streaming Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Drag Experience

August 27, 2015 by Belghast

Youtube Gaming

The big buzz worthy thing that is happening right now is that Google is rolling out its Youtube Gaming platform. It proudly announces that finally there is a youtube for gamers! Which causes me to pause and ask… wasn’t YouTube already for gamers? At least 90% of the content that I watch on YouTube tends to be video game related so… I think it was doing a fine job before. What gets slightly lost in the marketing spin however is that they are now offering twitch like streaming services. Which in itself is a big confusing because I have had the ability to stream to YouTube for roughly a year now. There was even a page in my channel settings that explained how to connect OBS to the YouTube RTMP servers. I guess the big difference is that people are starting to actually use it. I played around a bit watching various folks streaming and there were a few issues. The biggest thing I kept running into was the stream was hitching periodically. It also seemed that people were confused and simply unprepared to field YouTube chat. Also it feels strange that when I interact with other people I show up as “Tales of the Aggronaut” which is my YouTube channel and not “Belghast”. I am wondering if this is a setting somewhere I can configure, but thusfar I have not found it. In fact there seems to be really limited configuration options for channels in the first place, which means… I sure hope you had your YouTube channel set up how you wanted it before the gaming site imports it!

On some level I find this all interesting, but mostly in passing. I’ve recently switched from attempting to make Hitbox a thing, to giving up and just using Twitch because I simply got more random viewers. I felt like Hitbox was the superior service in every way, because the most crucial thing for me is minimal delay between your stream and the channel chat. It becomes so awkward to try and hold a conversation with someone who happens to be watching your stream where there is a lengthy delay. Twitch recently put in functionality to help alleviate some of this, and it works… sometimes. In order for me to even consider switching to YouTube, there would have to be a set up similar to Hitbox where there was little to no delay. The problem being that what I am hearing in practice is that the chat delay is often longer than that of Twitch currently. I guess at some point I will swap the configuration in OBS and give it a test to see how precisely it works. The other thing that concerns me is that from what I understand your stream gets backed up to your YouTube channel regardless. I liked being able to pick and choose what I exported from Twitch, keeping my YouTube channel as a cleaner version of whatever I happened to stream. What are your thoughts so far if you have tried it or watched someone else streaming on it?

Drag Experience

When Diablo 3 2.0 was released the AggroChat folks played it quite a bit. For the most part all of us had characters in the level 60ish range… that is except for Kodra. Kodra had not really played much Diablo 3, but we knew that the game granted some extreme experience to folks being drug along with you. Over the course of a few play sessions we managed to catch him up, but it was an exceptionally fraught experience for him. Last night after our Final Fantasy XIV raid, my good friend Grace asked if I wanted to tag along as she farmed in Diablo. She would get bonus loot and I would be able to soak in the lions share of experience. During the course of an hour and a half I went from level 40 on my Crusader to level 70 gaining about 5 paragon levels after that. I got to experience first hand the sort of game play Kodra did, and I have to say I understand why it frustrated him. I would have leveled so much faster… if I could stay alive. Grace was farming Torment V which meant if anything even glanced in my direction I exploded in a violent eruption of giblets. I was simply playing a different game than what she was… which was more akin to dodgeball. Carefully trying to stay in the part of the screen where the mobs were not spawning, and dodging projectiles as they came in.

The resulting experience however was just silly. There was no point in ever repairing my completely broken body, because I was leveling out of my gear too fast for it to matter. Finally when I hit 70 I was able to piece together enough gear to be “passable”. The biggest problem is just how behind the curve you end up being when you finally hit the level cap. While I could survive damage for a bit, I lacked any semblance of gear to be able to actually do Torment V style damage. We did manage to encounter a few bugs that kept us from getting loot. The saddest of these occasions was when some treasure goblins died just out of bounds and I was able to watch a dozen legendary patterns rotting in a place I could not loot from. However we also completed a number of bounties, and from those I got plenty of patterns as well. This allowed me at the end of the night to craft a few legendaries and a green chest piece and get my gear at least to a point where I could function. I am super thankful for the speed run, because this gives me something to dink around with until the new season starts Friday. Right now the game plan is to start a Female Warrior, since I love Sonya so much in Heroes of the Storm. The crusader is awesome, but I am not sure if I want to duplicate that experience again so quickly.

Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015

May 1, 2015 by Belghast

It’s That Time Again!

Well folks it is once again May the First and as such time for us to begin the Newbie Blogger Initiative. For those that are unfamiliar with this program, I thought I would take a few minutes this morning and talk about what exactly it is and what you can expect from it over the coming month. May is essentially the month that bloggers set aside to helping create more bloggers. In order to do what we do we need a thriving community to live in, and this is our version of a neighborhood block party. I once referred to NBI as the BlizzCon of the gaming blogosphere, because really this is the event I look forward to each year. It is exciting seeing all of the new faces filtered into our world, and seeing others rededicate themselves to creating more frequent content. Others of us just enjoy helping folks out to get their start with whatever projects they are wanting to do.

