Tales of the Aggronaut

Adventures with Sound

August 25, 2014August 25, 2014 by Belghast

The Crab Boss

Over the last several years every computer I have owned has had one thing in common. The onboard sound card has been made by Realtek, and with each of them I have experienced various quirks. Sometimes the mic output is too low, sometimes there is mechanical noise that I can never seem to filter out. In all cases I have been annoyed to no end with dealing with them, but for the most parts too lazy to really change. In part this is because I remember days when the only real option for a sound card was a Creative Soundblaster, and I’ve had my own series of issues with them. Additionally I remember add-on soundcards rivaling at least a low end graphics card in overall expense to pick one up.

About six months ago my on board sound card decided to go flaky. I made a mistake to decide to update my Realtek drivers when I was doing the same for my LAN drivers. After installing the reference drivers I lost all use of the soundcard. No sequence of uninstalling and reinstalling various community drivers, the reference drivers from realtek, or the ones posted on the MSI support page seemed to restore full functionality. In the past I have used a USB headset before with decent success so I shopped around to find one that I found comfortable. The end result was picking up the Logitech g430 headset, that comes in a rather fetching blue and black color palette. The install was easy enough, but early on I noticed a few quirks with it, in that I had to plug it into one of the two USB 3.0 ports on my machine. Once I figured out that this was what was happening, I resolved the issue and soldiered on.

Adventures With Sound

For the most part these headphones were excellent and the Logitech drivers provided some really nice 7.1 surround sound emulation. As far as communication went I seemed to be understood well, and transmitting both clearly and with plenty of volume. It was during this time that we birthed the ideas of our podcast, and it was with this headset that I have been recording all of the episodes. As I listened back to the recording however I noticed something that bothered me. All of the other guests came through with much more full sound than my own voice. My voice sounded very flat and tinny and no matter how much I fiddled with the settings did it seem to actually improve it.

After some research I found that this was pretty much a universal complaint with this particular headset and namely the usb soundcard that accompanies it. It seems like it does a great job of output, but a pretty poor job of input, only allowing for 16 bit audio. The result is the “flat” sound that I had noticed and that frustrated me. The suggestion universally was to hook the headset to onboard audio for the microphone, and the usb for the 7.1 surround output. This seemed like a hack at best, but no amount of fiddling with the drivers and settings managed to fix the problems I noticed. This eventually lead me to start looking for other options, and as always that ended up with me searching Amazon.

Xonar Ping

For years I have had an unnatural love for all things Asus. As a result I have owned a number of products and when I buy something I always tend to start with seeing what their product offering is. A search of Amazon lead to what I expected, there to be a lot of Soundblaster options, but mixed in among them was a Asus Xonar sound card that had relatively good reviews. The best part was it was cheap, currently $26.99. I ordered one with my Amazon Prime membership, and it arrived on my doorstep Sunday morning. I was shocked to find that something actually delivered on a Sunday, and it was not like I actually paid for overnight or anything of the sort. Within a few minutes I had popped it in my case, and booted back up. I grabbed the latest drivers from the Asus website and popped into a game… and the sound was amazing. It was every bit as good as the Logitech software was capable of and then some.

Then I hopped on Teamspeak to hang out with my friends and test it there. Immediately upon speaking I got “Is there a Helicopter in the background?”. I recorded some test audio and sure enough there was a very noticeable mechanical disturbance in the background of my audio that seemed to get worse the longer I talked. My heart sunk, and immediately I had flash backs of all of the fiddling I had done with both the Realtek and Logitech sound drivers to see if I could get something better than what I was. I could get the sound to go away momentarily, but it always returned regardless of the settings. Once again I took to the internet and found people complaining of this, and leaning towards that I would need to RMA the card and get a new one.

New Drivers New Hope

There in the middle of the stack I found a glimmer of hope. There was a thread by a poster saying that he had all of the issues I was having, and ditching the Asus drivers fixed his problems. I guess the Xonar drivers are notoriously bad, and that there is another group that has released a Unified Driver for the Xonar family. I downloaded the drivers hoping that this would maybe fix my issues as well. It took a series of reboots to uninstall the current driver and install this new unified driver. I booted into a game and it sounded amazing just as before, and this time upon firing up Teamspeak, I was greeted with “the helicopter is gone!”. This is the part of technology that I like the least, the wide variance in which drivers work best for which cards.

