Completely Unexpected

Over the years I have had a number of ideas I thought were good enough to do. Some of these have been story ideas, some project ideas, and of course my Body on Games idea. One of the more recent ideas I had, which actually came out of The Body on Games, was to start capturing my review playthroughs when I can. Thus far I have done with for Agony (on the TBOG YouTube channel), F1 2018, Star Control: Origins, and am working on Assassin's Creed Origins. (Yeah, AC Origins launched a year ago so I don't mind sharing I'm working on a review for it.) Well today I saw there was a comment for the last part of the Star Control: Origins playthrough, and the person said they not only did watch them all, but will also be picking up the game.
I was definitely surprised that someone watched the playthrough, but then I looked to the channel's stats and was shocked. It looks like this is all owed to Star Control: Origins, but the views for the past four weeks are is at 2514 with 58,751 minutes of watch time... The videos only went public on September 20 though, so that is from just 10 days...
How?! How has this happened? Yes, I'm questioning how I have achieved this measure of success because, very seriously, I have not had such success for years. The closest would have been about six years ago when my book, Sci-FU, reached #1 in Technothrillers on Amazon over just five days. It was free for those five days though, so like this, I am not going to monetarily benefit from it. (None of my YouTube channels qualify for monetization, and even if this one, GuestJimOCC, were to now, I don't think I will hit the button on it. Maybe I would set up something else, but I don't want to put ads on these videos.)
On the bright side, this does appear to be validation for my idea of capturing and sharing my review playthroughs. Hopefully it will happen again, but I will likely not be surprised if it does not. Like I said, success and I tend not to meet, so this being a one-time fluke would fit with how the world treats me. If it is not a fluke though, then hopefully I can continue producing this content, but we'll see. I do have other projects and responsibilities.

To Stream or Record

I do not know why, but for quite some time I have been suffering connection problems when streaming. I do not know why this is, but everything tells me it is external to my system and house, putting it outside of my control. This forces a question, which is if actually trying to live stream, as I try to do every Saturday, is worth it or if I should instead just record and post a video every week. It certainly is more stable, as then I do not need to worry about the connection to the ingest servers dropping out, but if it is a weekly stream, does it not seem fair that it is actually streamed? I don't know, but I do need to think about it some, if only to remove another source of frustration from my life.

Black Panther and Kingdom Come: Deliverance

So I've been busy for a bit more than a week now as I have been working on a review for Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game that can take over 100 hours to complete, and because of how I play/enjoy games, I may approach that before writing the review. Good news is, I am enjoying it and having fun. Do have some criticisms, but most are not too major. (Personally I do not have an issue with the save system, unless the game crashes, then I am peeved.)
What I think I can more freely talk about is Black Panther, which I saw just earlier today. I do think it is a good movie, but it too has some weaknesses. Some aspects of the story are cliche, but I'll be fair and say being an origin story can almost require cliches (plus, cliches work, but one should still be cautious). There were some plot holes at the end, like resolving why M'Baku came and what his new status is, so I am hoping there will be deleted scenes explaining this, as even a couple lines like, 'It is time we came down from the mountain,' with a positive and affirmative response would do the job. The main criticism I have is a certain weakness to the beginning as I felt the Wakandan tribes were not well introduced. The movie provides very little information about them or their roles, so the conflicts between them and their members felt more hollow than I wish they were. Still an enjoyable movie though and I am looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Awesome Opportunity Taken

I've been busy the past few weeks, and the primary work consuming my time has been working on a couple reviews, and one of them has gone live! I was very fortunate that I was able to receive on loan some Lenovo hardware to review, including the Lenovo Explorer, the company's Windows Mixed Reality headset. It has been a pleasure to work with it, in part because of how easy it is to get working. There is no special set up to speak of, and in all of the SteamVR games I have tried it in, it just worked and worked well. It leaves me looking forward to the WMR platform continuing to develop, including receiving formal SteamVR support, as it is currently in beta.
So cool, but I have to get back to some other work now, and post something on the Body on Games blog.

