Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked and Tomb Raider were great fun. I can’t wait to find out what Renowned Explorer is on Monday.
Well, that was a fun way to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday morning (my time). Threw it up on the big screen and had it running over a couple of coffees and playing with bub.
Every-time I looked up though, it seemed Tom was starting a fresh run. :P
I think I could watch Tom run from snakes all night, too bad he had to go, heh.
That was great, guys! I apologize that there weren’t quite so many humiliating epic deaths as the previous two nights, but I certainly got one in there!
You mean “play the game for real”?
Losers! I honestly don’t think I’ve ever even booted up the baby mode. Monday and Tuesday will be all adventure mode, all classic difficulty (i.e. the way Renowned Explorers was meant to be played)!
-Tom
Cool to hear, Tom. Looking forward to it!
Haven’t checked your stream out yet, will do when I can though. I hope you have the encoding set high enough to handle movement though. Pet peeve that really is bugging me are the streams where as soon as motion starts everything goes blurry. Seems to be most of them anymore.
Hmm, when I clicked on the first link in the OP, it took me to youtube but with the message: “This channel does not exist.” So I just did a search and found the channel.
This is bitrate, right? Or is it a matter of FPS? I’ve been using a pretty high bitrate, but only 30FPS. If you get a chance to take a quick peek at one of my videos, I’d be much obliged if you let me know whether I should be using any different technical specs.
Oops, bad URL. Fixed.
-Tom
I’ll take a look in a few minutes Tom. It’s a combination of bitrate and the encoding settings. If you have the encoding set too lax high speed movements (like any shooter or racing game) get horribly blurry. I use OBS for mine and spent a long time tweaking to get it just right.
It’s far better than most streams I see. Fast turns still do it though. At 1:40ish in the first Dark Souls 3 vid you can see some of it during the boss fight but I find the level you have more than acceptable enough, especially if you are streaming at 1440. I tend to not stream higher than 1080 just because of a combo of bitrate required and the number of people who can successfully watch the stream at that rate without it tanking. Not sure how Youtube streaming works but on Twitch if you aren’t a partner they won’t downsize to accommodate people with less bandwidth.
Watched a bit of the Endurance stream for RoTR and it looked quite good. Only spinning hte camera triggers it there.
I’d be curious to see you stream an actual FPS or fast paced third person shooter to see how it works. A good test I did was load up a game, start the stream then spin rapidly or wiggle back and forth 180 degrees as fast as I can and find out how blurry it gets. There is a fine balance between this and how taxing it is on the cpu doing the encoding. I don’t have an amazing PC so I have to cut corners when playing a PC game since the system is running the game and encoding. When I’m streaming from console to PC though the PC does nothing but encode so I get smoother stream.
(also I need to grab that Endurance DLC for TR, looks fun)
FWIW I run 30fps 1080p at roughly 3000 Bitrate, but the settings I had to tweak are deeper in OBS and relate to CPU usage and the like. I didn’t catch what software you are using.
edit: Think I’ll try some Youtube streaming to compare setups for it versus Twitch. Been using Twitch mostly with the occasional Hitbox.
Thanks for taking a look, Harkonis! I’m also using OBS and I have a pretty beefy computer with lots of bandwidth for my internet connection, so if you can think of any settings deeper in OBS that I should mess with, feel free to recommend something.
Is it worth bumping up to 60fps? Because that would address blurriness in a fast game, right? What would be the drawback of doing everything at 60fps? The file size is bigger of course, but that’s not really an issue, is it?
-Tom
60 fps wouldn’t do anything regarding the blurriness, just affect the smoothness overall. Typically not worth it but you can try once you get the rest sorted out. I did notice after watching further that you do still have a bit of that blur during some fast turns in Tomb Raider. While streaming, going from 30 to 60 fps doubles the amount you’re sending and encoding which can be a huge deal especially with regard to delays. honestly 30 should be fine and I’d worry more amount shoring up the motion blur than the fps.
