T w e n t y S i d e d
Last Wednesday I did another stream of Grand Theft Auto V. We drove around the city, looked at environment maps, talked about the police AI, discussed the internal building layout of strip clubs, and killed hundreds and hundreds of people.
It turns out this streaming stuff is pretty fun. I’m still working on the technology and such, but I’m getting there. Here is the archive of the stream:
Link (YouTube) |
At around the 27 minute mark I died, and it was unclear how anyone could have shot me. It looked like I was alone in the room. (Aside from the unarmed civilians.) I’d put a proximity mine beside the main entrance, and I was facing towards the back entrance. And yet somehow someone shot me in the back. Nobody watching the stream knew who shot me either. It looked completely random.
But now I’ve watched the replay and I think I’ve solved it. If you watch the map in the lower left you can see I was ambushed by the world’s luckiest policeman. Apparently the proximity mine wasn’t armed yet. I thought the audible “BEEP” signaled that it was armed, but no. I guess it just makes that sound when it attaches to the wall.
If the cop had arrived a split second sooner then I would have seen him and killed him. And if he’d been a second later the mine would have been armed and killed him. Lucky for him, unlucky for me.
Stuff I’m changing for the next stream:
- I discovered a less kludge-y way to integrate chat into the stream. This means the chat won’t be cut off, and it should be a little more readable.
- I figured out how to view the chat on my end without going to the front page where Twitch will randomly begin playing my own stream back to me. This will avoid the cutoff problem you see just after the one-hour mark. This will also let me make the chat window bigger, so it’ll be easier for me to converse.
- I’ll be on time this week. On one day of the week I have a meeting at 7pm, and on Wednesday I stream at 6pm. I got the two times confused and didn’t realize I was late until you folks said so on Twitter. Whoops. Sorry.
I think we’re going to spend a couple more weeks will GTA V, just because the game is so perfect for streaming. However, feel free to nominate other games. We’re going to move on eventually. Witcher 3 is on my list of games to stream, but I think I should wait until Bob is done with his series. There’s already too much confusion about who is making what content and if we both cover the same game it’ll only get worse.
I’ll be streaming again this Wednesday at 6PM Eastern US time. I don’t know what time that will be where you’re at, because it’s time to pointlessly and stupidly fiddle with the clocks again.
If you can figure out how to convert 6pm my time to wherever you are, then you’ll be able to catch the stream on my Twitch page. I’ll announce the stream on Twitter just before I go live. See you there!
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
About the “author confusion”: I think the problem is that since you write most of the articles on this site, readers are parsing the author blurb as white noise way before they get to an article not written by you.
So how about giving every author blurb their own (primary) colour as a background to the text. Of course not too saturated, but enough to catch the eye. Then, new readers will see your, say, blue blurb and ignore it whenever they see it, but realise that, say, Bob’s green blurb is something different that they should take notice of.
Also, I will repeat my request for more than 12 entries in the comments RSS feed. If you go offline for a few hours, chances are good you’ll miss most of the comments from right after you stopped listening in on updates to the feed.
Coloured background sounds like a lot of fuss – just make all contributors to the site change their name to Shamus. Commenters too.
When everyone is called Shamus, this won’t be a problem.
Yours sincerely,
shamuswhosaysfish
The confusion comes from both Bob and Shamus having similar writing styles.With Rutskarn,you quickly find an odd sentence or two that make you go back and check who was the author,because its very different from the way Shamus approaches things.
If the problem is too much visual clutter / white noise, the solution is to remove some visual elements, not add more.
None of the other visual elements factor into this: This would be just the same problem if this whole site were just pages upon pages of Title – author – content. The problem is that a lot of people read a lot of Shamus’ articles on this site before even discovering there are other authors.
If somebody is already ignoring the different faces which indicate different humans, I think it’s pretty likely they’d also ignore the random colors, and think it’s just some styling thing that Shamus is testing out.