I realize that it has become tedious for companies to release a specific driver for a specific revision of a product, but I feel like the age of the universal driver for a “Family” of products has been riddled with this sort of issue. Right now for example I am currently self locking myself to a specific version of the GeForce drivers, as I had all sorts of hell when I tried to update to the latest version. In any case, I have recorded a few audio samples and am extremely pleased with the results, so here is hoping with future episodes of AggroChat there will be far less disparity between our voices as there was in previous episodes. Hopefully the tinny flat audio is a thing of the past.

A Darker Doctor

August 24, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 19

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat, and welcomed back Kodra from GenCon. For the most part the AggroChat crew has had their heads firmly planted in Final Fantasy XIV and that much hasn’t changed. Kodra regaled us with the tales of what he did with his time at the convention. LARPs are one of those things I have always been interested in but never really participated in. I did a little bit of a local World of Darkness LARP in High School, but it wasn’t really my scene. As Kodra talks about the ones that happen at GenCon it feels far more like improvisational theater than gaming. In any case it sounds awesome and if I ever make it to GenCon I will totally join in the fun with him.

Additionally we talk a little bit about MMO design and theory and how Final Fantasy XIV has made tweaks to the game in order to support the community aspect. So far it is working because that is the overwhelming thing that I am enjoying the most from our time playing. We also talk a bit about Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition and our upcoming campaign. There has been some talk about maybe streaming it, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to happen. Rae talks at length about her awesome character concept, and I talk a bit about the Grudgebearer Cleric I will be playing as well. This weeks episode had a very non-video gaming feel to it, and it was pretty enjoyable.

A Darker Doctor

Yesterday was the day the world was introduced to the new Peter Capaldi Doctor Who. So as the world was enthralled by the BBC airing of the show and subsequent BBC America rebroadcast… where was I? Well I spent my afternoon shopping with my wife and then my evening recording AggroChat. With all of the weight loss my wife has gone through, she pretty much is in dire straights on trying to find a new wardrobe for the school year. I figured it was far more important to help her find that, than to sit at home and catch Doctor Who as it was originally broadcast. As a result I have just finished watching the show this morning, and I have to say so far I am very pleased. I don’t want to go into any spoilers really, because hopefully you are going to watch it yourself.

First off I have to say I am of mixed opinion on the new Doctor Who intro theme. You can listen to it here as someone has uploaded it to youtube already. It just feels over produced to me… and extremely “muddy” if that makes sense. I can tell that they went went back to the fourth doctor theme and sampled it heavily…. and that aspect I like, but all of the modern crap that they seem to have layered on top of it is frustrating. I would love to see them just make a nice clean Doctor Who opening theme without all of the auditory graffiti. I am sure over time I will get used to it, but right now it is just grating on my nerves. As far as the show itself the production quality was impeccable as always. I always like the episode that happens right after a regeneration because you get to watch the doctor in his most vulnerable state, when he isn’t quite sure of this new body.

With Capaldi it feels like gone is the zany doctor that flails about, and a different form of “Mad Man” has replaced it. I am liking the darker take on the doctor so far, and I am also liking the fact that the series is distancing itself from “companion as love interest”. I am sure to some of the more modern fans this will be a point of frustration, but to someone who has watched a lot of Doctor Who over the years, I prefer the days when the companion was just that… a travelling companion for the adventure. I think the franchise will be in solid hands for awhile now, and I would love to see Capaldi have a run to rival Tom Baker. I am tired of the Doctor changing quite as often as he has been, especially since we have long retconned the original storyline of a limited number of regenerations. Overall I enjoyed it, but I look forward to seeing more episodes to really set my opinion of it in stone.

Return of Ultima Weapon

While waiting on the audio to render last night for AggroChat I got pulled into an 8 man raid with the rest of my Final Fantasy XIV guild on Cactuar. One of the quests that was added to the game post launch in Mor Dhona takes unlocks the Hard Mode version of the Ultima Weapon primal encounter. I won’t go into any of the details surrounding the Ultima Weapon itself because spoilers… but in theory we had heard that everything about the Hard Mode of the encounter is significantly harder than the first few turns of the Bahamats Coil raid. After last night I am guessing that was in fact the case. This fight is absolutely insane, but I am pleased to say after three tries we managed to down it and clear it from all of our quest logs. I returned to my role as a tank, and since at this point I somehow managed to pass Ashgar in gear I ended up starting off the fight and playing the role of Soak of a lot of the bombs that happen during the fight.