Going to go look at my settings and I’ll be back. Pardon any typing errors, I may be a few beers in right now ;P
On the encoding tab I have Use CBR checked. This is constant bitrate and makes it run at a steady rate instead of fluctuating on the fly based on the amount of data. I run at 3000 bitrate, but this can fluctuate based on the power of your cpu, the needs of your users and the amount of bandwidth you have available. I found 3000 to be good for a 1080p 30fps stream as the sweet spot between people trying to stream at full res on mobile or desktops. Any higher and you pretty much shutdown mobile users (though youtube might not have this issue since they seem to have ‘stepdown’ in place for bitrate and res)
Audio bitrate on the same tab is 112 48kHz
Video tab I run at 1920x1080 with no downscale. I did downscale to 720 for awhile and some people still wish I did since that seems to allow more mobile viewers (again might not even be an issue with youtube). You seem to play at 1440, not sure if downscaling to 1080 would be better or not. Probably have to test it out. The difference in data between the two might mean it will be worth it to avoid any blur though. The blur from downscaling will be less drastic than the blur from the encoding issues I’m referring to.
The advanced tab is where things get interesting. I assume you’re playing on the PC you’re streaming from so changes here can potentially be pretty drastic to both experiences. Will have to test some things out and find out what you can get away with. For me I found one of the big keys to eliminating the blur during fast motion was changing the x264 CPU preset to veryfast from faster. This drastically changes the CPU usage though and could potentially make your game stutter or chug. For example when playing Vermintide there is no way I can use this setting, the game almost becomes unplayable. However when using my console I can crank this up since the PC isn’t being used as much. Keyframe interval is 2 and Use CFR checked.
The resolution and downscaling, bitrate and CBR setting, and the x264 CPU Preset combine to give you the ideal settings to get best picture during movement. Finding what works for you will take some time and someone to watch the stream with you while you change settings, stream and repeat until you find the sweet spot. Finding a fairly spu demanding game that you can move the camera rapidly in to test will be key.
when playing games without fast motion, like a TBS game or the like you can likely use a different profile altogether and just crank up the res to have a crisper picture.
Hope my drunken ramblings didn’t ramble too much ;) Let me know if you have any more specific questions about anything. Personally I’ve been happy with my settings, I just really need a microphone that’s worth a damn.
The Renowned Explorers stream starts in five minutes!
-Tom
Got a chance to watch the archived stream, and it was great! Sorry I didn’t get into the live stream until it was almost done, but thanks for doing this game!
Also, I had the GOG version, but picked this up again on Steam so I can beat my Friends list on the leaderboard.
The other thing that I always forget about this game (and I haven’t played since November or December) is how absurdly deep it is for what it is.
I’ve been watching a couple of vids and I really enjoy Tom’s sense of humour. That’s very important to me for let’s plays. The Starcraft coop with Mcmaster was totally cracking me up.
King of Dragon Pass please.
Is that too easy, i mean you have to win the game (and maybe you have done that already) if you do it.
Oh, man, King of Dragon Pass would be a good one, wouldn’t it? I’ll definitely put that on the list, Zak. I wonder how easy it is to jump back into? I mucked around with it on the iPad maybe a year ago (?), but I was a bit foggy at the time and I hadn’t touched it in literally years. I recall being, um, pretty lost and feeling like I was just stabbing blindly at different options and seeing what happened. But, yeah, that would be great to revisit and I imagine the narrative possibilities would make an interesting stream.
I’ve updated the schedule. For the rest of the week, I’m going to try to give my PS4 a go and hope nothing implodes (everything I’ve streamed so far has been from the PC). Stories: The Path of Destinies tomorrow, Samurai Warriors 4: Empires on Thursday, and Far Cry: Primal’s new survivor mode on Friday.
Also, I’ll be trying Renowned Explorers again in 30 minutes (6pm Pacific). I’ll try to play more and talk less this time. I’d like to make it further than rank two encounters this time. :(
-Tom
Well, uh, that went a bit long. But it had a happy ending! Unfortunately, there seems to be some issue with Renowned Explorers uploading high scores to the leaderboard. But if and when it gets resolved, there I’ll be with my veritably unbeatable renown of 1,917.
Tomorrow:
-Tom
Ok, so your not a pro at it. Well you probably need to do a weekend shamans retreat first in that case, to shake out the ‘modern’ you to be able to become King of Dragon Pass. It can be done, i’ve done it once.
Another request to think over:
Emperor of the Fading Suns
I, and no doubt countless others, have tried to get into this game a few times, but always bounced off hard. You are the pro and seeing your suggestions on how to set it up and play it would be a valuable resource for the rest of us :)