LP Update/Comment Thread

[Pr0nogo]

Thanks for the tips. I don't have an extra internal HD, but I'll look into getting one. I was aiming for a Blue Yeti mic from Amazon for Christmas, though.

If I can clear enough disk space and defragment the home PC, things should probably be okay.

[IskatuMesk]

How can you not have an internal HD?

[Pr0nogo]

I don't have an extra internal HD

[IskatuMesk]

Oh.

Well, even the primary will probably give better performance than an external. Just not ideal performance. Depending on the drive.

[Pr0nogo]

Yeah, didn't realise that until you explained it to me. Thanks for the tips, again.

[IskatuMesk]

On an unrelated note, MGEC wave 2 is going to be released very soon.

[ArcCain]

Mesk, I got my hands on a Heart of the Swarm beta key for EU, do you want it?

[IskatuMesk]

I don't have an EU account, which I think is required, isn't it?

[ArcCain]

I don´t know, but all you would have to do is make a second account and have it set in EU, it´s free so it would only take 10 minutes I think.

[Pr0nogo]

A second battle.net account altogether, I think. And if you feel like talking to some interns, you can definitely just call up customer support when you get your key and tell them that it didn't work or was set to the wrong region and they'll 'fix' it for you.

[IskatuMesk]

To be honest... I care so little about hots I doubt I would do anything with it. It's probably better off going to someone else.

[ArcCain]

I see.

[IskatuMesk]

The Dark Souls LP has suffered a massive loss of data likely to forcibly end the production, or at the very least result in a huge, irreplaceable gap of gameplay.

Fraps has mysteriously started crashing unexpectedly, and even when sets of recordings were ended without crashes, it corrupted them anyways. Because fraps is programmed by idiots it constantly resets to the wrong hard drives every restart and crash, hard drives with no space left, adding to the problems. Because the crashes are silent they can be very hard to notice.

I will not continue recordings of any kind until I am sure they will be stable. I have attempted to access the broken files but nothing can access them. They are likely destroyed.

/edit

All recovery efforts have failed expectedly. I am writing off the broken files as unrecoverable, but I'll back them up anyways.

Now I must decide if I want to continue production of LP's or not. These kinds of problems are inescapable. No reliable tool exists. Dxtory was a terrible failure, camtasia and others aren't even options at all. Fraps is the best of the lot, but is yet unreliable.

The bosses I lost were non-mandatory I guess. Two of the DLC bosses (Sanctuary Guardian and Artorias) and a lot of exploration, but only in the DLC area. Given how easy the bosses were, it's not a particularly painful loss, but Artorias was a hilarious fight in how effortlessly I killed him in the end. But losing any fight is bad for the LP. I specifically had the Emu explain how to get here so I could record the entire game as it was. But now that effort is squandered by bad programming.

I am fucking sick of this. It takes all I've got to muster the strength to cast, I spend days, if not weeks, waiting for the perfect moment. These games are not particularly enjoyable, but what pisses me off beyond all else is wasted effort and losing tons of invaluable recordings for nothing. Now I have to second guess every single recording attempt because I have no idea what the fuck even happened. Fraps crashes silently, without a trace. It's easy to miss the counter just vanishing quietly. I think it crashed during the Artorias fight. The previous crashes were all happening every time I alt tabbed, or around that point, and despite not recording the files were silently corrupting themselves.

How?

Why?

I have never, ever seen a problem like this. What pisses me off above all is how it just dies silently without a word to the user. Terrible programming ethics, just awful. If something is going to fail, it should fail as noisily as possible. Fraps doesn't even whimper, but boy did I yell when I discovered a 40 hour production had just taken a crippling, irreversible blow.

I am so sick of nothing working like it should. I am so sick of nothing being reliable.

[Pr0nogo]

The reliability of programmes these days is pretty fucking atrocious and terrible, and the biggest question I would ask is definitely 'why?'. Why does it crash? Why wasn't that error fixed? Most importantly, why does it crash so silently? That must be so fucking horrible. It's not like you can reload your save and act like you didn't just play forty hours worth of content. I remember that happening to me during my preliminary recordings of Space Marine and I would have been far more pissed had the recordings been worth anything to begin with.

Whatever ends up happening, just remember that your audience will be more than willing to watch anything you put out.

[IskatuMesk]

The saves in Dark Souls don't work like normal saves. I can't reload at all. The content is simply gone.

/edit

I've been running a ton of test recordings and fraps still sometimes silently crashes. I have no idea what's going on, but until I do, I can't continue LP's.