What makes the fight so cool is that it is the first tank swap encounter that I have run into here in Final Fantasy XIV. This is a common mechanic in World of Warcraft now as a way of keeping both tanks engaged in the fight, and they seem to do it very well here as well. Now the swaps have to be timed carefully, but since Ash and I have worked together on many occasions this ended up fine. Essentially you have to hit provoke which raises your threat to 1+the highest targets threat, and then start spamming your highest aggro ability to make sure you gain a decent lead. Basically during the swap I would hit provoke and then spam butchers block a few times to make sure I had a nice lead. At this point the target would peel away from Ashgar easily and I would be in control again for another three stacks of the debuff.

Now the coolest aspect of the fight is that we didn’t even realize there were weapons to be gotten. I feel like this fight is worth more than an ilevel 80 item… but in any cases it was one hell of a fun encounter to be done with guildies. As hard as it was, I could totally see myself doing it again because this felt like a true challenge. It required each of us to do something to add to the fight. Towards the end of the fight we had to have a few DPS sacrifice themselves to make sure all of the bombs got blocked, and then we slowed dps allowing the healers to catch up and ressurect them. It was awesome seeing each person fully engaged in what had to be done. I am so proud of my guildies for accomplishing this, and now I have no doubt at all that we will do fine making progress in the Coil.

#DoctorWho #AggroChat #FFXIV

Fears Verified

August 23, 2014 by Belghast

Death Visits

It is shaping up to be a bad week. I realize at this point it is Saturday and the week is technically over, but bear with me. Thursday I got a text from my father telling me that my Aunt Inez had passed away. Technically she is a Great Aunt and the sister of my Grandmother that passed away close to a decade ago now. So given her age it is not terribly shocking news, but I feel horrible that she lived roughly two hours away… and I have not seen her since my Grandmothers funeral. At the least I think she attended the funeral, but that day was such a blur that I can’t really be certain. I know she was not at my Grandfathers funeral a few years ago, because she wasn’t well enough to travel. I don’t know the details of when the service will be, but I was figuring I likely should make the trip.

That was at least until last night I got a call from my mother. Another Aunt has been in and out of the hospital more times than I can count over the last few years. I say Aunt but again that is a bit of a misnomer since she is technically my second cousin… but she treated me like a nephew pretty much all of my life and I was too young to realize that my cousins and I did not have the same relationship to her. She has been in final stage renal failure for quite some time and having to take eight hour dialysis pretty much every other day. In fact when my Grandmother on my moms side passed away earlier this year, I had thought my Aunt would go before her. Last night on the phone my mother said that she had been given a terminal diagnosis and was being transferred to hospice. Yesterday they stopped dialysis which gives her a prognosis of two to four days at the most.

As at peace as I thought I would be with this… it turns out I really am not. In fact my mother called my cell phone at 7 am this morning…. and I am scared to death to return it. My wife and I had planned to come visit her today, since we couldn’t go together last night. My fear is that I am going to pick up the phone and call my mother back and find out that she passed in the night. I have a complex mix of feelings about how exactly I am with this possible event. So long as I don’t call her back, it is like it hasn’t happened yet… and for all I know it might not have. There is part of me that thinks it is a blessing, because she has not had any semblance of a qualitative life in the last six years or so. The single solitary joy she had was mealtime, and if that is the happiest you are all day long… then it tells me life is pretty horrible. Another part of me deeply mourns the fun and interesting aunt that she was for most of my life, and that she hasn’t been able to be for the last decade. I know that once I finish my blog post, I will call my mother back and whatever it is that has happened will not longer be sitting out in a buffer somewhere… but will be very real. This mornings post I guess is a way of psyching myself up to receive the news.

Fears Verified

I did not actually make it through my post this morning before receiving another call from my mother. It was in fact what I had feared, that my aunt passed away over night. She drifted off to sleep and never woke up and passed early this morning around 2 am. I guess they had known about this for longer than they had told me. She found out sometime on Wednesday, and at that point her and my mother went into planning mode, planning all of the elements of her funeral. Apparently she also threw all of her renal diet measures out the window and ate the things she had been craving. The one that I found the oddest was the fact that apparently she had been craving a snickers bar. So much so that she asked my mother to go out and get her one right then. By some quirk of fate my mother had purchased a snickers bar that morning and it was sitting there in her purse just waiting for the request.

