Tales of the Aggronaut

Recording Console Games

June 19, 2014 by Belghast

Bombing Run

Yesterday was an interesting day, partially because I dinged another level and am now officially in my “late thirties”. Most of the morning was spent in preparation for my wife to fly in, and doing a last minute run through the house to “pick up” a bit. Honestly this year I somehow managed to pick up successfully as I went and didn’t really hit the point where I simply stopped caring that there was a pizza box on the kitchen counter. So it really only took a few minutes, and I streamed some Warlords of Draenor while waiting. For a reason that I did not know at the time… none of my voice over was coming through in the stream, but I will get to that later.

I picked up my wife around noon and we ran across town to my favorite Indian restaurant… where I proceeded to order something completely new in honor of the occasion. My standby has always been Chicken Tika Masala medium hot, and no matter how many times I consider ordering something else… I always end up back on that. The new dish was a sort of super spicy egg fried rice with chicken in it that they call Desi Rice. In any fashion it was pretty freaking good. Overall the day was pretty relaxing, and it served as the perfect break in the working week. It was awesome to have my wife back, even if it is only for a few days as she flies out to the second conference of the year Sunday.

What completely overwhelmed me yesterday was all the well wishes from my internet family. Both my twitter and g+ feeds were blowing up with well wishes all day yesterday, and upon logging into teamspeak that night I got another round. I feel completely bombarded, and I thank all of you for that feeling. It kinda feels like the whole Sally Fields “You like me, You really like me” moment. But amazing friends aside… I find it always interesting to see which bot wishes me a happy birthday first. This year and I believe many of the other years recently… the reward goes for the WoW Ace Forums… who wished me a happy birthday at 7 pm on the 17th, which I can only assume is on Australian time? In all seriousness… I am humbled by the amount of support I get from you all.

Recording Console Games

One of the coolest things about the PS4 is that it can stream live to twitch. It also happens to be one of the most disappointing, since the twitch streaming rate is locked to 480p which shocked me. I pretty much religiously stream in 1080p so it was frustrating the first time I cracked open one of my Destiny Alpha videos and saw how blurry the footage was. The other nuisance is that it seems to only record MY voice chat as part of the stream, and not that of the other people I happen to be partied with. The end result is this disjointed experience of listening to an often times hilarious one sided conversation. I figured there had to be a better way.

For some time I had looked at a capture card, but honestly that whole concept was foreign to me. After doing a ton of research I realized there was a huge problem there, with the way the streaming worked. The two consoles that I most wanted to stream from were the Sony Playstation 3 and Sony Playstation 4… both of which I absolutely love. The problem is that in both cases they use HDCP or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection aka a screwball system that tries to encrypt the video data from the source to the television. Apparently the Xbox One also struggles with this, and for some reason in all of these systems it is either on all of the time… or turned on the first time you play a movie and then stays on. Normally this would prevent you from recording gameplay footage, because the recording device is not “HDCP Compliant”.

The widely accepted workaround is to plug these consoles into the capture card using component cables. This however causes its own stream of problems as you take a digital signal… convert it to analog and then convert it back to digital. The end result is often blurry and color shifted and just not something I wanted to mess with. So after a lot of research I stumbled on the above video. Basically the idea is to use an HDMI splitter to get around the HDCP lockout without actually stripping the HDCP protection and making the device illegal for sale. All of this is voodoo to me to be honest, but I wanted to give it a shot. I managed to find an Elgato HD Capture device on Craigslist and got a ridiculously good deal on it, therefore enabling this entire thing to work. As of last night I had the set up going and it worked successfully, after a few attempts to work out the kinks. Sorry for the twitch advertisement spam on twitter.

Rube Goldberg of Streaming

This ladies and gentleman is my streaming setup. I decided to diagram it out in part because it made it actually make sense rather than the jumble of cables that I have running around my desktop. Right now I have both the PS3 and PS4 hooked up in this fashion and will ultimately move the Xbox 360 in here as well. For the setup I am proposing you need the following materials.

