LP Update/Comment Thread

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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

As I have received absolutely zero feedback on the Alice LP thus far I'll assume nothing got hosed. Good.

So, what's next? Past GoW1/2, I am probably going to run the original Alice sometime. Of course, I still have to edit and release Hunted sometime soon, so expect those sometime. After that I cannot say. Lots of stuff to choose from, with Demon's Souls likely to take priority. But I'm all kinds of RANDOM XD so who knows what I'll do.

I've noticed in my casts as the timeline comes closer to modern day that my casting gets weaker. I think it's because of the depression that's been getting worse (during Black Sun to finally today where it's rather severe). So, I won't be doing any new recordings at all until all current stuff is caught up on, unless for some reason I am feeling adventurous. I want the casts to be strong, and as Alice showed, they are weakening.

I'll be honest when I say I am considering just dropping video production entirely, though.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

In case you are wondering why nothing is happening... it's because nothing is happening. I have indefinitely postponed production on all projects since some weeks ago. I probably won't pick them up for a long while. I just don't feel up to doing anything anymore.

I suppose this could be the inevitable end of my video productions, with a thousand dollars down the drain and little to show for it. Or it could just be a deep depression a la 2010 that will pass over time if events fold well enough. But, for now, nothing is happening nor will anything happen.

The UDK project for all intents and purposes is abandoned. I will produce video and concept material for it maybe around summer and later on. But the project itself will never be started. I am just not capable of doing this kind of work.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by mark_009_vn »

IskatuMesk wrote: The UDK project for all intents and purposes is abandoned. I will produce video and concept material for it maybe around summer and later on. But the project itself will never be started. I am just not capable of doing this kind of work.
You never even started it LOL. Tell you what, try to simplify everything works, every single of your projects seems to be so overtly ambitious and demanding in every single aspect (especially coding and graphics), that it seems like you got a habit of abandoning it even if it's nearly completed. For example Black Sun, you could just finished it if you actually tries simplification, if you could just halve the insane amount of ships, be less demanding on the mechanics not possible to be included in the game, and use all those energy to instead make a haft-assed 5 missions campaign that revolves around demons stabbing the living shit out of perverts who stabs at even more perverts and Xul Amon revealed that he's virginetic and got touched all over the place, then maybe it wouldn't turn out to be so bad in the end. Simplification is not something that is equal to cutting corners, simplification allow you to be better at looking at the bigger picture, allow the entire game/mod/thang to be far more robust and are more easier to change/adapt should you go along. Just look, if you halved the amount of ships, you could far more easily would have envisioned how the game would act and play, it wouldn't be anything revolutionary, it wouldn't be unique, but it will work and it will work well, Starcraft balancing by it self is very easy to do because they simplified everything and make everything robust, most of the units in Brood War are basically mass units that shoots bullets, and the few niche of other units are basically high risk high reward mass unit killers that kills those units, and by a touch of balance and careful creation of the core ideas of the three races, you got a game that you said where "perfect". Just simpifies things to the bare minimum, make it as robust as possible, and make it. After you have became aware how your mod/game acts, or how it should acts, and how it could became a finished product, then add some more content. Remember, you don't need to add more content more to make something awesome or epic, you only need it to work the way you wanted it to work, the more you have the more you lose track of what you have, the more that things became the jumbled mess that you wanted to make, and the more your enthusiasm cease to give you more energy.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

Black Sun was about as simple and menial as a project can get. There's no point in investing energy in something insignificant.

Also you can't make campaigns or missions or anything in Sins. Just so you know. That was never on the table, nor was gameplay - it was a video-only project from the start of phase 2.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by Vetraeus »

Your turning into an Eastern Political American Mesk, don't go to the SOULLLLLLLSSSS side....fat...lazy...bearded...and..........everything that makes an easterner.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

Did you confuse Easterners with Westerners?
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by Vetraeus »

Easterners are more lazy than westerners, westerners work for 500$ a week, then buy drugs from drug lords and piss off the locals, then get murdered by mexican cartels the next day.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by mark_009_vn »

IskatuMesk wrote:Black Sun was about as simple and menial as a project can get. There's no point in investing energy in something insignificant.

Also you can't make campaigns or missions or anything in Sins. Just so you know. That was never on the table, nor was gameplay - it was a video-only project from the start of phase 2.
Well, just trying to help. :)
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

Well. It has been quite a long time since I last considered working on these projects. But I think I'll probably start tackling the LP load in a month or two, maybe sooner. So, a few things have changed or been added to the tabletop for consideration.