Even Shorter Lived Than Expected, In Theory

Last time I wrote about how Marvel Heroes Omega was going to be shutting down its servers on December 31. During the week though it was then stated that the servers would be shutting down on that Friday, as the bank that was funding the developer decided to pull out as well, forcing the company to shut down. Thing is the servers were still up this morning, so it is impossible to know what exactly is going on, but for now I am going to keep logging in each morning, to push the days logged in counter higher. I already said goodbye and recorded everything I could think of (the characters, team-ups, items, costumes, achievements, etc.) so I do not think I can start playing again, but I at least want that counter as high as it will ever be, for whenever it disappears. Might not matter to the servers, but it matters to me. I also left a number of consumables unused in my inventory too, so the profile will be like that of a player waiting to return. That is how I want it to be because I am a player who wants to return and is saddened to know the end has come so abruptly.

1852 Hours and Counting

Over the years I have put in some 1852 hours into the game Marvel Heroes, and once the new year begins, it will come to an end. The game's development has ceased, the license has been revoked, and the servers are going offline on December 31. I have had a great deal of fun in the game, which should be obvious be that time played, and it is disappointing that it will come to such an end. I will continuing playing as close to that end as I can though, and at some point will also make a recording of everything I have collected and earned.
Not that I need to 'replace' the game, but I will probably try to pick up another game like it. There are a couple I have played previously but haven't touched for a while, so perhaps them. Regardless though, goodbye Marvel Heroes and good luck to all those who made it possible as they move forward to other projects.

Not Much Longer Until the Extra Life Stream

The Extra Life stream is approaching pretty quick now, and I really hope I am not in over my head on this. Might be, but only time will tell. I do have most of the preparation work done (OBS scene created, games installed, etc.) but there is still some testing I want to do, and some hard drive clearing. Not sure if it is a good idea or not, but I am planning on actually keeping a local copy of the recording so I can edit it down for the specific games. I'll need to clear off the hard drive I normally record to first, and I also need to do some recordings before Saturday too (I want some fresh, short ones I can try to play while I take a brief break and the like).
On top of that though, I've got another two projects, and one I will hopefully be able to finish after I post this. Busy, busy week, but then I know of some people who it has been even busier for.
Wish me luck on Saturday! (I will be streaming from The Body on Games Channel since I will be capturing heart rate and gaze. The donation link is already on the page if you follow the link.)

Did Not See It Coming

So yesterday, for my weekly Overclockers Club stream I played the Fortnite Battle Royale game mode. I played a little prior to the actual stream, to make sure I understand the game in practice, and to make sure I could capture it. The time of the stream came and I played some matches, not doing as well as I may have liked, but I am not a PVP FPS gamer, so what could I reasonably expect? I do know I was not ever, as in never expecting to actually win a match, but that is how I got to end the stream! There were 95 players and I killed three, including the last person other than myself. Since I was streaming at the time, that also means I have a recording of the entire match!
I guess in PVP, you can never really know what is going to happen. (I am seriously thinking I will never play the game, or perhaps just the mode again. Can't top it, so why try?)

Finally Upgraded!

The final parts arrived and now I am finally rocking a new build featuring an AMD 1950X CPU, so I have 16 cores/32 threads running at 4 GHz. It is combined with 32 GB of DDR4 3200 MHz CL14 RAM and is running so nicely. Video processing is much faster and the games I've played thus far have also improved nicely. It is that video processing I wanted so much though (why I went for the Ryzen Threadripper over just a Ryzen 7) and it is really awesome to have a system capable of over 2x encoding speed at x264 Medium, compared to about 0.1x before. I am very much looking forward to putting it to some serious work soon, but right now, I have a few other things to take care of first (like this post).