My aunt was one of people that when she made up her mind she did it whatever it was. If she decided she wanted to go to a craft show, she would show up at the house early that morning and say “get in the car, we are going to a craft show”. More often than not my mother would tag along for whatever adventure it was that they were off to, be it going to a movie or going on a road trip. When I was younger there were many weekends she would decide that we were going off together to visit my cousins, and me and my Aunt would go off on an adventure where I am sure I would talk her ear off about whatever thing I happened to be into at the time. It turns out that when she realized there was no getting better, she set her mind to planning on her passing. It sounded like during the day yesterday she had set all of her affairs in order, making sure my mother had transferred enough to her own account to pay for the funeral. After that it seems like she decided she was done with everything that needed to be done and simply drifted off peacefully.

Just Dance

As not to end this mornings post on a somber note, I thought I would mention something that warms my heart. Final Fantasy XIV is a very charming game, and as such it seems to attract a certain type of gamer that is more than willing to stop and smell the roses. When I go idle I am notorious for starting up one of the many dances that I have been collecting in game. Often times when I return to the keyboard I will be joined by one or more people who have decided to take up dancing beside me. This happens as an almost nightly ritual in the housing ward our guild has a plot in. I will go down to the market board, and while checking out what has been posted I will start up a dance. Before I know it Naine one of the neighbors will have joined me, and on occasion others will as well. The community is weird like that, and I am growing to love it.

The above screenshot is of me and a new friend going through our little dance ritual while waiting on something to spawn. I feel like if you stop to dance with a Lalafell, you are destined to become instant friends. So the next time you happen upon someone dancing in whatever game you happen to be playing… take a moment to join in. It is moments like this that make the virtual world seem so much closer than just an assemblage of pixels. On a side note I am extremely happy to see so many friends either renewing their accounts or starting new ones to come hang out on Cactuar with us all. I am really hoping this will be a game I set down roots in for a long while. We are already involved in a bunch of different active link shells and it feels like we have connections far deeper than just our immediate circle of friends. I have not felt that way in any game since the early days of Warcraft, and I have to say it feels really awesome.

Cannot be Tamed Questionnaire: Part Three

August 22, 2014 by Belghast

Wrapping it Up

Over the last few days I have been answering a Gaming Questionnaire, and with a little luck this morning I should be wrapping that up. You can check out part one and two and see what the earlier answers were, or you can check out the original survey here. Without further stalling… here goes the answering of the final leg of this survey. Be Warned… this leg of the journey is going to include several spoilers… so

SPOILER WARNING!

14. Most memorable moment in a game:

I alluded to this in one of my answers yesterday, but the most memorable moment for me while playing a game was in a Link to the Past. I can’t explain this fully without spoilers, so if you have not played The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past I highly suggest you do that and maybe skip this answer for the time being. In the game you spend a lot of time running around collecting all of the objects you are used to from a Zelda game all in the attempt of rescuing Zelda from the dark wizard Aghanim. After collecting the Master Sword, the pinnacle of the original game you journey to the tower in Hyrule Castle where the Dark Wizard resides and do battle with him. Up until this point I totally thought I was moments away from beating the game, and a little disappointed at just how short the experience was.

When the finally defeat the wizard, and I remember the battle being rather challenging at the time, you expect to collect your rewards and move on after beating the game. Nope! You are warped into the Dark World and you set upon a different quest. I remember my jaw almost hitting the floor as I realized “there is a whole other world!” This was the very first time I game had done this to me, set up the starter world / real world bait and switch so successfully. In those moments this one game forever changed the way I looked at game in general. So when I played Rage for example… I was totally expecting a bait and switch that unlocked the real game, but alas it was just a really short storyline.

15. Scariest moment in a game:

Crossing Kithicor at night will I think forever be the scariest thing I can think of in any game. For those who are not familiar with it, in the original Everquest there was a zone that sat between the West Commonlands and Rivervale called Kithicor Forest. Both Rivervale and the Commonlands were starter zones and during the day Kithicor was a nice level 15 hunting zone. However at night it changed completely and was filled with tons of level 50 undead creatures that spawned moments after dark and stayed up until the daylight hours. Everquest was an old school game and the only way to move around was to do so by foot. There were a number of druid and wizard ports but those required finding a person of that class, and more often than not it was more trouble than actually running there would have been.

In Everquest there was a concept called “running the zone line”. Since this was an early game a lot of the zones were big squares, and by quirk of the spawning and pathing code the zonelines were generally relatively safe places, though later on they purposefully made some of them dangerous. There were many a time that I would zone into Kithicor just as it was getting dark and praying I could make it across the zone before attracting unwanted attention. In all the times I ran Kithicor, I never actually aggro’d any of the high level undead, but this did not stop me from living in fear of them. It felt like I was constantly moments away from a horrible and grizzly death.