For New Bloggers

If you have ever thought about creating a blog, a podcast, or a youtube channel this event is solely centered around you. For years we have heard that “blogging” is dead but the fact that I have over five hundred active blogs in my feedly account would disagree. Each time I go to read through my gaming blogs it is like drinking from a firehose. I love this and I love the fact that there is so much creativity packed into this community. However in order to keep this a vibrant and fresh community we keep needing to infuse it with some new blood and new ideas. One of the most difficult parts about starting any new venture is getting an audience. It can be frustrating to feel like you are writing into the void, and in part the Newbie Blogger Initiative is here to give you what you need most… exposure.

During this month the gaming blogosphere turns its eyes to the Newbie Blogger Initiative and by choosing to start a blog during this month we are essentially hand delivering you readers. Now of course starting the blog is the easy part, creating regular and creative content is the challenge. Throughout the month veteran bloggers will be giving you tips and tricks that we have to help ease your transition. This has always been a very blogging centric event, but we want to embrace all gaming content. There have been quite the number of new podcasts spawned out of this event and the connections with other bloggers, as well as a few folks dipping their toes into video creation. Essentially the sky is the limit on what you can do, but you have to start someplace and we are here to help.

For Veteran Bloggers

While all of this love is getting thrown around on the new bloggers, it is really the Veteran bloggers that make up the backbone of this initiative. We need you, your ideas and your wisdom. Blogging is rough, and getting up and doing this on a daily basis means we need some tools to be able to lean on. Each of you started out as a fledgling blogger at one point or another, and many of you got a massive boost by the Newbie Blogger Initiative in the past. Now is the time for us to step up and help the next generation to become the awesome bloggers of tomorrow. Many times these new bloggers just need someone to talk to and bounce their ideas off. I personally am always open to new blogger queries and during the course of this event I will end up trying to make a personal connection with as many of the new folks as I can.

What we need more than anything however is for you to keep making awesome content. Let the bloggers know what works for you, what you have figured out doesn’t work, and general ideas about how to make a blog successful. I’ve talked about a lot of topics in the past, and there are a few of them I end up dusting off almost every year. More than anything we need you showing that this is an achievable goal, and that given dedication you can succeed. Each of us has tricks that we use to keep us going, and at the end of the day someone starting this is going to need a big bag of tricks to lean on. Channel your gifts in whatever direction you feel best be it with writing prompts, tutorials or lessons learned, but whatever they might be we need you to make this work. There are already folks signed up on the forums waiting for us to find them, so I suggest you sign up as mentor today.

For Wayward Bloggers

Now especially I want to address a special kind of blogger this year that I might not have in the past. Have you lost your way blogging, and somehow lost the will to put pen to paper and create new content? While I am generally thought of as this prolific daily blogger, there are some pretty massive lapses in my blogging history. I recently celebrated my second anniversary of making posts every single day… but prior to starting that there was a seven month lag in my blog. It is easy to “fall off the wagon” for lack of a better term. Life gets in the way and your font of inspiration dries up… then the longer you wait to make a post the more pressure you put yourself under about making said post. We are our own worst enemies, and as the months tick you suddenly realize you are no longer really a blogger.

Newbie Blogger Initiative is also the perfect time of the year for you to get active once again. Sometimes we start down a path that doesn’t end up as sustainable for our interests, and other times life just simply throws us a curve ball. In any case I urge you to take this month to get back into blogging. We are here and waiting to help you with whatever you might need to tweak on your blog to make it sustainable. We are also waiting with a ready audience to consume your brand new and shiny content. Each year we lose a number of bloggers to life, and I am hoping to help resurrect some of them and get them making content once more. The Newbie Blogger Initiative is so much more than just a launch pad for new blogs. It can be the vitalization of our community every single year, giving us a new perspective to carry us through the next year. If you want to come back to blogging regularly, we are waiting for you.

#NBI2015

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

Impressive but Still Beta

July 8, 2014 by Belghast

Auto Update

“Wow, I’ve never seen that happen before” is generally something you never want to hear uttered from an auto mechanic. That said at this point my wife’s vehicle is fixed and ready to go and seems to have no negative impact. Apparently on the Pontiac Torrent there are two different sizes of bolts that can be used to attach the tensioner. Quite simply when they replaced that part they used the wrong one, and as we were driving Sunday the vibration and force sheared the bolt off completely causing the serpentine belt to shread, and at the same time stopping the flow of motion to both the water pump and the alternator.

The good folks at Hibdon were more than willing to fix the problem, and after getting the vehicle towed there yesterday morning they had already fixed everything by mid day. It is one one of those “honest mistake” type situations, and I don’t fault them for it… especially since they are also the ones responsible for making it right. It was a grand inconvenience but thankfully my wife really had nowhere that she needed to go yesterday. I cringe when I think how much worse this could have gone had the bolt sheared and she lost power to major systems while out on the highway with no place to really pull to the side of the road. We were likely saved by the fact that it happened so close to our home and we did not drive it long enough to cause a radiator boil over.