Enlarging the area that might catch the eye in the blurb (the lower one at the end) from something like 64×64 pixels to 1000×200 pixels is not going to have any effect on noticeability, whatsoever?
Especially considering that the reader’s focus at the end of the article is going to be on the last bit of the last sentence, which is likely going to be located pretty far from the image. Which they ignore because they presume they already know the blurb.
And different colours catch the eye even if you think it’s just fluff. That’s how banner ads work.
Do any of us actually know for a fact that Shamus and Bob are two separate individuals? I know that I’ve never seen them in the same room at once. Dun-dun-duuuuuun!
We heard both of them speak last week, and they don’t sound the same. But I’ve heard good voice actors before. So I think you’re on to something.
We heard them speak,but did we hear them speak both at the same time?
If you program them correctly, robots will avoid talking over each other!
If you keep trying to make readers care who wrote what, you’re eventually going to end up with a full cover page with just the author’s face and an “I acknowledge [Author name] wrote this” checkbox. And the pirates will just hack around it so it’ll only affect the honest customers.
Honesty is overrated. :P
Maybe just have them have slightly but noticeably different post backgrounds or some such noticeable but not off putting element.
Definitely do Factorio at least once! Just speaking as someone who barely has any idea what they’re doing and whose current project is on track to finish the rocket in approximately two decades (my circuit/processing unit industry is a proper shambles) I would love to see how you tackle it. I’ve yet to touch railroads or, god forbid, actual wire programming stuff.
What I’d love the most, actually, is to send you my current fortress and have you absolutely tear it to shreds. Not literally (though you certainly could), just have you marvel at how absolutely ridiculously everything is.
Yes,factorio should be a must.Easy for Shamus to play,perfect for us to watch.
If you put your save game somewhere public, and link it here, I could point out some things you’re doing wrong! I’m not a perfect player (far topo lazy for that), but I (mostly) know how trains work, and circuit wiring is fairly straightforward. :)
This site takes the date into account, and makes the appropriate timezone and daylight saving corrections:
https://time.is/1800_14_Mar_2018_in_ET
You can also create an event on Twitch:
https://help.twitch.tv/customer/en/portal/articles/2777118-how-to-use-events#CreateEvents
It should show the correct time to anybody who visits the page.
Don’t forget Time and Date dot com!
When I need a quick conversion I like time.is better because you can easily just type the url with all the information you already know. For example: 3 pm in Tokyo? time.is/1500_in_Tokyo
Wanna know when the Bethesda conference is going to be around the world? time.is/1830_10_Jun_2018_in_PT/ET/London/Berlin/Tokyo/Sydney?Bethesda_Conference_E3_2018
That seems like a large enough amount of typing, to be just as slow as clicking in a menu or two…
Well, you’d have to type all that in its respective field anyway wouldn’t you? On top of that you’d probably have to look for the right page of the site to begin with. I don’t see what’s so slow in just typing that stuff right in the url.
DST must have been invented by the Nazis. Hitler himself, I’m convinced.
(Callback to previous article!)
It was Mussolini actually.How else would he make the trains run on time.
Game suggestion? Well, obviously you have to play Call of Duty World at War on stream, I mean, it’s just logic
Is there a way for you to not have chat on stream while its live,but that it appears on the archived footage?Because that would be the best solution,imo.
I’m not sure if they still do this but twitch vods include the chat as of the last time I looked at one. They even give you the ability to insert messages in to the chat history although I am not sure who sees those.
This is frustrating because it NEARLY solves our problem. But then it falls short and is useless.
You can watch the VOD and see the chat, just as if you were watching live. You can watch the chat or you can close that chat window if you only care about the game. This is exactly what we want for people watching in the future.
Except, Twitch deletes the VOD after 60 or 90 days. So the content must be moved to YouTube. That means we have to take that nice separate chat window and put it into the video. And since I don’t want to spend hours editing (which defeats the purpose of streaming) then I have to put the chat in the original broadcast and make it part of the VOD.