The Elgato comes with one HDMI cable and the necessary Micro to Full USB Cable. Like I said I got mine through a craigslist deal for $75 enabling this whole setup to work. So the only thing I was actually missing was the splitter. After doing a lot of research on the subject it seems like only a few splitters do what is needed. Thankfully the one I ordered and linked above is both tiny and works great. Ultimately I want to get some much shorter usb cables because right now… having all these 6 foot cables is a mess. Essentially you hook all of your game systems to the HDMI switch, and then hook the switch to an HDMI splitter, and then hook one of the two outbound ports to the Elgato. That then passes the signal to the television and your computer. You can download software from the Elgato website that does a decent job at capture, but I simply integrated all of this into my existing OBS setup.

Trial and Error

After a lot of trial and error I was able to produce a video of me playing Castle of Illusion on the PS3. I do a rather horrible job at playing the game, but that is entirely beside the point. Basically I could have died over and over and still would have been amused because the setup was working. The only problem is… I seemed to be unable to record any dialog from my microphone. I spent the better part of this video fiddling with my settings in OBS trying to make it function again. The video however looked great, and was streaming to twitch and exporting to youtube in glorious 1080p. The trouble with my headset started over the weekend when I decided to disconnect it from my machine and hook it to my ps4 for the purpose of grouping up in Destiny.

Being a USB headset, everything seemed to go wonky when I did this and everything from mumble, to teamspeak to obs treated the headset as though it had never been connected to the system, forcing me to remap everything. Then I remembered… I had hooked the headset previously directly into my machine, and was now trying to go through my powered hub. So I pulled the headset out, hooked it directly into the machine and bam… all of the sudden OBS started working again. This second video has dialog coming across and with the help of my good friend Ashgar, I managed to sort out the volume levels so that I could actually be heard over the game audio. So I feel like right now I have a repeatable solution for streaming HDMI connected consoles over twitch.

Now my specific setup is not a requirement… there are lots of different ways to do this. Some folks have had good luck installing a cheap capture card in their PC and streaming through that. The Elgato seemed like a more hands free solution to working out the finer points of video conversion. There however are a bunch of different devices on the market that do essentially the same thing. I wanted the Elgato simply because it did not require an additional power source and could draw power entirely from my PC over USB. Since the HDMI switch and splitter each have their own power supplies, this just cut down on the total number of cords needed. Right now the hole thing is a colossal mess, and at some point I want to hook it up with significantly shorter cables. For now however it works great and I am super happy to be able to do this.

Fires of Kel Vorath

June 18, 2014 by Belghast

The Vanishing

There are things that happened yesterday, that I feel like I want to talk about… but at the same time I probably shouldn’t. Suffice to say a good friend of mine pulled the ripcord yesterday and jettisoned out of the internet briefly. I kept trying to figure out if it was something I did or said, but it seems like there were just larger things happening that I will never fully understand. While it was happening though I was supremely confused and depressed to be watching it going on… and felt rather helpless to stop it. I have a bad habit of trying to internalize these things, and trying to figure out how exactly I had failed the person. Luckily for us at least, the person seems to be reversing course a bit… and since friends are friends I am ready to welcome them back with open arms regardless.

A few weeks ago I was moved to send out a blanket tweet and I honestly don’t even remember why at the moment. While I don’t remember what started it, the sentiment is very heart felt. Each and every one of you makes my life better in some way. We might grouse and bicker and have bad days, but at the end of the day I am better off because each of you exists out there and has touched me in some way. We use the word “community” a lot, but in many ways it doesn’t really sum it up. You guys are my family, and not the uncle that you never see and always thought was kind of weird… but the ones you wish you saw more often. As an adult, your friends are the family you choose to associate with. I don’t draw lines between real life and online… because the effect is real either way. So I just wanted to start my blog post this morning in trying to remind you all what you mean to me.