- I still want to fraps console videos instead of using the old method of recording audio and video independently. This means I need to work out why virtualdub doesn't want to hook the video driver for half an hour. Reason? Avoid the desync issues and drop the huge post-production workload. Until I figure this out I won't be touching God of War 2 to finish it.

- I am now in possession of an xbox 360. That means I can LP 360 titles at some point. I'm all for recommendations, but preferably 360 exclusives.

- When I go back to work I plan to finish recording my The Ball LP first before anything. This is an easy start. I've actually had Segment 1 "finished" for months, but it ran into some major issues I cannot fix. As a result the video lost like 1-2 minutes of video and may cause strange things to happen to media players - like outright crash them. I'm still trying to figure out how to fix it. The cause for this bug? mkvmerge. One of the new versions was hosing a lot of videos, including Alice ones (which would bluescreen me on DXVA entirely if they were broken). I seem to have lost my old functional version, so I grabbed a newer one today. Doesn't change the fact I still seem to be unable to fix this first Ball segment. If it comes down to it I'll just release the most fixed version I can manage, preferably one that doesn't blow up mpc.

- God of War 1 was about 1/5 verified/edited when I dropped work. My first major edit project will be finishing this. The next will be finally verifying Hunted. The BW video will be worked on inbetween downtime of this stuff. I can't remember where I left off with that, I think around 1/3.

- All console stuff that was otherwise going to be 60fps is all being dropped to 30fps so I won't need micro versions.

- As a reminder, I dropped Dante's Inferno and Killzone 3 entirely. I won't be going through the anguishing resync process of those games. I may re-record in the future once I have figured out a better way to record them.

- My hands have gotten much worse. But I feel I can probably still play something less button hammery than my last lineup. So, I won't be continuing God of War 2 until I feel better. And probably also not until I've edited the existing material.

After The Ball is finished recording I have nothing immediately in mind to attempt to record next, but it's possible I'll try Mother 3 or FF6.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

Return to production is imminent.

I have tentatively begun to record more of The Ball and plan to start to tackle the edit projects soon-ish (a week or less perhaps). I still need to figure out how I'm going to address the codec issues with the BW videos. I would like both drives to be clear by the time Darksiders 2 arrives, which is likely to be my first major recording project now.

I plan to release the two BTGA segments that got recorded before I ragequit whenever I do a major update.

Due to the nature of my current workload, all 2042 conceptual material is considered frozen and will be resumed when the backlog of LP work is dealt with (late this year maybe).

As I mentioned previously, my release model is entire playthroughs at a time now. The Ball or GoW1 is likely to take first priority followed by Hunted. The Ball will probably be first simply because it will be very fast to process new material as it gets recorded, while GoW1 still needs a lot of editing. I am not sure how far I am through The Ball right now, but probably at least half way. It's an indie game, after all. A really bad one.

If I cannot solve the BW video issues I will encode the source files to x264 and backburn them because I seriously need that HD space. Insert paragraph about hate towards interns.

I originally planned to take up a new recording project following The Ball, but I think I'll focus on getting Hunted and GoW1 finished and let my hands rest instead.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

Status update -

I have made moderate progress on the BW video. The last segment(s) of the recording seem to be a real confusing mess.

I made a very favorable test recording on the next bit of The Ball.

I am finished XXE 8, though it's not as long as I had hoped. Expect an upload soon.

I will finish my Tera Beta 2 video soon.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

We're back on track.

BW video is sidelined. I remembered why it wasn't progressing immediately - I need to re-encode all of the recordings that are broken, because Vegas hates lossless codecs. I speculate I can record the files with fraps and go from there, but it still involves an aggravating puzzle game with the audio streams. If I ever cast BW again I'm not using windowed mode so I can just fraps the fucking thing and be done with it.

My plans are to get the GoW 1 recording out the door and then figure out how to approach the BW video mess. Unfortunately, my plans to encode the GoW1 video have run into unexpected issues. For some reason I'm having a hard time just encoding the mjpeg videos out of vegas. Yeah, more Vegas bullshit. I was going to use vegas to simplify cutting out the minigames in the beginning and some idle time. Golly, now I either can't do that or I need to find out why it's being a bitch. Since I probably won't find out why, this means extremely annoying work after I am done working with the audio.

