T w e n t y S i d e d
EDIT: Thanks for showing up! The archive ought to go up later this week!
Come hang out with us and watch Josh die over and over again in a way that – if we’re being totally fair – he probably deserves. The stream is here.
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Wait,chain-swords?What is this,a prince of persia 3 remake?
I enjoyed that quite a bit.
Also, wow, something like 200 people watching. Nice.
Having played neither I much prefer what I’ve seen of Dark Souls looks wise. The parts we saw in Spoiler Warning gave the game a rather creepy feeling, while the environments and enemies in this game are almost comical from being so far over the top.
I pulled the stream just in time to see Josh get killed by a boss.
Well, I guess the odds were 50-50 between seeing that or a loading screen.
Nonsense, you could just as easily have tuned in to see a wall – the camera seemed to be pointing at those most of the time.
That would explain Josh firebombing the wall that one time.
THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.
I think the long load times is the game recording your death and uploading it plus the simulation of the game checking to see if your blood echos are picked up by the enemies that are re-spawned.
The upload shouldn’t pause the loading since it doesn’t concern the gameplay so it should be done asynchronously in the background. Blood echoes thing is soemething I do not understand but since there is probably only one echo, calculating weather a fixed patrol enemy walks over it should be trivial.
Since the player deaths and ghosts were in Dark Souls 1 and 2 as well, that would mean that only the monsters-eat-your-soul thing would cause the loading times.
I asked 10 times during the stream so maybe it’s annoying, but why are you guys not doing more twitch stuff? 200 people is a great start and certainly enough to get a twitch partnership. That, and interacting with the chat is a big plus.
It also removes editing the show from the equation, makes the stream/recording times less rigid (Only 2 people to stream with? That’s plenty, especially with the chat tagging along). Any time somebody is playing a game for fun? Might as well stream it for people to watch.
It’s also a lot more entertaining live, anytime a game starts going into a large boring section, especially near the end, you can just start talking to the chat. Let’s Plays are still big but streams are generally a lot bigger. I know I’d listen to a Spoiler Warning stream regularly.
I saw the question, but didn’t have a good answer. I guess it’s just hard to get all all together at the same time. Rutskarn already does a stream. Chris has a day job. Our Saturday night recording sessions are a rare moment when we can all appear at the same time.
Having said that, I’m not against doing more of them.
Obviously you’d have to cut the youtube show and replace with streams.
That said, it’s common these days for people to just stream something, record it and upload it later to youtube, and uh… well that’s pretty much what you’re doing anyway just without a public audience. With a stream, you can have a more *loose* cast where not everyone needs to be there, a big advantage when you have a group of 3-5 people in Diecast/SW.
In any case, that’s all I have to suggest in terms of growing the show. This stream was very entertaining.
With regards to dropping the youtube show and moving to Twitch, they’d already said there were reasons that was unfeasible before (unless I’m mis-remembering things). The main reason was something that you could actually see in the stream, everyone lags behind Josh by at minimum 30 seconds or so, which is *not* very conducive for a show designed around more in depth discussion of whats happening on screen.
If I were to suggest a way of having more twitch, I’d pick a day that Shamus usually doesn’t have additional content on his site (mid-weekish for me in Australia generally) and maybe Josh can simply run a stream of some game he feels like playing, with whoever in the rest of the cast feels up to it tuning in (I’d assume Shamus would generally be available, not sure about anyone else).
You could also use that as a way to answer a lot more questions then you can on the diecast, with interesting ones maybe being repeated on the Diecast, or simply allowing the Diecast to be more “Happy Haps”.
Anyway, apologies for the long post, and thanks for all the content (especially thank you for having the Twitch stream archived as living in Australia, I have almost no chance of actually watching it live, was 5am or something on a Monday)
I suspect that the problem with doing Spoiler Warning “live” would be that then they have to deal with Twitch’s delay, unless Josh simultaneously streams it to Twitch and to whatever private, short-delay stream they use for Spoiler Warning right now.
And adding another layer of complexity to the already labyrinthine logistics of Spoiler Warning might just be too much.
