port which meant that I would need some sort of a digital to analog converter to step it down into something I could feed into the line in port of my PC. I eventually settled on this device from amazon, and in the grand scheme of things it has been working excellent.

I had to do some fiddling in the television but I now have the audio being broadcast over the built in speakers and out over the optical cable. This allows me to wear a headset if I choose to or just turn back up the volume on the television and listen to the playback there. This also has the weird quirk of allowing me to pick up all of PSN voice chat and bypass their default state of not recording any of the voices. All in all I am pretty happy with the way things are set up apart from one minor thing.

Right now I have a second monitor hooked to my gaming PC and it feels awkward to cram everything that I want to interact with while playing a game over onto that monitor. At some point I am contemplating re-engineering this entire set up to be able to include a second machine to game capture. That unfortunately would result in a top down rethink of the way I have everything set up because all audio would be piping through a second setup. I think at that point I would have to upgrade to the Elgato Game Capture HD60 pro to give me more options. So all of this is why I generally just say “I am doing some nonsense” when people ask me how I have things set up.

Angry Spiky Boy

February 22, 2018 by Belghast

Before I start this mornings post I have a deep burning question for my readers that may be more in tune with the Monster Hunter lore than I am. What are the flags representing that are displayed in Astera? There is one more banner that is not displayed in this screenshot that makes up the main sail of the ship I happen to be standing on currently. The only theory I have right now is that maybe that sail is the banner of the first fleet, and then each additional flag from left to right is the other four fleets? The symbols are the ones that we see on the loading screen, but those literally mean nothing to me… but I am guessing they are part of the monster hunter lore? The most prominent one that we see on a regular basis is the Sapphire Star displayed on the far right banner which sorta lead me to believe that maybe it is the symbol of the fifth fleet that we are part of. I’ve poked around a little bit online but have not really seen much talk of this heraldry.

As far as activities of the night, we spent a bit of time fighting with the multiplayer systems. I was under the impression that if I logged in and joined the squad session… that would be something easy for other squad members to do. However as the evening drug on we realized that all of us had done this thing… and we were in two completely different squad sessions. There were two players in one and four players in the other… so nowhere near the session cap of 16. Making life even more challenging was the fact that the group of two could not join the group of four without getting a network error. The four of us in the first session had to join the newer session, so it makes me wonder… do sessions eventually time out or something of the sort?

Mor and I spent a good deal of time farming nonsense, before a few of us decided on trying to get past the Nergigante roadblock. Ash had recently arrived at that step in the quest, and Kodra with a little bit of leg work was able to get there as well. So the three of us combined with Tam decided to make a few attempts last night. For the uninitiated, Nergigante is a fight where you simply cannot get hit. There is a one two punch move that he pulls off that first stuns you in place and then decimates you. If your team members are fast enough they can throw some crystal burst at him to distract him from pummeling your friends. However we were not always fast enough. The above screenshot is of Nergi just about to pound poor Ashgar into the ground.

Similarly here is a screenshot of him completely wrecking my world. The problem is you have three faints before the quest fails, and unfortunately things seem to go from “perfectly fine” to “oh god why” at a moments notice. I’ve been told that this fight is a little bit more predictable solo with only you and your Palico to worry with and the buffer of two faints for yourself instead of having to share a pool for the entire group. I will probably try this thing tonight, but whatever the case the fight feels really stressful because I simply cannot get in and deal much damage before needing to roll out to safety. At first I wondered if ranged fighters had a better time of it… but since I have been playing bow quite a bit lately for fun… I am guessing not. The biggest problem I personally have with bow is the lack of ability to dodge out of the way in the same manner as I do with longsword.

I’ve been on high center for the last two weeks and would really like to move past Nergi and on to other fights. So in theory tonight if I actually make it home from the current icemageddon, I will likely spend the evening working on trying to get through this one on my own. In other interesting news… Byf has started releasing lore videos for Monster Hunter World. The first one came out yesterday and talks about the fall of what seems to be a pretty technologically advanced civilization that existed in the Monster Hunter universe before the current relatively primitive one we have currently. Byf and Myelin were a good deal of what made the original Destiny so special for me, because they dug deep into the lore and assembled the fragments into a cohesive narrative. I am hoping that Byf can do the same for Monster Hunter seeing as I am coming in so late into the series. There is clearly a bunch of interesting stuff here, and I am looking forward to learning more about it.