Fires of Kel Vorath

The better part of last night I spent trying to finish out the Auroria zone in Wildstar. The further into that zone you get, the more intense the questing becomes. The other night I ran the Ruins of Kel Vorath dungeon with some guildies, and last night I finally reached that area in zone. It is absolutely massive and everything seems to exist on this grand epic scale. The only thing I can really equate it to is doing the quests outside of Dire Maul in World of Warcraft, but imagine that Dire Maul was maybe four to five times bigger. Almost an hour of that time was spent doing a single zone event quest as I helped the dominion retake Kel Vorath. The rewards were minimal but the experience gain was phenominal. At the beginning of the night I was level 22 and now I am level 24 and about halfway into it.

I came into Wildstar expecting fun mechanics and a really enjoyable world to wander around in and explore. I had zero expectations of epic story so I am really pleasantly surprised to find it. I have no clue how much of the zone I have left. Right now I am hung up on a main story quest because I cannot for the life of me find the mob I am supposed to be killing. The indicator is on my map, and I have wandered around the entire area without finding any place that lets me go underground where the indicator seems to point me. Unfortunately the game is just new enough that there really are not many guides out there that I can even lean on as a crutch. So if I ever manage to find Kaarg the Divine… then I imagine I will be wrapping up the zone in rapid succession. I have the quest leading me out of Auroria to speak to someone at Palerock Post, so I think I am as “done” as it comes other than this one straggler.

PVPness

I don’t have any proper screenshots from last night, so instead here is a shot of me standing on this giant gun. Zelibeli decided to schedule a PVP night last night, and in an attempt to spur it on I showed up and participated. Several of my friends had a pen and paper game going on, so I knew attendance would be at least somewhat limited. I am supposed to be participating in the game, but for one reason or another I have not actually made it to a single meeting. So I figured it was just fine if I didn’t make this one either. We actually had five people ready to go for PVP, the only problem was that we were not complimentary levels. This might be an oversight on their part, but for whatever reason it does not seem like you can mentor down to the lowest player and queue together for PVP. Maybe this is their way of trying to prevent “smurfing”, but in any case it also meant that we all needed to swap to alts to make this work.

I grabbed my level eight warrior, because quite literally… that is the only character I have other than my engineer that has finished the “ship” starter area. First thing I have to say is that I suck horribly at pvp, and as a result I tend to actively avoid it. That said PVP in this game is much like PVP was in Warhammer Online… as in it is a phenominal way to level a character. I went into the night about halfway through level either, and exited the night almost level eleven. We ran maybe five matches, towards the end we were starting to get the swing of things. We were playing Walatiki Temple, which in many ways is like a remix of Warsong Gultch. Instead of being a pure capture the flag scenario, it is a “collect the things” one. In that you capture these Moodie Masks that spawn in the center of the zone and take them back to your base.

The catch is that you can also capture masks from your base. So in theory you have to guard the middle objective and your own base to be able to win it. We were doing a fair job of limiting the hemorrhaging towards the end of the night until someone started shooting off his mouth about how dumb we were for guarding the masks at home… causing the entire team to get distracted and fumble. People really are the worst part of PVP, and I wish in many ways there was NO chat in the battleground. If they simply had a smart ping system like league of legends has, I think most of the chat could simply disappear. The challenge we had last night is that ultimately we ended up against other premades, and quite simply we were not exactly “premade” quality.

In World of Warcraft, if you queued as a five man you got matched against other groups that queued as a five man. From the way that we got trounced I am guessing that the Exile players were a combination of two five man premades. They each worked flawlessly to whittle down our defenses and at the same time keep pushing forwards and taking masks. All of this said… I really was surprised just how much I enjoyed myself, and bolstered by just how little the rest of the AofA folks cared about winning. We were there to play the game and play it as well as we could while we could. With that sort of attitude I can totally see this becoming a regular thing. I like playing anything… and so long as folks keep a good attitude about it I can deal with losing all night long if we do. The big positive is that win or lose you still get a ton of experience and a satchel of goods, so I came out way ahead at the end of the night.