As someone that lives in a different time zone, this sounds terrible. I’d never be able to follow the streams and I’d trade that off for what, longer pre-recorded videos with more downtime and less interesting conversations due to managing the stream/chat? Nnnno thanks. I much prefer the 20ish minute videos of Spoiler Warning that we have now, at least as the “standard” go-to thing.
Yeah. This is my main complaint too, essentially they would loose their considerable European viewers. Also I might not have time for couple of hours of stream but I do have time for a 20min video.
Thirded
As a european watcher of spoiler warning, I would also be sad to see streams taking over more time. I really appreciate the edited and much much higher quality content. I’ll do almost anything to avoid ads. In fact I just upped my patreon pledge a bit, with that in mind.
I wouldn’t mind seeing more streams out of them but not at the cost of their existing edited content.
Just adding on to say I agree with this.
Wait, Rutskarn does a stream? Where would we find this?
I know he used to do this a little, occasionally… I didn’t think he still did though.
http://www.hitbox.tv/Rutskarn
He’ll generally announce on Twitter when he’s streaming. Unfortunately Ruts is the worst at recording streams, the absolute worst.
So why dont you do it?Even alone,people would enjoy watching you play system shock 2.
I don’t know. I’ve heard horror stories of Shamus trying to stream Deus Ex.
aaargh, and this is when I try to finally tune in … offline :(
=> hope there’s a canned version soon
Josh said it should be up tomorrow to replace the Diecast we’re not getting this week.
There is a recording of it on Twitch here: http://www.twitch.tv/spoilerwarningshow/b/643256264
I’ve been watching it during loading screens while playing Bloodborne.
Are you sure this is Bloodborne? I think it’s a Diecast about how much Twitch stinks and how it shows you an ad every time you have to refresh it. :)
And seriously, I visit sites with ads, popups, etc. that have the decency to only make me look at them once every visit or elapsed amount of time. Twitch could do the same, though I expect if they did that, their ad impressions would drop by at least half.
I hear ya! The stream start up was going to be an hour before work and sure ’nuff, they had to delay up to the point where when the linked stream started, is literally when I had to stop watching. #sadface
Been a lurker here for some years now. This was my first hangout. Really enjoyed it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the setup that you use for this and the regular Spoiler Warning. I work a lot with group streaming situations. If I can do anything to make your setup easier on you guys, be that with experience or a hardware donation, do let me know. I have a ton of kit lying around that may be of use and would love to be able to do something to contribute.
Also thanks for convincing me that I do indeed need a PS4 and BloodBorne…
I had to leave right as we were complaining about Twitch being horrible. :( Here’s to catching up on what I missed, some time in the future, then.
I don’t know what to say, but I had an even worse time than you with twitch. I had to stop watched, constant lag every few second, comments not loading, parts of the page didn’t work properly. I just want to know if its twitch or just me having these kinds of trouble.
That sounds like many of my own Twitch experiences, yep!
Did anyone get to the bottom of why there was no video quality selection option like you normally get on twitch? Dropping to low (or lower) quality could probably have fixed the stuttering a lot of people were getting.
Only twitch partners get the downgrade stream quality feature. If you’re not a partner, your viewers’ only option is the quality that your local hardware has encoded and uploaded. Twitch probably doesn’t want to use up cycles re-encoding streams that only have one or two viewers.
As mentioned above, though, with the viewership Shamus and co were getting, they could probably get a partnership if they streamed regularly enough.
Aye – they sometimes enable quality options for non-partners, but without a great deal of observable rhyme nor reason.
Partnerwise, Twitch wants around 500 viewers approximately three times a week – 500 viewers each time, that is, rather than in total – so I don’t think they’d be quite there just yet…
That’s interesting, it hadn’t occoured to me at all that there would be a performance impact involved in downgrading the quality. I was assuming that a lower quality stream would use less of their bandwidth and therefore be a good thing for them.
you guys heard of hitbox? it only has like, 3 second delay for me and my friend when we mess round on it. might help you for recording if not streaming :)
Pretty sure they DO use hitbox for their recording.
I just started watching the archived stream and heard Shamus mention intro-blocking ads. One streamer I casually follow starts his streams with a splash screen countdown, so anyone tuning in only misses staring at a timer. It doesn’t help anyone who shows up mid-stream, but it functionally preserves the intro and provides an effective hook.