Not my Preferred Price, but I Got One

I didn't get it at launch, but I was lucky and caught some Gigabyte Vega 64s on up for order Amazon Friday morning at the MSRP for the Black pack. That means instead of the $499 price of just the card I paid $599 for the card with two games. Well, one of the games I definitely want, so in effect I'm only paying $40 more than I would have preferred (I want Wolfenstein II which will be $60 for a time).
Now, I do want to comment on the Vega pricing story, which personally I am seeing more as a non-story that a few actors have put forward and the Internet is running with. The idea is that AMD gave an MSRP of $499 for Vega 64, but had only little intent to sell many at that price point, so 'in effect' the actual MSRP is $599. Basically people are upset there were so few at the $499 price, so instead of being rationale and patient they are attacking AMD and every second AMD does not respond to their liking is another reason to despise the company. I am very glad I interpret the world differently than this as I'd quickly exhaust my emotions. Here's my take on it, based on some of the available facts:
The card-only and Radeon Pack versions of Vega 64 have different SKUs, meaning they are supplied differently and possibly also ordered in bulk differently. (Not an expert on SKUs but they would be ordered differently, it is more I am not sure how much the wholesale prices differ.)  So a company may have gotten 100 total Vega 64 GPUs, but only 10 of the card-only SKU and 90 for the more expensive Radeon Packs. This means you have a lower chance of getting the cheaper SKU and better chance of getting the more expensive SKU (which happened to me, but I'm not upset about it). AMD has issued an official statement saying they are trying to restock all the SKUs, so with patience you will see the card-only SKU come back in stock, but they might be bought up quickly. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people, including crypto-currency miners trying to buy them up as well, which is making some of the gaming community super-salty, because it means less product for them, which drives up costs.
Now for my, I think rational take on this. AMD had stated the Radeon Packs were meant to counter the hordes of miners trying to purchase up the cards. Personally I don't think the packs were very interesting (most people will probably have the CPU and motherboard already, and a monitor too while games we already expect to be free), but I want to look at the intent here because that is much simpler to consider (I do not want to guess about the internal politics to cut the deals necessary to arrange the deals between the different manufacturers). AMD likely made a calculation that assumed miners just want the card-only version while gamers would be more accepting of the more expensive packs that give them something extra (I personally would have rather saved the $100 and purchased the games separately, but I'm not complaining because I do want one of the two games, and will probably enjoy both. Plus, I chose to purchase now instead of waiting and hoping for a better offer in potentially months) and that calculation skewed how many GPUs went to the SKUs. If they already wanted to target gamers over miners, then they would put more into the Radeon Packs.
One's gut might say AMD was wrong about balancing the SKUs, but let's add a dash of reality to this. They were going to sell out fast, across the board, and once that happened the prices would go up. This has already been happening with GPUs and it was going to happen here. It didn't matter what the balance was, this would happen. AMD, according to my guess, was hoping the extra $100 would dissuade enough miners to leave some for gamers, and while it may have worked for some, there are two things that worked against them. One was rumors that Vega was going to be amazing at mining (looks like this isn't true, but then not all of the hardware features are currently driver-enabled either, so we'll see what happens, plus AMD has long had a powerful compute side, so there would be interest anyway) and the other is the prices were going to skyrocket regardless. New tech almost always sells-out immediately because it is new and exciting and in limited quantity. Those who want it are going to get it, whether it is a miner or a gamer like me. I have a specific reason for wanting it beyond just gaming, which NVIDIA GPUs could satisfy just as well (I want it for comparisons in game performance analyses and to do some technical analysis). When someone has a specific goal in mind, higher costs are less an impediment. Consider game prices and how they start expensive, when the people who want to play 'that' game are buying it, but once this group is satisfied, the target shifts to those who want to play games like that, but there is more competition for this group's money so prices have to fall. Vega is new and definitely in that first phase. Mining has disrupted GPU prices in part because it extends the length of that phase significantly, so prices cannot come down for those who just want a good GPU, and not a specific GPU. NVIDIA's less compute-capable GeForce cards receive an advantage here then, because they are just not so good at non-gaming tasks, and the smaller, gaming-focused architecture allows it to be cheaper (and use less power, as some have been attacking AMD for) hitting AMD twice.
Now, here's my guess for the future: the card-only SKU is going to be restocked and sell out almost immediately. This will continue for months, and during those same months the Vega drivers will improve and people will come to realize it is a better architecture than the attacks suggest. People also attacked Ryzen when it launched, and now it is widely seen as a tremendous success for several reasons, so with time will come some clarity. Now those new drivers might make them more interesting to miners too, so that issue will not be solved, but something else is also going to happen. Technically two things will happen, with the public one being the Radeon Packs coming to an end. Some are decrying AMD, claiming that when this happens the card-only SKU will go up in price, but considering this would be stupid economic move and at best a rumor, I suggest we dismiss that concern unless it happens. When that happens, chances are the card-only SKU will keep its current price, but also the manufacturing cost of the GPUs will have come down, so there will be more profit at that MSRP too. Basically, if the Radeon Packs are making more money for AMD, they might be giving them a stop-gap measure to bring in more revenue while the manufacturing process improves, making the lower price more affordable to them. Might take longer than the packs will last, but the packs could change before leaving, and what profit comes in might carry the losses as the price drops.
Be patient. Things will improve. (Also, don't start attacking the unreleased Navi architecture, claiming the same will happen there. We don't know and at least I had a silly idea that would ease this issue if true. In addition to the ability to mass produce one die cheaply for an entire stack, like we see with the Ryzen CPUs through EPYC, my crazy and uninformed idea is that maybe Navi will be able to have additional compute components attached to it. This would mean there could be graphics focused and compute focused versions, allowing AMD to have the different classes of GPUs, like NVIDIA does currently, but without having to produce a lot of different dies. It is a crazy idea, but may be it is possible.)
Huh, that's a long one... sorry about that, but seriously, stop freaking out and attacking AMD. Be patient and see what happens. Chances are it will be less malicious than the hate requires and the harm from the hate will be regrettable.

