Transcendence

On Thursday, July 16th at 4 PM PDT, I will start a new series of weekly Twitch streams in which I play Transcendence from beginning to end.

I'll also be monitoring our IRC channel as I play to get questions and advice.

If you have time, please tune in and watch: http://www.twitch.tv/kronosaurproductions

And of course, the session will be recorded and available after it airs.

 …Welp. I know what my Thursday evenings just got preempted by. Seriously though, this is very cool to hear. Looking forward to seeing just what your playstyle is — especially if you don’t do it on /debug with a Wand of Wishing. ^.^

Very nice. I'm not sure I'll be around at that time, but I'll certainly tune in when I can.

Are the recordings going to be on twitch or youtube?

AssumedPseudonym wrote: …Welp. I know what my Thursday evenings just got preempted by. Seriously though, this is very cool to hear. Looking forward to seeing just what your playstyle is — especially if you don’t do it on /debug with a Wand of Wishing. ^.^

Indeed.

Fortunately I don't have friday classes this semester, so I might be able to turn up for these.

 …So. This is coming up in somewhere around thirty-six hours or so (if my math isn’t too crummy). Any further news? Version to be played? Expansions and/or mods to be included? Cover charge at the door or big, burly bouncers needing hired for guarding said door? Wait, wrong event… <.< >.> <.<;

AssumedPseudonym wrote: …So. This is coming up in somewhere around thirty-six hours or so (if my math isn’t too crummy). Any further news? Version to be played? Expansions and/or mods to be included? Cover charge at the door or big, burly bouncers needing hired for guarding said door? Wait, wrong event… <.< >.> <.<;

My first run-through is going to be straight vanilla plus Corporate Command (though I'll start with a Sapphire, of course). I'll run RC 2, which is looking pretty good. No bouncers this time.

Should be fun!

This really didn't work out well for most of us. It seems to have only worked cleanly for Parrot and for part of the stream for Shaman. Everyone else had bandwidth problems.

Can you please stream at lower resolution next time?

Mine was mostly fine, except for when the network derped around.

 It eventually got to be unwatchable for me. I had to duck out on the last fifteen minutes or so.

That was fun (and a bit more exciting than you were probably hoping towards the end). Now you can see why I was concerned when I saw on GitHub that the damage of the Stiletto was raised from 4d6 to 8d6. I'm glad I caught that and you lowered it to 5d6, although I still think it should match the Longbow. Charon Frigates have very good equipment for how early they can show up and their internal hp makes low level primary weapons quite ineffective. Their awful fire rate offsets that a bit and makes it possible to take them on with missiles. I recommend Brutes, which have very good damage for their cost right now, but you could probably have done it with what you had if you'd docked and repaired your armor mid-battle and saved your Stilettos for once you were through its armor.

Those Korolov missions were also a good example of the annoyance of fighting infinite waves of reinforcements in the vicinity of a stargate.

The stream was OK for me, except for a couple brief hiccups. But it seems to be a problem for a lot of people, so you should probably see if you can set your streaming program to output a lower resolution than your display is set to. Then you could still record at full quality and upload that version to YouTube.

NMS wrote:you could probably have done it with what you had if you'd docked and repaired your armor mid-battle and saved your Stilettos for once you were through its armor.

I think this sort of thing will be nice in that it allows the whole community to analyse issues in real time, discussing solutions and strategy. If nothing else, it'll be great for getting more info on balance and different playstyles.

On that note, should repairing in mid - battle be disabled because of balance issues? I could see a timer being applied upon taking damage, such that armor could not be repaired until it had time to "settle" or "cool". Should make fights near stations a bit more challenging and believable.

Those Korolov missions were also a good example of the annoyance of fighting infinite waves of reinforcements in the vicinity of a stargate.

Didn't George modify it so that they came in groups? Would a timer in between waves of reinforcements be beneficial?

The stream was OK for me, except for a couple brief hiccups. But it seems to be a problem for a lot of people, so you should probably see if you can set your streaming program to output a lower resolution than your display is set to. Then you could still record at full quality and upload that version to YouTube.

I'd like this as well.

Unfortunately, I cannot record at a different resolution than I stream (I'm using OBS--if anyone can suggest a better stack, let me know). Sorry about that.

george moromisato wrote:Unfortunately, I cannot record at a different resolution than I stream (I'm using OBS--if anyone can suggest a better stack, let me know). Sorry about that.

Hmm, seems like OBS can't do that (without some hacky work-arounds). XSplit can, and it seems like the free version should be able to stream at 720p30 without a watermark, which is all you really want for Transcendence. A lot of people at Speed Demos Archive use Amarec to record and output a stream to OBS, but it seems like it's designed more for capture cards and you might need additional software for it to do screen capture. Also, you could use a separate program to do your local recording. If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, ShadowPlay can do it with very little overhead because it encodes on the graphics card.

If it was working for some people and not for others then it was not likely a problem with how the video was being uploaded to Twitch. The problem was therefore likely a result of certain viewers not having a high enough bandwidth to watch the stream in high quality, in which case they should have just tried viewing the stream at a lower quality. The only reason I can think of to upload a lower quality version would be to make the text more readable by playing the game at 720p instead of 1080p so that the text would be larger relative to the resolution.

Arkheias wrote:…in which case they should have just tried viewing the stream at a lower quality.

 I would have been more than happy to have done so, if there were a way to do so on Twitch. That does not seem to be possible, though.