16. Most heart-wrenching moment in a game:

This one took me a little bit to think about it, but the more that I did the more I was certain there was one exact moment that I had to talk about. Well written stories have a way of taking a character that you start out disliking and maybe even hating a little bit… and turning them into something you have come to love. Mass Effect 2 was my first foray into that game series and as such I have a deep love for many of the characters that were introduced in that game. One of them that turned from someone I disliked to someone I came to adore was Mordin Solus. I went ahead and linked the moment for those who have not played the series or plan on playing the series. Essentially through the story line you find out that he was responsible for the genetic disease that caused the Krogan to become sterile.

In Mass Effect 3 he sets out to undo what he had done and is sabotaged by his people and namely the STG the secret group that he was originally a part of. I replayed this section of the game over and over to see if there was a way I could stop this from happening, but as far as I know there simply isn’t. In order to distribute the cure to the Krogan, Mordin realizes he has to die. “Someone else might have gotten it wrong” is his only explanation. I just finished watching the video I am embedding, and man… I still get choked up watching him sacrificing himself in his usual logical manner. It is an absolute sucker punch directly to the feels. Thank you Mass Effect for being able to do this several times during the course of the game. I still think if you turned Mass Effect into a television series, it would be amazing.

17. What are your favorite websites/blogs about games?

This one thankfully is a rather short answer. If it is in my blogroll I read it regularly, and suggest you also read it. My blogroll has gotten so large that I had to implement a database driven system that shows like 20 random blogs at a time, especially since I have a habit of showcasing specific groups of blogs like the Newbie Blogger initiative classes or Blaugust.

18. What’s the last game you finished?

The last game I finished was Divinity: Dragon Commander and you can check out my Steampowered Sunday feature on it here. I had previously beaten Divinity II and loved every moment of it, so in preparation for the release of Divinity: Original Sin I started playing a ton of games by Larian Studios. If you have not played any of their games I highly suggest you check them out. Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity are the only two I have not played yet, but I hear they are both excellent Diablo style games in spite of the fact that they have horrible names. They have this odd habit of not making games in the same genre twice. Dragon Commander for example is this strange Civilization/RTS hybrid, Divinity II is a Skyrim-esc game, Divine/Beyond are Diablo style games and Original Sin is a hard core PC RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate. It is a really interesting company, and they make some awesome games.

19. What future releases are you most excited about?

The only game on the horizon that I am really excited for is Destiny. The reason why I got a Playstation 4 was in huge part because of this game. We had a ton of fun playing it as a group in beta, and I look forward to doing so again when it releases in September. Really interesting FPS with role-playing game elements and at the same time built around a really good shooter engine. The game was gorgeous and the game play extremely enjoyable. You can check out my some of my initial thoughts here. My only frustration is that those playing on Microsoft consoles and those playing on Sony consoles will be on separate servers. We have Microsoft to blame for this one, because they place some odd restrictions on the manufacturers. With FFXIV for example it is on PC and Sony consoles… and all of the players play on the same server.

20. Do you identify as a gamer?

In spite of all of the negativity surrounding the term, I definitely identify myself as a gamer. It is just a part of what makes up me as a person, but it is a very important one. I feel like if we stop using the term gamer, it will become yet in another line of slurs hurled towards people. We need gamers out there doing good and elevating the title to something more than just a basement dwelling misogynistic man-child. I try my damnedest to leave every gaming community I am part of better for my presence there. I try really hard to remain a mostly positive voice, and lead through my actions. So yes, I identify myself as a gamer and it is because I have hope that the term can be something more than derogatory.

21. Why do you play video games?

I guess I have always played video games for as long as I can remember, so at this point there was no single moment that got me into gaming. I am a gamer in all senses of the word… I love video games, board games, pen and paper, even puzzles and the occasional word game. More importantly with video games it allows me to do things I cannot do in real life. I cannot fight back an alien invasion hell bent on the extinction of humanity, nor can I crawl through a dungeon and slay a dragon. Gaming lets me live out lives that I simply could not through any other medium. Sure you can read about someone else’s story in a novel, but gaming lets me make my own stories in vivid three dimensional glory.

All Done!

I did in fact manage to wrap things up today. Look forward to a real post from me tomorrow!