Diablo 3 Season 2 and Dream Of Mirror Online - Both Start Today! [Reminder]

Just a quick post as a reminder: Diablo 3 Season 2 and Dream Of Mirror Online both started today! 

Get in there and start levelling - no matter which game you are playing this weekend, have fun - and See You In The Games!

Achievement - Diablo III - 'No Time To Rest' Challenge with Level 25 Demon Hunter (Video)

Recorded with Bandicam ('For Edit' Preset)
Resized to 720p, 4000kbps h.264/AVC (for smaller upload size)
Resampled to x1.5 speed (to assist in reducing watching boredom)

Playtime: 47:47 (forty-seven minutes, forty-seven seconds)
Character: Level 25 Demon Hunter (Female)
Skills most used: Vault (Rattling), Elemental Arrow (Ball Lightning)
DPS: 154.96
Dexterity: 207
Follower: Templar (Intervene, Loyalty, Charge, Gaurdian)

Usually playing games through slowly and savouring every graphic effect, listening to every environmental sound, I don't ever do "Speedruns"; but feeling that my Level 25 Female Demon Hunter [yes I know lolxDeathDeeler1337x] kicked a bit of butt, I decided to try running Act I Normal for the No Time To Rest Achievement.

The first time I tried it didn't register for some reason, so I had to try again. Then the second time I got disconnected halfway through! That saying The Third Time's The Charm came true once again and this is the result:

The slow moving big blue orb, similar to D2's Frozen Orb, is Elemental Arrow with the Ball Lightning Rune/buff. It acts very similar to the old Sorceress FO as it sails over the enemies, hitting most of them as it passes. Running through Act I I found I could just Fire-And-Forget, launching one and then continue running past.

The Demon Hunter Elemental Arrow, with Ball Lightning Rune 

The acrobatic cartwheel she does (a lot) is Vault, an evasion move that lets you get away, even moving through enemies, I believe. I have the Rattling Rune/buff on it, that lets you shoot a couple arrows off as you cartwheel by, which has showed me some barrels/jars at times that I have missed. It uses the slower-regenerating Discipline as it's 'mana', so you can't just cast it constantly (which I would have liked, heh).

The Demon Hunter's Vault skill/ability

For the most part, to get this Achievement you just have to be willing to run past a lot of things. I gave up Uniques and what they might drop, Treasure Chests and Treasure Goblins. I suggest having all of the Act completed ahead of time, so you don't have to miss all the story and plot, of course. Also, I had created and done the Act with a few characters already, so I was familiar which what should (relatively) come next and had a feel for the dungeons, which helps a lot. There were a couple small things that I couldn't figure out, like why I didn't get the achievement at The Butcher for not getting burned by the floor fire. I thought I got away clean from it - I realize now that it says "on Hell difficulty or higher". Regardless, these types of Achievements are ones you can go for at the same time, while getting the Challenges like the one above.

The video is unedited and you can see all the mis-clicks I do, like going into the wrong doorway and the dialogue with the caravaneer at the end, heh. I am also not the greatest at picking Pathing routes to take, as I haven't done Act 1 more than a few times; but all in all this was enjoyable to run, with it's own sense of Tension added to the gameplay session. Nice Challenge Blizz, it was fun.

See you in there!

Quality Test - Diablo III and Bandicam's "For Edit" Preset / YouTube Upload Test

With the Bandicam "For Edit" Preset, every frame is an independent Keyframe or I-Frame (Information Frame), which is a type of frame that can be 'cut' or started from in video editing programs (technically, every frame is a JPG picture). Also, the audio is Uncompressed, which means that any video editor should be able to recognize the sound data. Errors in programs like Virtualdub saying "Error initializing audio stream decompression" or Sony's Vegas showing "Stream attributes could not be determined" will not occur and these will open the audio just fine with this setting.