Steam In Home Streaming

One of the problems with having multiple machines is that ultimately the game you happen to want to play is not installed on the machine you are sitting at. Yes I realize this is a first world problem, as I am extremely lucky to be able to have both a nice gaming laptop and gaming desktop, but this is something I have tried to deal with for some time. I’ve tried gaming over various versions of remote desktop, and none of them work well enough to offer a passable experience. I am not sure who mentioned it first, but the other day I said something about steam logging you out when you tried to log in a second machine. Apparently this has not been the case for some time. What happens now is that you see all of the games available installed from all of the machines you happen to be logged into on your network. The cool thing about this is instead of the play button you now see a Stream button as shown above.

Last night I decided to try this out, and I had some mixed results. This all started because I decided that I wanted to play catch up on True Blood which meant needing to hang out downstairs with my laptop. True Blood is one of those shows where about halfway through the third season it went off the rails and I stopped caring about it. That said at the same time I felt like after spending that much time watching it… I felt committed to seeing it through to the end. Like if I stopped my choice to watch it in the first place would have somehow been invalidated. Sadly this is how I end up feeling about most television, and why I am still watching Bleach after all these episodes… when essentially every season is EXACTLY THE SAME. All that aside the game I wanted to play last night was not installed on my laptop, so it was either steam streaming or a 10 gig download over wifi.

Impressive but Still Beta

I have to say that the actual game play was rather impressive. The game I was streaming was not exactly fast paced and action oriented… in that I was playing Divinity: Original Sin. There was a minor input lag, but I seriously might be the only one who actually would have noticed it. For example I refuse to use a wireless mouse because I can feel the slight hesitation of the wireless lag… whereas none of the rest of the world seems to be able to. The biggest thing I noticed is that it felt like I was watching YouTube video. Since you are in essense streaming video across your network, there was a certain measure of blurring and artifacting of the screen. This was most noticeable when confronted with large areas of a dark color, but it was not bad enough to be anything more than an annoyance.

The deal breaker for me however was that every time I tried to alt+tab out of the game to check something… the stream would crash out, and in a game where saving your progress is important this meant that a couple of times last night I lost a bunch of progress. Alt+tabbing is something that is just habitual at this point, and I have done it before I even realize I did it. So all of the problems I had with Skyrim apply here, in that either I have to force myself to NEVER alt tab… or I have to deal with the consequences of my actions. As a result I decided to just simply deal with installing yet another game in two places. Unfortunately since Divinity: Original Sin does not use the steamworks cloud save functionality… this also means I will be manually copying saved games between the two machines each time I decide to switch systems.

Steam in home streaming is of course still very much a beta product, and hopefully they will fix the alt+tab thing. When they do I can see myself using it quite a bit more often, especially as my laptop ages. What this really gives you is the ability to play games using the full horse power of your gaming machine, while on another machine that simply acts as a viewer and input device. I’ve even seen video of someone playing games at full frame rate using a chromebook with linux side loaded onto it. If they ever get internet streaming working, and manageable lag wise… this means there might be a time when you could play all the games on your home machine from your tablet while travelling. What I would love to see is for this to work in a more universal fashion, so I could play the games from my PS4 while sitting at my PC or versa vicea. I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet, but it gives me hope that maybe at some point we will be.

Old Addictions

Over the weekend there was a point where my wife needed to get out of the house and do anything. She had been sitting in the house for over 72 hours at that point, and just needed to see something other than the walls around her. While we didn’t really have much in the way of errands to run, I decided to co-opt the trip and run around and visit a few pawn shops. I’ve always loved going to pawn shops, because you really never know what you might find there. Since I hate paying full price for anything, they are a smorgasbord of potentially awesome things for cheap. One of the various ones we went to had a bunch of their Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 games for as low as $5 a piece. I picked up used copies of Tekken 6, The Simpsons Game, Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavy Rain and a copy of Fallout 3: Game of the Year edition.

One of the things I have always been curious about is playing Fallout or Elder Scrolls on a console, so for $5 I could not pass the the chance to see “how the other half lived”. When we got home I had this grand idea of testing out all of the games… but never actually made it past Fallout 3. I booted up the game and spent the next three hours playing it before I realized how much time had passed. This is one of those games that I can play over and over and never quite get bored of it, and I always thought it was the ability to modify it that made it so intriguing to me. Playing on a console I have no modding at all available, so I realize it really was the game itself. I am completely happy to wander around with wastes with nothing but a pistol, dispensing justice.

Last night after we finished our walk I went back upstairs to cool down, and made the mistake of turning on the television and continuing the journey into the wastes. Next thing I know it is 12:30 and I am scrambling to get back to Megaton extremely encumbered, but at the same time completely unwilling to drop any of my plunder. This will be interesting to say the least. One of the “mods” I always install when playing the PC game is something that removes encumbrance, because I absolutely hate playing the inventory management simulation that is a Bethesda game. That said at this point I feel committed to seeing just how well the Fallout 3 experience translates to a console. Additionally it has been a really long time since I have played Fallout 3, as more recently I tend to play New Vegas when I get the fallout itch. It is amazing just how much more I like Three Dog, than Mister New Vegas.

#SteamStreaming #Fallout3 #PS3