#Wildstar #WalatikiTemple #Auroria #FiresOfKelVorath

Ruins of Kel Voreth

June 17, 2014 by Belghast

One More Day

Tomorrow has a fairly significant sequence of events happening. Firstly my wife is flying back into town from the first conference of the summer, and secondly she is doing so on my birthday. Currently I care far more about the first part of that statement than the second. These conferences are always rough especially when they straddle my birthday. There have been times in the past when I was all alone for the occasion and it is really hard to keep from disconnecting from the world. However tomorrow when I ding 38 I will have my wife back home, and I hope her trip is safe and expedient. The flight back home from this event in past years has been riddled with downtime and layovers… and I hope she actually arrives on time this year.

As far as the birthday part of tomorrow, I really have no clue what I will be doing. I took the day off from work mostly because she would be flying in and I would need to get to the airport and pick her up without really knowing an exact time based on past years experience. I figure I will likely either play Wildstar or something on the PS4 while waiting. Past that I have no real big plans, as I won’t likely get together with family until the weekend. I always have a sort of contest to see which automated bot wishes me a happy birthday first. So I am curious who will win that race this year. Its funny when we live in a time when that is a “thing” and I take a perverse sense of pleasure in it.

I just hope that I will be breathing tomorrow. For the last several days my allergies have been going haywire and this morning it finally hit my lungs. I woke up today struggling to breathe, and am contemplating taking a breathing treatment. If it stays too bad even after the treatment I am not sure if I will be able to go to work in this condition. Having asthma and allergies is a blast… and right now the cottonwood is blowing hard outside. I wish I could find wherever the cottonwood tree is and remove it… because it seriously makes my life miserable every year. However I guess were it not for the cottonwood… the would be something else to take its place in the making my life miserable department.

Buying Rapidfire

As of yesterday morning I was sitting outside the Fire Powered Ship sequence that ultimately leads to the fire crystal. I had been assigned the Geomancer for my fire job, and having had it in the past… I knew I really wanted no part of it. As a result I ended up using Gilgabot’s Job Fair to buy my way to freedom. If you end up with an assignment that you really do not like for whatever reason, you can donate more money to charity to “buy” the class you really wanted. As a result I ended up picking up the ranger for my fire crystal, though it might have been interesting to see what it would be like with a ninja instead. The ranger gives me access to rapidfire, probably the most overpowered melee-friendly secondary ability in the game. With the knight it will likely be an i-win button against a few of the later fights.

Last night I played through the Fire Powered Ship, collapsing Karnak Castle and the Ancient Library in rapid succession. I continued on to Jachol and Cresent Island and now have officially gained my Ranger crystal. Tonight I will play through the Ancient Desert which should be interesting to say the least. Not sure if I will steam roll the sandworm or get steamrolled to be honest. I would really like to get through Soul Cannon tonight if I can and pick up my earth crystal. I went ahead and requested this yesterday when I picked up the fire crystal just so I would know whether or not I wanted to buy my way to freedom again. I was given the Dragoon which honestly I am fine with. I’ve always loved the dragoon in the Final Fantasy games that have had them, so actually looking forward to finishing with it. Maybe it is that I have just recently played through this much of the game already during our draft game, but it seems like it is going so much faster for me.

Ruins of Kel Voreth

Last night at some point during the night I had muted Teamspeak, and not realized it. So while I had wondered why everyone was being quiet I didn’t really think much about it until Tam messaged me asking what I was up to. I guess they were pulling together a dungeon run, and while I had considered going to sleep… I opted to stay and dps the run since Shandrah would be tanking. I have to say the Wildstar dungeon experience is kinda amazing. I know I have said this about other games, but Wildstar dungeons really do feel like World of Warcraft raids. We would have likely wiped over and over were it not for the fact that Shanbot has been running the dungeons with pugs since she often plays during a west coast timeframe host often. As a result she knew exactly what to do on each of the boss strategies, and we managed to make it through the instance without much in the way of wipes.