Really Twitch. HD space is really cheap these days. You really can’t find space to store these VODs?
I wouldn’t mind if there was some cutoff, like X people must watch a stream before the VOD is eligible to be saved. Just… stop forcing me to rely on YouTube.
I suspect deleting the VOD is part of the twitch plausible deniability, so they don’t have to enforce whatever thought-police stuff is in vogue. If the chat is around forever, so is the toxicity, and there’s a trail to follow. By deleting the VOD, they can’t be so easily made a platform for the audience’s abuse.
As a bit of a follow-up, here’s Twitch’s own explanation(with no personal opinions on the explanation)
https://blog.twitch.tv/update-changes-to-vods-on-twitch-169cd8bda850
It’s interesting to note given your current length of streams, you could store your entire stream as a highlight which would be stored forever.
“Really Twitch. HD space is really cheap these days. You really can’t find space to store these VODs?”
Heh, it all adds up though. From the Twitch article:
“We also discovered that 80% of our storage capacity is filled with past broadcasts that are never watched. That’s multiple petabytes for video that no one has ever viewed.”
One petabyte is still one million GB, which on AWS S3 retail currently would cost you only $0.021 per GB and month, or $21,000 per month. Twitch is not retail but we don’t know how many never-watched petabytes there are (and increasing). I’d guesstimate they were perhaps paying 50k per month for that when they wrote the article.
(Hangs head in shame) They could actually optimize that price quite a bit by reading further down the AWS price list and hacking a bit, actually. But maybe they wanted to spend their time on more interesting things.
Get your wife to join you and you can read doki doki literature club live on stream.Its a perfect game to be voiced by a guy and a girl ,so why not cash on it.
Looks like the death occurred at around the 29 minute mark, not the 27 minute mark?
Just wanted to say it’s good to hear you talking over a video game again. I still miss your input to Spoiler Warning.
Hey Shamus, any plans on streaming something other than GTA V in the near future? Would love to watch your streams, but GTA V in any way, shape or form annoys me to my wit’s end, to be honest. I realise I’m in the minority here, but thought I’d ask anyway. Regardless, hope you keep having fun with streaming!
EDIT: I’m very sorry, I missed the part about the Witcher 3. I hope that comes sooner rather than later, though.
Maybe in the scale,but plenty of people here have expressed their annoyance with gta.Heck,even on the stream Shamus said how plenty of things in this game are bothering him.
Darn it! I missed it again! When do you announce these things? Is there a way to receive a notification from Twitch when you start it (or, ideally, before, so I can be ready)?
Edit: *Facepalm*! I just checked my e-mail and turns out I did receive a notification. It went straight to spam for some reason.
I also missed this one; No post on the site, unlike last time?
Ah,it seems that Shamus forgot to check the “Check this if you are NOT a robot” button.
As long as the robot looks like Shamus, and streams…
You drive like a maniac. I mean you were weaving in and out of turn-only lanes and just dumping your car across 2 or 3 parking spaces. And I’m somewhat sure at least one of those cars you drove was stolen.
And he’s even worse when he’s playing computer games instead of driving in real life.
If you are interested in graphics programming the following is a must-read http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
Fwiw, they don’t have a police code for “stickybomb on a fuel truck,” but Code 996 means “explosion.”
And what if the cops are so fearless because they have the same “wasted” mechanic the player does? Do we know there aren’t just the same fifty cops, continually dying and respawning? Maybe they’re competing for “most deaths” and you get retirement benefits based on “times died in line of duty?”
Game suggestions:
Prey (Wich one is your call)
Saints Row 2
Valkyria Chronicles
Bridge Builder Portal
I’d be interested to see Grim Dawn.
Rimworld is a great game to stream because of all the fun and/or catastrophic ways things can go wrong. Though you should definitely learn to play first, which could take around 30 hours ;) Totally worth it, though, I think you’d love it, Shamus.