Just Hours to Go

It might sound weird, but I actually enjoy digging into frame time data with R. You can find some interesting patterns, and of course improving the design of the graphs is also rewarding on its own. Hopefully I'll be able to get an RX Vega soon so I can continue my data collection with it, including FRTC, Chill, and Enhanced Sync. The resulting data of these different frame rate impacting features might be quite interesting.

Looking Forward to the 14th

Last week AMD launched its RX Vega GPUs, after much anticipation, with an availability date of August 14. While the GTX 1080 currently driving my display is plenty for my needs, I still think I will try to pick up a Vega 56 because there are some technologies and capabilities I do want. Among of the first things I would do after getting one installed and set up would be to do a second part to the Serious Statistics article I wrote, but this time looking at the different features in AMD and NVIDIA drivers, as then I would have access to both. Should end up taking some time to compile all of that data, but I do want to see frame data for technologies like Radeon Chill. I think it could be very interesting, and then I will be ready for upcoming titles that may take special advantage of other AMD technologies. Hopefully I'll be able to get one before prices skyrocket because of the mining craze.
One thing I am not so looking forward to next week though is that my current job ends the end of the week. Hopefully, with a lot of luck, something will come up, either a separate opportunity or something to let me continue on where I am, but either way, next week will be a different week in one way or another. At least that will be next week, as for now, I need to focus on this week.
Something else coming up is the release of Ryzen Threadripper, and I am very much looking forward to reviews and more information on RAM support, motherboards, and full-plate coolers because I do want to build something around 32 threads. Oh the things I should be able to do with such a build are truly wonderful.
This is looking to be an interesting month (and SNES Classic pre-orders should go up sometime this month making it even busier).

If Only I Could Stay Up

Have to get to bed early tonight, which is a shame because I am looking forward to the official information on the RX Vega GPUs from AMD. There are a number of features and technologies it has I would like to take advantage of, but need some more information first. Most importantly is pricing, which we might learn tonight, and performance, which we should be learning in the near future as reviews come out. Hoping it will be good, because the graphics card market could use some disruption at the high end (though breaking through the mindshare of NVIDIA is going to be very difficult, no matter the stats). Navi may be what will really break green-team dominance, but Vega still needs to be a success by some measures, and it probably will be. The trick will be getting people to recognize those successes.

Finally, my Statistics is Out!