As the dungeon went on the encounters ramped up significantly. One of the things i liked was that there seemed to be a bit of randomness to the dungeon itself. One of my friends mentioned that when they had been in the dungeon the quests they were given were completely different. The final encounter was something that could only be described as “Bullet Hell MMO”. As a fan of the Bullet Hell shooter, I found the encounter really interesting. We wiped the first time because it had bugged out and we managed to get phases one and two happening at the same time. Without this bug occurring the encounter was actually rather manageable. I am honestly amazed that any pugs are able to get through this dungeon, let alone do so in a timely manner. Now I find myself really looking forward to running it again.

The big change for me last night was that I had literally just finished setting up a DPS build in my second slot. I had been slogging through content since about level 20 as a full tank, and honestly I thought I might have an easier time dpsing my way through the encounters. It was fortuitous that at that moment almost exactly, Tam got ahold of me to dps the dungeon. Now I feel like I have both hotbars set up and ready to go if I need to do this again. I really liked dpsing as an engineer and might have to install damage meters just to see if I am even vaguely close to the other dps in performance. I feel like I am lagging behind, but maybe that is just because I am not used to doing it. A lot of the engineer dps abilities are tightly targeted and it is hard trying to lay them down in a way that the mobs won’t move out of them until the effect fades. I look forward to giving it another try another night… and increasing my performance.

Wildstar PVP

Tonight ZeliBeli has scheduled a PVP night in Wildstar, so I will be doing that along with some FF5. If you are on Evindra Dominion you should totally check out the anook event if you are interested. I have not even touched PVP so far in the game, so I look forward to getting my feet wet with friends. As it stands right now, since tomorrow is my Birthday I do not have a Elder Scrolls Online night scheduled, because really I have no clue what tomorrow evening might bring. Here is hoping that my wife is back home and that all of her flights were successful. In the meantime, going to beat things up with the guildies in Walatiki Temple.

#Wildstar #FF5 #FourJobFiesta #RuinsofKelVoreth

The Devil’s Lair

June 16, 2014 by Belghast

Bad Decisions

I am still feeling pretty lousy from this allergy induced stupor, so last night I just was not really feeling Wildstar and interacting with other human beings. I ended up logging out about 9:30 and attempting to lay down. I hung out in bed for awhile snuggling with our cats but sleep just refused to take me. So as a result I ended up getting back up and decided I would begin my four job fiesta run. My intent was just to go through the process of backing up my savegame files from the previous draft run we were doing, and simply start the game going… maybe get to the first crystal. Next thing I know it is midnight and I am moments away from getting the fire crystal.

Now however I am paying the price because I feel nice and groggy to add to my allergy induced stupor. It is funny how a game you have played so many times can be so enthralling. So far I am off to a pretty good start. My first job was the Knight which lead to a really easy start to the game and me just being able to roll over the top of almost every encounter thanks to the power of “Two Handed”. The second pick from Gilgobot was the Red Mage, which still worked okay since I did not have either the black or white mage in the first round. Also the Red Mage can totally use a Two-Hander if equipped with that ability, so still pretty much rolling over the top of everything without having to cast any magic at all.

Since I am just a little ways from getting the fire crystal I went ahead and requested my fire job. Now is when things start to fall apart. I wound up with the Geomancer, which is one of my least favorite classes. This means I do have a use for bells… but I’ve always felt the geomancer was somewhat of a useless pick. Basically I have a couple of options… I can either deal with it and struggle through or I can donate money to Four Job Fiesta to buy my way out of geomancer hell. I have yet to decide what to do, and ultimately this is why I chose to request my job a little early so I could mull it over. Basically I have to make a decision before I collect the fire job crystals with which way I am going to go. I would have far rather had ninja or ranger, but then again I would have rather had mystic knight than red mage. but more than happy to roll with the punches there.

Destiny Group Play

Yesterday afternoon after I had finished editing the podcast and writing my morning blog post that almost turned into an afternoon one, I opted to do some Destiny with Tamrielo and Ashgar. At this point Tam and I were both completely sold on the game, but Ash however was not really feeling the game. While I was finishing up my blog post, Ash and tam ran through the first mission in good time and the three of us entered the “Explore Cosmodrome” map point which was a free roaming version of the Old Russia area you visit in the first static mission. We wandered around out there for some time getting both Tam and I to level 7 and Ashgar to level 6. The mobs we encountered ranged from level 2 near the entrance to the area, to level 4 in the instanced areas… and finally level 8 or 9 deep in the zone.