Testing out Bandicam as a game recorder and playing during the launch of Diablo 3 (woot!), I've put together some settings/specifications, uploaded it to YouTube, and collected some results for you all:

The video is short, but I was mainly testing a few things:
1) D3's performance, with all options maxed out
2) Capture quality of Bandicam's 'For Edit Premiere/Sony Vegas' Preset and performance/lag of using it
3) The Logo/Watermark capability of Bandicam
4) YouTube's quality maintainability


Recorded with: Bandicam
- v.179204 (Latest at time of this post)
- 'For Edit (Premiere, Sony Vegas)' Preset
- MJPEG, "Full Size", 80%quality (Preset), 30fps, Uncompressed PCM Audio at 48kHz
- Logo option (our GTAM watermark), lower right, 10% opacity


Game: Diablo III (Retail Release) Launch Day
- Witch Doctor, Cathedral Level 3
- Texture Quality: High
- Shadow Quality: High
- Physics: High

- Clutter Density: High

- "Anti-Aliasing" checkbox ticked ON


Resolution: 1680x1050 (1.6AR) recorded at 1680x1050 ("Full Size")**
Filtering: 4xMSAA, 4xAF, set in Control Panel of Videocard
Framerate while not recording: 80-100fps
Framerate while recording: 80-100fps

For people trying out Bandicam and finding your recordings are choppy/laggy on playback (when looking at the original generated/recorded file), you should find that compressing it to a file with a smaller bitrate/size in a format you will keep it permanently in, it will play back that file just fine.

I chose this D3 clip for a Quality Test because it was a good example of both fast movements/action on the screen, as well as slow/non-moving parts, including text. It has dark and light areas, high contrast edges, and tests wide area panning as well.

Bandicam's "For Edit" Preset worked great, with clear text and action in the original recording, while flatter, darker parts were not overly compressed which would create excessive macroblocks or be too smoothed out. There were some Gibbs Effects/Mosquito Noise around text and on some of the button logos in the original recording, but you had to look closely to see it, which is pretty good for not being a 100% Quality setting.

The very small amount of color banding present in the original recording was somewhat generated by the Game Engine (seen in the lower-right quadrant of this video, and in the Diablo3 login screen around the moon, etc.), and there shouldn't be much, due to using MJPEG as a recording codec.

If you are having problems with Color Banding that is not in the game itself, try MJPEG as your recording codec




Average bitrate of the original was about 40Mbps, which meant a writing stream to the disk of about 5MB/s, which any hard drive can handle (recorded onto a drive capable of 150MB/s).
Framerate during recording was maintained at 80-100fps (same framerate as not recording).
The original 1 minute generated file is about 300MB in size with these settings. The recompressed MPEG-4, resized to 1080p file, has an average bitrate of 20Mbps and is about 140MB in size.

While this Preset in Bandicam is designed for compatibility with editing programs, the original recording was uploaded directly from the Bandicam-generated file anyway, to test the effects of uploading to YouTube from an original recording.

** The video at the top was Lanzcos3 resized from the original 1680x1050 capture to a 1728x1080 (1.6 AR) [MPEG-4 H.264 AVC/AAC file with a bitrate of 20000kbps (audio at 384kbps) using a Deblocking Filter setting of +0+0] because the original upload was down-sized to 1280x720 by YouTube and looked much worse, see here below:

The Result:
Recorded at 1680x1050, YouTube had downsized that one to 720 vertical lines. The Gibbs Effects were no longer present because of this, but excessive smoothing and other compression artifacts were introduced. Text was far less readable and nothing on the screen was as crisp as the original 1050p recording. Aliasing was also introduced. This was unfortunate but understandable however, as YouTube can no doubt not keep 'everything' at 'very high bitrates' on their servers, and since it was not 1080p, it simply scaled it down.

A single frame taken from each video for comparison (Frame 813, zoomed section) from the original Bandicam recording, YouTube's version of the 1080p upload and YouTube's 720p version of the 1680x1050 upload. Click to see Full Size.