A while ago I did some tests and wrote up an article on some performance statistics, and it has finally gone live! You see, in December AMD released OCAT, which is essentially a convenient front-end for PresentMon, a powerful tool that is not the easiest thing to work with. Well, I wanted to work with OCAT so I could put it to use when reviewing games, but I first wanted to do some experimentation with it, to make sure I could do what I wanted to do with it and to see what various things I could do with it.
That experimentation I decided to do in Serious Sam Fusion 2017, because it allowed me to also test on three different APIs (DX11, OpenGL, and Vulkan) and OCAT/PresentMon works with all three. The result was plenty of data to process, and while I initially created an Excel template I switched to using R, which is something I may have mentioned before, as I am now also using it with The Body on Games data. Anyway, the point is the article I wrote about collecting performance data with OCAT and processing it into characteristic values, graphs, and even video overlays is finally live! I named it Serious Statistics, because I needed some name for it, and that made some sense to me.
Since I wrote that article, I have not stopped working on the R scripts I had written. In fact, just this past week I was (at last) successful in making the scripts for generating the graphs for video overlays multithreaded. This can greatly increase the speed at which the graphs (typically in the thousands) are generated. I also set up the scripts to save text files with the characteristic values, because those will be a bit easier to read through than having R open and looking at its output. So ahppy to finally see it live and I am looking forward to putting it all to use in the future.

At Last I Have the Third...

I really could not think of a better title without making the post itself irrelevant, so forgive me for that. Anyway, yesterday I got a Dualshock 4 controller and I am sharing that here not just because I could not think of anything better to share but because it is something mildly meaningful for me. I already have a wired Xbox 360 controller and a Steam Controller, so with this I now have what I consider the big-three PC controllers that I can pull out whenever I need to. Sometimes a PC game just does not support KB/M properly, and sometimes you want a specific feature of a controller. For example, the D-pad of the Dualshock 4 is indeed, very nice. It has a healthy firmness to the action and that makes me very happy. I do prefer to have a joystick on the top left though, which is the Xbox design, so I have that controller as well. Then there is the Steam Controller, that I have gotten used to and I do even prefer for some situations. The trackpads are nice for some situations, but also the grip buttons and double-action triggers are so nice and I enjoy taking advantage of them.
Anyway, I am now happily set up with these three controllers. I'll keep to my KB/M when I can, but when I need to experiment or overcome poor controls, I am ready.

Looking Forward to an Upgrade

Right now I am still quite happy with my computer and all of its components, but I will admit I am looking forward to eventually building a replacement. Yesterday when streaming, there were some serious problems with the stream, and after some more testing I finally figured out what the problem was and why it seemed to come and go. I had it set to capture at my monitor's native resolution (2048x1152) and then downscale it to 1280x720. This downscaling would have to be done by the CPU, and my CPU is not always up for it. It depends on the game and how much it uses the CPU, which is partly why it took me so long to figure it out. I thought the problem was special to the game, but actually it was my general settings and the specific game could alleviate the problem. Well, now it's solved so I will be able to stream in the future without issue. (Though I will admit, I would love it if we could stream and record in OBS with different canvas resolutions, so it is the hardware encoder I am using doing the scaling, instead of the less powerful CPU. Maybe that will happen some day, but it is hard to say, and I could see one thing preventing it from happening.)

Just some musings

Been a bit since my last post here. Had a more recent one on The Body on Games blog, but then forgot about posting here or just wanted to go to bed. No excuse, just trying to describe the situation.
Anyway, there are a few things I can talk about. The most obvious being what happened on this day fifteen years ago. A day you wish never happened, but at the same time you hope to never forget. Too many days end up being like that, but thankfully there are so many people out there who will do what is necessary to make such days less horrible. Sometimes those efforts claim their lives, which is why we never want to forget what happened.

Let me see, other than that I can mention that I reviewed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which I enjoyed playing and earlier today I finished a NG+ playthrough that earned me the Pacifist achievement (complete the game without killing anyone). Did not even realize I was going to get that; it was just how I wanted to play. Fun game and it makes me want to play the previous game again; Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Nothing too much else going on, or at least nothing I feel like sharing. How it is sometime. Want to do another TBOG recording tonight (working on FEAR 2: Project Origin) so until next week (or whenever I remember to write one of these again)!

A Rose by Any Other Name...

It may still smell as sweet, but might not be as fun to say.
In this past week there was an interesting announcement of a name change. Nordic Games is changing its name to THQ Nordic. Remember THQ, the big video game publisher that went bankrupt. Nordic Games bought a number of the IP that were sold at auction, and have now changed their name to reflect their intent to develop those IPs, instead of just being their owner.
All I can say to that is I wish the company the best of luck. They got some good IPs and I would like to see them successfully resurrected. I also hope that this THQ fares better than the last.

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.

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.