Bludgeoned with Adorable

February 21, 2018 by Belghast

I have been a horrible person and should feel bad. One of the usual suspects missing from the Monster Hunter madness has been my good friend and often partner in crime… Grace. Her original line of logic was that she was going to wait until the PC release, and I was largely cool with that because when I started playing Monster Hunter World I absolutely intended to do what I did with Destiny 2. That is to restart when the PC version came out and focus on that from that point forwards as my primary platform. However the longer I have played Monster Hunter World the more I have doubted if I could actually do this thing.

Quitting Destiny 2 on the console and restarting on PC felt like it was a no brainier… and at the end of the day I was not really giving that much up. However I already feel way more attached to what I have on Monster Hunter World than I ever did to a handful of weapons that I easily regained the moment I started grinding things out again on Destiny 2. The other core problem is the fact that there is no announced date for Monster Hunter World for the PC. When I decided to restart Destiny 2 only a month had passed since the launch of the console versions, and really… it allowed me to redo all of those things I maybe should have done differently.

When Monster Hunter World finally launches on the PC something along the lines of six months or more will have passed and that is more than enough time to get acclimatized to a game and pass the threshold of being willing to give all of that up to go elsewhere. In part Monster Hunter World feels more like an MMORPG than Destiny 2 did, and those are the sort of games that you really move into. I love my gear and my weapons and having to give all of that up would feel extremely alienating. While I might have every intent of trying out the PC release, I have a feeling I would bounce pretty hard without my stuff. Now in Destiny 1 I reached this point and it was in part why I had so much struggle getting any measure of traction on the Xbox One client. I am not saying never to Monster Hunter World on the PC… just that I doubt it will become my primary platform over night.

As a result Mor and I have been waging this guerilla campaign of deluging Grace with pictures of Palicos and Poogie. Last night for example I sent her the above image of the two Palicos in my room playing harp music for me. I think the final straw that broke her with adorable… is when I sent one of the Tailrider Safari cutscenes. Whatever the case she relented and downloaded the game last night, installing it and joining the madcap community of folks playing Monster Hunter World. When she first started Destiny I made the mistake of trying to drag her around to experience all of the content that I loved. However this wound up with a really choppy experience so for the most part I am going to be around to answer questions, but try my level best to just let her experience this game.

That is not to say that shortly after taking down the Great Jagras I did drag her through a Kulu-Ya-Ku kill for completely “pure pure” reasons as PizzaMaid would say. The Great Jagras costume for palicos is not exactly a good one… so instead I figured that a single kill of Kulu would get her more than enough parts to make that set of armor for her Palico so she could begin the process of dressing it in increasingly ludicrous costumes. As a result she is now the proud owner of a lute wielding fake moustache cat, and I think the barbs of the hook are officially set. The game is completely nonsense but has a charm to it that is undeniable once you experience it. I also think that while taking down that Jagras, she got a taste of the other side of the coin that makes the game super fun to experience.

Regardless… I should feel bad by bludgeoning my friend over the head with adorable pictures from the game until she caved. However I don’t really because this is absolutely the sort of game that she would love and was only waiting for an undetermined PC release date that might see her playing alone. For awhile I had said that Horizon Zero Dawn was worth every penny of buying a PS4 just to play it. I feel like Monster Hunter World is also sort of in that category, with the exception being that it also exists on Xbox One. The problem there is… my core base is on PS4 and as a result I see very little reason to play anything but the scant exclusives on the Xbox platform. Most Xbox exclusives eventually see a PC release apart from Forza and Halo, and in the grand scheme of things at least in that scenario I would rather wait. PS4 is my console and ecosystem of choice and I am pretty happy about that.