The end of the Dead Space run has come

This time, Seferia did not have the technical glitches. However, Shayla on the other hand… Her mic became possessed by powers that possibly were summoned by Harv. Yea, I’m pretty certain that Harv was the one who set her up for the downfall.

Also, a lot and very public Happy Birth to Harv. The guy didn’t have cake though. So, poor guy. Cake is good. Especially if it were ice cream cake.

Anyway, want to watch the end of the saga? Feel free to check it out below.

Continue reading The end of the Dead Space run has come

The end is drawing near

Tri Ultimate is releasing this month, which means that the weekly stream for P3rd is likely going to conclude in two weeks or so. This doesn’t mean that I’m done with P3rd streaming nor weekly monster hunter streams. No, it just means that the P3rd stream will be replaced with a TriU stream.

I’d also probably be likely to move the date of the weekly stream to make it work out a bit better, maybe. I don’t know. I’ll see if Friday is still a desirable day. I have time to think on that matter.

P3rd streams will likely occur when I have the whim to go onto P3rd. However, Freedom Fridays will be set free.

Anyway, enough of that talk. I’m not even fully certain what my plans are yet.

Anyway, this past Friday, I did stream P3rd again and this time, I think that I have the audio working nearly perfectly with what I want. I might need some tweaks and such, but it sounded much more stable from what I’ve skimmed over.

Unfortunately, Xsplit did have a silly error near the start of the stream. However, that was just a random error that could not be planned for. Sadly, computer programs do occasionally do that.

Anyway, feel free to watch the recordings. I’m open to any feedback, especially on the audio quality.

Continue reading The end is drawing near

More lessons while experimenting

I’m still on my quest for the perfection in which I seek. This perfection is escaping me for now, but I will eventually obtain it, I swear.

However, Trillian turned out to not be the key to that perfection.

Last night, I once again performed a number of test streams. This time around, I did some research and looked at my resources. When I glanced over what programs were munching up resources, I quickly found that Skype likes to eat a whole lot of resources. I also noticed that Trillian, on the other hand, does not. So, a brilliant plan of using Trillian instead of Skype for stream Skype calls came into play.

It didn’t work out as well as the brilliant plan idea that had been envisioned. Apparently, while Trillian does indeed use less resources, it doesn’t have an option to turn off the mic volume adjustments. So, my voice was regularly brought to a near whisper thanks to the program’s tendencies. So, Trillian has been cut out of the available options.

Maybe I’ll look into the mumble thing that had been mentioned once. I remember using vent while on WoW, and that was a nice program, though I wouldn’t want to pay for another vent server.

Anyway, if you want to watch the fail, here you go.

Continue reading More lessons while experimenting

Bash things enough, and maybe something happens

This past week has been filled with a lot of trial and error. For that bit, I apologize. I wish that I could get programs to work the way that I want them to the first shot. However, things regularly need to be bashed in order to discover all the bugs. Then tweaked and bashed again.

It’s never a pretty process.

Anyway, OBS project has been fired. Sorry to all those that love that program, when it drops my streams like crazy, it gets shot and told “you suck!” I do not know what else I could do to get that program to work properly. I’ve tired, but it simply is not meant to be.

So, last night, I brainstormed and decided to try another approach. This approach involved minimizing the preview on Xsplit so that it would not use up so many unnecessary resources. I also bumped up the bitrate for the sound. The result sounded like it was close to what I wanted. So, I think I have it.

So, feel free to watch that result here. Or just listen. It’s probably more fun to just listen to this one.

Continue reading Bash things enough, and maybe something happens

Sef’s first use of OBS project may be her last

Last night, the saga of Dead Planet 3 continued. Along with this saga came yet another attempt to optimize my streams and get to my semi-professional level look that I’ve been aiming for.

So, I decided to try out a program that people seem to rave about, OBS. Once I got my stuff together to get the program to properly capture Windows Media Center, it did look like it might be a good choice of program. However… However… The DCs. The program worked good for an hour, but the moment a spike came in my connection, it simply freaked out. The program dropped the stream about 3 times within ten minutes. Thus, I had to retreat back to Xsplit.

There’s a chance that setting my bandwidth at 1500 was too high, so I might give it another test. I also think I accidentally had messed with a setting in Xsplit that may have contributed to Harv having the stream freeze on him. For that, I apologize. I noticed the error after I finished streaming and fixed that setting.

I think I’ve also might have thought up of one more thing to help improve Xsplit so that it wouldn’t take so many resources.

Anyway, if you want to watch last night’s addition to the saga, check it out below. Though, there’s going to be minor holes in the conversation during the points in which the connection dropped or I was switching programs. Sorry.

Continue reading Sef’s first use of OBS project may be her last

Why Betas exist

Authors really should look for fanfiction circles to find people willing to beta read for them. There are simply way too many stories that clearly go without them and show. It’s painful to see a story where it almost looks like the author has some semblance of half a grasp on grammar, yet they randomly drop important things like quotation marks and capitalization for names.

Not that the perfect grammar would likely bump this story up to the “gem” statue. However, it definitely could have used someone to look over it and mark all of the obvious errors for the author.

Just a real shame.

Moving forward to improve my streams

For the longest time, I have hated the various technical issues that pop up in my streams. At first, it was just insuring that the stream doesn’t crash. Well, I got that down to a near science now. So, that part is all good.

Then, there was the time that my back-up mic didn’t quite perform. That was only temporary, but it was a pain. It was resolved. Not to mention, the real mic is back and performing at its fullest.

However, through all of the prior issues, there was one that I always wanted to tackle. However, the issue was not high priority, so it got set aside for quite some time. This problem was the fact that there was a lag in the way that the Hauppauge sent video to my computer. Thus, the voice commentary for the streams, that occurred while we were playing live, occurred just a few seconds before the viewer saw what happened. I always knew that this was not an ideal situation. However, I let it be because I had other more important issues to tackle.

Well, those larger issues had been tackled, so it was time for that voice to be fixed. Let me start by saying that Virtual Audio Cable is a great program. However, it was a bit tricky for me to get it working. At first, I just simply could not get it to agree to work. Once I turned on the repeater for my mic, it’d cut out the option to skype. Obviously, that wasn’t any good.

However, after spending some good hours researching my issues and attempting an older version of the program, I was finally able to get it to work.

Thus, I present to you the stream that proved that I could fix my issues!

Continue reading Moving forward to improve my streams

Late night streams from the weekend

Most probably missed these streams, since they started off rather late. The first one wasn’t planned at all, sort of. My participation wasn’t planned, that was for sure.

Shayla started off playing Operation Raccoon City with her friends from Unity while I was playing Freedom Unite with Deva. For the record, Deva still has a long way to go. Deva is not quite Fatalis-ready, nor elder dragon ready, nor upper G-Rank ready. Deva needs work. However, that’s not with this blog is about. So, we shall forget that detail.

Continue reading Late night streams from the weekend