A Nice Surprise This Week

I got a nice surprise this week when I got an email from Epic that because I had taken part in the Paragon open beta weekends earlier this year, my account was given a Battle Pack for free. Paragon is currently in an buy-in early-access phase but will be F2P at release, so for now the only way to play when you want, is to purchase a pack. As I do in fact enjoy the game, I was definitely happy to receive this for free, allowing me to play whenever I want.
Some other good stuff also happened this week, but some of it I want to keep to myself for now.

I got nothing

Really, I can't think of anything to share. Nothing has happened to me personally that is worth sharing in some way and I don't feel like commentating on any of the latest news. That stuff is either too depressing or too political. Just not an interesting week to talk about for me... Hopefully this week will be better, but some how I doubt it.

Annoying when Something Sneaks Through

Maybe this is a better fit for the Body on Games blog, but I don't feel like putting it there right now. Started recording in a new game the other day, and I noticed something in the recordings which seemed odd, but I didn't think much of it. I wish I had, but it could be worse.
My monitor has the unusual resolution of 2048x1152, but because it is the monitor's native resolution, that is what I record at. It is still 16x9, so what I do with most videos I intend to upload to YouTube is have FFmpeg scale them down to 1920x1080. Well, it turns out because OBS allows you to place a video source anywhere on the canvas, and to have it scaled down (or up) OBS was actually recording the game at 1920x1080, with black along the bottom and right side.
Fixing this required I rewrite the already complex FFmpeg commands to crop the videos down, but this was a pain because I had to do it in an already complex file that deals with two inputs, two outputs, and some six streams (two video and four audio). It was not easy, but I finally got it working.
At least the video was being recorded at 1920x1080, so I just have to crop and not scale, but because cropping requires the video be re-encoded, for best quality I have to do it at the same time as every other filter is applied. If I didn't, there would be some loss of quality. Took me quite a while to finally get the command logic right, but I did and the videos are being processed now. It's fixed for the future, so I don't have to worry about doing this again, unless I forget with a different game, and I hope I don't. This is a pain.

Haven't Forgotten

I know it's been a while since I posted anything, but I've been busy and slightly forgetful. Not forgetful like I forgot to do it completely, but that when I remembered there wasn't the time to post anything. I've been gone, I've been sick, and I've been busy. One of the things I've been busy with though has been finishing FEAR for The Body on Games channel. Took longer than I would have liked, but I got it done. Here are a couple links:
FEAR - Highlights
FEAR