LP Update/Comment Thread

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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

The two videos composing the dks3XE series have been released in Psychological Adventures.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by Jee-Host[gm] »

Glad to know you're still turning the crank, m8. Got to watch DMC "5" LP recently, what a wreck of a game... For some reason I keep hoping that someday quality shall be born from quantity. Might not live long enough to see it though...
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

I regret to report that even though this is winter and even though wibod very generously donated a new set of headphones that arrived today, I am not likely to be able to do much in a long time because I am wrestling with what may be the final day for my cat. She has fought for six years but it seems cataracts and overall damage have finally taken their toll on her eyesight and she is acting as though she is completely blind and very distressed.

I post this now because it is likely the last time I will be mentally composed enough to use the computer for quite some time. It is quite possible I will disappear for a prolonged period of time.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by Jee-Host[gm] »

Ah, that sucks. Reminds me of a situation an acquaintance of mine was going through with her pet owl. The bird went completely blind and everything that entails for an animal. I think she managed to deal with the situation by committing to some other responsibilities, but yeah... I get why this is difficult.

It's not much, but I would like you to know that whenever my mind wanders in the direction of your mind's productions, your efforts, projections of your soul if you wish — I find myself being thankful for certain things you did, regardless of what anyone might think of that. So whatever you do — keep your head high.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

she's alive, but it's going to be a long road. While not 100% sure on the cause of her episode, we're pretty sure it's not a stroke. Her blood pressure and heart rate are both very high. The first order of business is getting those under control while getting funds together to do blood tests and other stuff. Then addressing what is probably a thyroid or kidney problem after. Which likely means diet changes and drugs.

There's a lot I could say and a lot I want to say but I can't compose myself right now. A short end of the stick is I want to commit to doing unreal 4 stuff and getting into blueprint/programming. I've been chiseling on video editing but it will be hard in light of recent events to continue on that.

/e posted new coffee hour
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

I have begun conducting testing on the viability of recording 60fps for certain runs. Years ago, when I began Guild Wars, I recorded much of it in 60fps expecting the simplicity of the game to lend well to compression. This turned out pretty favorably, but a lot has changed since then and my standards for visual quality have risen significantly. Notably, we've switched from megui to ffmpeg and dropped a lot of bad settings like chroma subsampling. A lot like WoW, GW improved significantly due to these changes since it uses very similar ui. Recently I began recording again and re-assessed where I was standing in my 60fps experiment of the past.

Towards the end of my recordings in 2017 I had accepted switching back to 30fps since each segment was a day and a half encode time minimum, during which I could do nothing with the system. The file sizes were also enormous. In fact, some titles like DDDA I couldn't record at 60fps due to disk access and the fraps codec being so wasteful.

Now, with the new system, I am once again probing the idea and intend to switch guild wars back to 60fps.

Guild Wars is a game anyone can run at hundreds of fps and looking at it at 30 is just wrong. It makes an excellent case for testing recordings and compression due to the very low detail but high motion nature of the gameplay.

I pursued a test in x265 encoding and came to the conclusion that our understanding of it isn't quite ready to be used in video production yet, at least not for this game. While it did result in better compression, the artifacting (and warping/LSD melting of terrain) was distracting and extremely difficult to deal with. x265 handles compression in some fundamentally different ways than x264, which doesn't seem compatible with our media right now.

Along the way, I also discovered that our current version of MPC-HC featured on the site doesn't support x265 correctly. It will improperly flag Full Range as Limited Range in x265. Although I won't be using x265 for the time being, I both tested an unofficial fork of MPC-HC and MPC-BE and confirmed both work fine with both our current video pipelines and x265 configurations of them.

Drunk Swedes did start experimenting with another set of configurations for both x264 and x265 that introduces bitrate limit to prevent high bitrate scenes from exceeding certain thresholds. It's sort of a clamp on CRF which is more useful in longer videos with mixed information. I'll be experimenting with this as well, particularly with 60fps recordings, to see how I can manage file sizes.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by Jee-Host[gm] »

I believe Unreal Tournament had a perfect shout out for this kind of work — beautiful "Shaft Master".

https://youtu.be/-1eB2LaiI20?t=86
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

The cat has stage 2 kidney failure.

According to the internet this isn't necessarily fatal for a long time, but given the episode she had earlier, it's probably pretty advanced. We've managed to lower her blood pressure a bit but the cost is racking up very fast.

If anyone wants to buy voice acting or pay for some kind of LP (preferably something I already own), you should contact me and we'll see what we can work out. But my mental state is not exactly good for productivity anymore.

A long trial awaits with more drugs until the very end. This will be the most miserable time of my life.

/e

The second test tells that she is in fact in stage 3.

It's always more bad news.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

Usually I have an end of year coffee hour. This year I will not. There's nothing to report. 2019 is an absolute disaster. I started the year hoping to recover from the events of 2017 and 2018 by isolating myself from toxic environments and people, but what was supposed to be a year of healing has ended on the worst possible note of any year of my life. I have neither the time nor energy to offer to casting anymore. Whether or not I ever resume editing work remains on what happens with housing in the months to come, and how the cat situation develops.

I sincerely apologize, but this really is shaping up to be the end of my time as a video content developer.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

I have posted the one segment recorded from the Half Life 1 run a few months ago to the graveyard. Like similar projects this is considered abandoned due to the irl crisis. Similar videos will probably see release in the future.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

I have posted the two Season 2 skyrim videos that were created earlier in the year.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

What could be worse than a cat being in a life-threatening situation?

If your answer as "both cats being in a life-threatening situation", you are now the proud owner of a chicken dinner!

That's right. The good news just doesn't stop coming!

Literally right as I start trying to pick up the wow series again.

My, what a comedic legacy this adventure has been. It's really a systematic cycle of "try to do something, get shit on".
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

What is likely to be the last Coffee Hour for a long time if not indefinitely has been released.

This is the closure of my time as a caster. Other than side projects I hope to one day work on, I have no plans to continue LP casting or other major public content.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

As far as we know, Smokey has rebounded from his mysterious situation but due to extremely tight finances there's not much I can do to confirm he's out of the water other than that he's eating again. I want to have x-rays done but that will be quite a while off.

I no longer have to provide hourly physical assistance for my grandmother and she's slowly getting able to walk again.

This has allowed me to start catching up on DND work and I'll see about getting the Schwa DND video out sometime in the foreseeable future.
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Re: LP Update/Comment Thread

Post by IskatuMesk »

Things have calmed down a little bit here thanks to the Chinese deathplague, though the first couple months were kinda scary due to the high potential of losing access to the drugs/food necessary to keep the cat alive.

For summer, I would like to get the editing project for DKS3 randomizer finished and editing for Schwa's D&D game finished. That's my sole goal for the year overall and I'm not on good track for tackling it yet due to irl workload and insomnia.

I'm considering the following projects abandoned:

- WoW series (Tried 4 times to restart recording and gave up, accidentally deleted months of work on the side B conclusion)
- SSC (I will probably remove these particular D&D videos from the site and only have them available on request) (I am too far behind and most of the sessions I don't have anything to say, I'm working on a >40 hour dev video for the Fractal Maze and won't post it publicly since I don't want certain parties having access to my content)
- D&D primary article
- Publication variants of statblocks and other dev content for D&D

I will be working on the following side projects hopefully in the next while:

- 2x Steak hots videos (casted, needs processing)
- Horse hots videos (needs casting)
- Blizzard retrospective video (review of article+d2 reverse engineering+general insanity, I won't finish this soon but I did start it)

But overall I just want to finish the one major project this year. Any major casting is not going to happen.
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