The resized-from-1050p-to-1080p version maintained much of its detail after uploading to YouTube. The text is closer to the crispness of the original recording, and there is only some smoothing and deblocking being done. There are some macroblock artifacts and color banding accentuation in the darker areas however (for instance, the lower-right quadrant much of the time) but other than that, it is a decent quality version of the 1080p upload.


For those recording at 1680x1050, I recommend upsizing it to 1728x1080 so that YouTube keeps most of the detail of your recordings

  Well done, Bandicam (and YouTube).

Hopefully this information will help out any gamers that are looking to start recording their experiences, or even the already numerous people who are recording and sharing their great videos. Thank you all for sharing and your efforts.



Please note dear reader, that I am not saying "This codec is the best one to record with" or "use this one only". I am merely showing that it is possible or how to tweak it for quality or file size, as to your own personal tastes. There are many codecs out there to choose from when game recording and although some are more apt for certain types of games than others, overall it is your own choice to do with as you will.


See you in the games!

Diablo 3: Out To Launch

[Currently on Launch Day, this is a Text-Only Version]


To quote another author: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...". That's the D3 Launch Day in a nutshell.

Don't get me wrong, I was actually able to play for a couple of hours, which according to the forums, is more than many many people got to experience.

After having a blast with my crazy Shaman, throwing jars of spiders around and barfing up burning firebats, I was perusing the Auction House when I tried to go back into the game for a moment. Alas, I was unable to, as my luck caught up with me, and now I cannot get in at all, and I am receiving various error messages, from "Servers Are Busy, Please Try Your Call Again" to a "Temporary Outage Of Battle.Net" to the now famous "Connection Was Interrupted" that has been around since the 90's. To be fair, this is their Worst Day Ever. I don't mean that in terms of their worst performance, I mean that in terms of their worst incoming experience. The traffic, the logons, the installations, the downloads, the people. This is like feeding time at the trough and it will undoubtedly get rough.

As a former System Administrator, they have my sympathy. Whether they are working hard, putting in overtime for the next week or so, diligently hacking away at the weeds and problems that are coming up - or whether they are laughing and popping champagne, smoking Cuban cigars while they scan their bums and only try to reboot the login server once in a while at the party - in either case today will be the 'worst day' for Diablo 3. Hey, look on the Bright Side, it can only get better from here, right?. Heck, there are people that paid a hundred bucks for the Collector's Edition that have been trying for over 12 hours to get things working and have not played a single minute of gameplay. It can only possibly start looking up for them.

For those who have found this blog while waiting between refreshing the Battle.Net forums and retries of logging in, let me say to you as well, you have my sympathy. You have paid your hard-earned money and purchased a product as a customer and I know you expect to have results and pronto. Perhaps this is another nail in the coffin of Online-Only gaming. Or possibly, it is just another Waste Canister that will be buried in the foundation cement of Online-Only entertainment. Only time will tell, but personally, not just from the viewpoint of a consumer, but also from the viewpoint of a producer, I think that a product that requires a connection that may not always be there is a bad move. There is a reason not every company jumped on the "The Cloud" concept. There is a reason why you don't put all your Stormtroopers in one huge moon-size base. If there was Offline Play, Single-Player only even, this huge amount of people foaming at the fingertips, would only be a trickle, as most would just switch to that, while waiting for things to get going again.

Now I understand the reasons it was made Online-Only. The ability to sell in-game items and currency is one. Copy Protection is another. The thing I don't understand is, why didn't they make an Offline Version that was simply 'disconnected' from the in-game currency capability? Let the people who want to play their heroes and beef them up with "D3heroEditor"'s buff up all they want - so long as absolutely none of their items, gold, or anything else, is connected to their Auction-House capable characters. Why didn't they allow this? This would even solve the traffic/load/whining problem that is currently going on in the forums, because they would be in there playing Offline instead. Now even the forums are Unavailable.

For now, I must sleep. It was fun for some, a nightmare for others. Perhaps that is fitting, for a game such as Diablo 3.

See you in there.
Maybe.