I had the forethought to set this up and stream while we ran around. The interesting thing about the playstation party communication is that apparently it ONLY records my voice. This leads for some odd one sided conversation going on as you watch the video. After having a blast running around in a free form area, we decided to take it to the next level and do what is in essence their first dungeon set in the same basic area. I have to say the concept works… like the boss fights in Borderlands 2 were interesting, but they never really reminded me of the level of complexity found in an MMO boss fight. Destiny seems to bridge that gap and provided us with a number of extremely challenging encounters. The first one was a sort of “hold this spot” fight where we were flooded with really horrible things in the room with us.

The Devil’s Lair

The first encounter essentially involved setting off one of our ghosts to work on scanning an objective, while it does this we have to hold the position. During this time we encountered a brand new mob type that we had not seen to that point called a “Stealth Vandal”. These are the sniper type mobs but they spawn in stealthed and remain so until they actually strike. Now their form of stealth is not truly hidden, but they blend in with the background “predator” like. It took us several tries to get a feel for how the encounter worked and manage to place each of us strategically around the room. Even after doing so it still involved a lot of running around chaotically looking for a safe bit of cover to attack from. Every so often one of us would have to stay alive long enough for another one to spawn back in. This becomes a crucial skill since when the last player dies… the entire team respawns back at the checkpoint and you have to redo the encounter from the start.

The second encounter was the one we had been waiting for. Periodically when in the open world version of the zone these group encounters spawn in. One of them is this insane walking tank that has a blast attack that you simply cannot hide from effectively. If you are on the other side of the wall when it goes off, it will still very much one shot you. The idea behind the encounter is that you have to take out a piece of leg armor, which causes it to fall down temporarily and expose a weak point behind the red cockpit looking shell. You can only whittle down so much health during each one of these phases. So the biggest problem we ran into during the fight is that we simply ran out of ammunition. Every so often another drop ship lands, and periodically it spawns the little drones… all of which are decent sources of ammunition. But this also forces one to make a suicidal run dangerously close to the walking tank to be able to gather it up effectively.

I wish I had thought to fire up the stream before going into the mission, because I swear we were fighting the tank for a good thirty minutes. Once we got to the other side of it, things started to get super creepy. You walk through an area littered with hundreds and hundreds of bones strewn everywhere. I started to wonder if I accidentally teleported into a Doom game, but I have to say I am loving the atmosphere so far. I really have no clue what exactly the “Fallen” are yet, but they seem to be some sort of incectoid baddies similar to the Prothean/Collectors from Mass Effect. Honestly there can be parallels made between those two games in many ways, as the atmosphere often feels like you would imagine Mass Effect would feel if the Reapers came and decimated the planet. So far I am hooked, and looking forward to getting to play more of it. Right now we have managed to hit the cap allowed in this first alpha test, which sucks a bit because each of us have gear that will never be equippable as we cannot get higher than level 8. That said it was a really good time, and I hope to play some of the other classes to see if I like them better.

Wildstar

My plan is tonight to play Wildstar, and work on finishing Auroria on my Engineer. Right now I have reached a point where I am just tired of that zone and want to move on. The southern area of the zone is extremely nasty, and I feel like I am almost underleveled to be able to complete it successfully. I am wondering if I need to go back and finish some of the challenges that I didn’t quite make to see if I can finish off 22. I am also considering making myself a secondary hotbar setup with non-tanky abilities to see how much more smoothly questing goes. Right now my biggest problem is that it takes forever for me to kill anything, and while I can stay alive for a really long time… that time is not infinite. I feel like I am high center right now on my engineer, so I need to do something to get back into the swing of playing it.

#Destiny #DevilsLair #FourJobFiesta #FinalFantasyV