I always remembered the GoW1 cast being strong and this is shaping up to be one of my better casts for sure. So much strange, silly shit happens throughout my play, some really difficult fights, and plenty of rage/wtf moments. I freaked out momentarily because I thought the audio streams somehow got mixed up, but I think I just confused myself like an idiot. Hopefully this and GoW2's existing segments are the absolute last videos I ever have to edit like this.

(Edit - Yeah, the audio is actually mixed up. Audition decided to just randomly change its naming scheme throughout the recordings and somehow managed to name two identical tracks different names, which fucked up all the naming even more. Fucking Adobe. Fucking Sony. I hate this country.)

I released my Tera video and cleaned up a bunch of space. I've considered making a coffee hour but realized I don't really have anything to say other than that youtube is a piece of shit and DLC is retarded. But I say these things all the time, so my energy is best focused elsewhere.

No plans to return to sc2.

/edit

I've completed the verification and audio editing work on GoW1. But since I cannot think of why Vegas cannot encode the files correctly (the preview flips out a lot, too) I'll need to do my traditional method of seperate encodes and mixes. This means the four chunks I need to cut out will be done through mkvmerge. Just annoyances, really.

I'm running my initial test encodes now, trying to find a good balance between size and quality so I won't need micro versions. Unlike Viking, again, this will be 30fps baseline, so the files will be way smaller (Half the frames, half the size). My first test encode was 560mb for 1:20 hours - I'm gonna push the quality up and see what I get.

With the attention-demanding labor now away, the next LP to get similar treatment will be Hunted. No silly encode juggling for this, though, just the re-encodes to drop the resolution and any audio waveform edits for Westernization.

Once GoW1 is over with I'll do an initial pass on the GoW2 recordings and consider resuming recording in the semi-distant future, pending a test of Virtual Dub to see if it will play nice. Above all, though, I want the existing unfinished work off my hard drives so I am free to do whatever recordings.

God of War 1

GoW1's recording was very strong. I think this is nearly Earthbound-level quality. The last hour and a half, the Ares segment, is very depressing to watch, though. The commentary is there, but my gameplay was not up to such a challenging fight.

Reviews

I stopped posting reviews a while back because they were short little things on Youtube tailing the end of an LP release. That seems redundant at this point in time, because extremely few youtubers watch LP's. I believe what I will try to do is append review videos to the final segments of videos or, if they are very long (I'd like to make them longer), make them individual FTP releases, even if they're just audio files.

Coffee Hour

I don't know what to do with this series. I'm thinking of dropping it for good.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

Shucks, another Tera weekend is here. I'm done encoding GoW1 and need to merge all the audio and do my cutting, but I'll probably be too busy to bother for a while.

Not sure what I'll do immediately after, probably pick up Hunted verification.

Probably make another Tera video since I got good feedback on the last one and there's a few things I can answer.

/edit

I've reconsidered my plans for a second tera video and will probably instead invest effort into patching up GoW1's seg1/2 audio.

Apparently I forgot that there was a large amount of fan noise in this recording, in seg2, two of the internal segments in particular have rather high rumbling volume. I can fix it, but the question will be how much will my efforts effect my voice. In either way, this should be out in less than a week even if I am really lazy.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

I have been feeling pretty awful this last while, when I was otherwise poised to finish most of my work. That's just the way things sometimes are. But I'm almost done my work with GoW1 and The Ball.

I'll be once more upgrading my drive infrastructure with some external 3tb buckets to offload backups and project data onto. They'll also replace the drive that always spins down, because it is really annoying. This will free up older drives for recording, and set the foundations for my future efforts to push deep into LP territory.

If Canada ever gets real internet I would just host a local server. I wouldn't mind. But the bandwidth caps are very severe for something like that.

/edit

I pushed myself to finish the audio work last night, which I did. Waking up this morning, I wrapped up the edits to the thread and making sure everything was uploaded and ready. GoW1 is now available.

/edit 2

I added reviews for GoW1/EB/Alice. The EB/Alice ones are not new, they were recorded many months ago, but only now did I decide to release them.

/edit 3

The issues with The Ball's first segment are holding back the entire thing. I have a possible strategy to employ - the same thing I was going to do with the defunct BW segments. But I need a long period of inactivity to just sit and do nothing while fraps records mpc.

As for my next LP title, I'm not sure. Could be anything.

/edit 4

As always, I fucked up the audio for GoW2's final fight beyond repair.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

I finished my recordings for Conan. I had no idea what depravity awaited me when I started this game, but I can definitely say it's one of the worst ps2/ps3 games I have ever played. Imbalanced, untested, buggy and broken to hell, Conan was nearly the death of me in many ways.
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