Diablo 2 - Ladder Reset May 2012 - with Screenshots

For those of you still playing Diablo2 off and on, a new season of Ladder starts the 2nd of May, 2012! Don't worry, Blizzard has stated that it is NOT, I repeat, it is not the last ladder reset of D2, just because D3 is coming out:



See that, Other Game Companies? That's how you keep your customer base coming back for more... Thank you, Blue.

Heck there are still tens of thousands of players online and many more messing around on Single Player. I myself have recently been trying out The Cheat Engine on Single Player, but with the Hero Editor there is really no need, as you can give your character level 90+, level 90+ skills and max out your stash with goldz for gambling. Do a few Boss Runs, save the items as files, then you can import them into the other characters! I hope Diablo3 has this sort of thing... I don't want to sound like 'that forum guy/girl', but I may not purchase Diablo3 if it doesn't have Single Player. Even the annoying must-have-an-internet-connection Single Player is fine, as long as cheats and utilities are allowed for those of us who want to beef up our characters. [Must not... include rant about online single player games and them not working when servers/companies go down and how they should all be like Diablo2...]

Speaking of D3 (a separate post will be made about the beta), it seems like Gold and other things are all server-side. This makes sense, since D3 items are going to be able to be sold for "Real Life Money" and you don't want some hackers giving their characters a million goldz to sell for real cash. However, again, for those of us who like to supe-up our characters, the ability to have (built in?) cheats of some sort would be nice for isolated/offline single player gameplay. I purposely do not read/view too much on a game before it comes out and I haven't heard anything about Single Player in D3 and how it's going to be handled yet.

Distraction! This is a post about Diablo2, and so let's bring it back with some screenshots:

My Necro in NM Den. If you can change the game running from DirectDraw to DirectX, I highly recommend it.
The shading and colors are superior.

My Barbarian following in a Chaos and Baal Run in Nightmare. Yup, that's what I call the Necromancer Clay Golems.

My Hydra Sorceress running Hell Countess for Runes. My strategy was usually to teleport to her [I miss the old 3-level Tower] and then let the hydras kill her and her guards off. Pretty easy with decent Hydras. The one Hydra on me is for defence of the position.

Ahh! This is what happens when you don't play your characters for 90 Days and someone takes your name before you sign in again. Drat, I don't mind losing the item holders but she was a good sorc. Oh well, a chance to make new!

My 83 Wind Druid on Ladder. I was in the top 10 at the beginning, then stayed in the top 50 for a while, but I just can't keep playing and keep up. It was fun for a while anyway and I got some fast levels with good groups.

My Windy Druid found Ali Baba, woot! What's the best character to MF with these days?

Going through some items from Ladder on my Item Holders and found Warshrike, a nice throwing dagger weapon. Now where's my Throwing Barb again?

Found Jalal's Mane for my Bear Druid. Yesss!

My Bear Druid's Stun Strategy. Want easy PvM (player versus monster) fights? Just level a Druid to 24 and get Shockwave. Coupled with a nice strong Grizzly, just 'Stun-Em-And-Run-Em': Shockwave stun and let your merc and grizz clear em out. The only thing you have to worry about is what loot to pick up when it's all over.

My Necromancer can use Charged Bolt! Ok, he can't, but my Bonemancer entering Hell WSK looks like he does in this screenshot, due to some Lightning Enchantedseses-es near the Waypoint.  Don't forget kids, if you hold the mouse farther away from your character when you cast Teeth, they will come out in a narrower cone, and if you hold the mouse closer to your character, they will come out in a wider spread.

A quarter of a million gold for dying? Man, I hope this doesn't happen in D3.. Ah, well it was about time for a break anyway..

That's it for now, see you in there!

N.B.: This post has been copy/pasted to a few blogs out there (that seem to mainly just copy/paste others' work). This is the original article (our logo is in the screenshots still and they left one of the copyright statement of ours intact). Please ask if you wish to copy/paste entire articles (thank you for the compliment I suppose) and it's great if you could just link to this one. Thanks, though.