AFK: I haven't posted in a while... so here are some things I have been slowly working on as I can [Personal Log]

I realize I haven't posted anything here for a while [and I have always been sporadic with posts due to my ongoing illness] so I wanted to just give a quick Update on some things that I am working on, off an on lately - lots of 'irons in the fire' - but still getting over some rough cold/flu symptoms (on top of my surgery, which I am still recovering from), so I have no idea of a timeframe of completion of these posts... Still, here are some topics that I have been working on the past months, posted here both to encourage myself and to let others know some material to look for in the future:

» A QualityTest of the Plays.TV client, looking a bit at the interface but mainly the Quality of output, comparing the different settings and what results can be expected, with examples [I was in the Beta for Plays.TV and have been testing out various settings at The Blog's Plays.TV page (http://plays.tv/u/GameTipsAndMore ) collecting material for this QualityTest/Review]. The data and material is going to be a part of a future 'Versus' article, comparing a few Game Recording Clients that all have GPU-Accelerated capability…

» A Playclaw 5 FirstImpressions/Review, looking at the interface and output that can be expected from it, with a few settings and examples of the effect they have. I have been giving some Feedback to the Developer of this software, testing out recent Beta versions, after Santa felt fit to give this non-free software to The Blog for an Xmas gift and it is also going to be a part of the future 'Versus' article, comparing a few Game Recording Clients that have GPU-Accelerated capability…

» An ACTION! FirstImpressions/Review, looking at the interface and output that can be expected from it, with a few examples of the various functions. Santa also gave The Blog this one for Xmas, and it too, is going to be a part of the future 'Versus' article, comparing some Game Recording Clients that have GPU-Accelerated capability…

» 'The Battlefield Series of Games and how to take screenshots in them' (BF3 to BFH). I have been seeing a lot of people asking this over the years, in the Official Forums and many other places. It is continually asked (new players, etc) how to do this in these games, so I want to make one post covering all of them…

» A QuickTip on GTAV (Grand Theft Auto Five) and the problem with Activation. I received this game for Xmas and had some trouble Activating it. I figured it out, but I saw a lot of people online asking how to fix it or what to do (with no answer given). I want to help people with this, so I will post exactly what I did and how to get it to work...

» “How To Tell Where The Bottleneck Is”, when looking at a system and what to possibly Upgrade in it (or if there is no need to). This is a common question that gets asked a lot, anytime, on Gaming Forums, Technical Forums and Support Forums everywhere. As a Certified Computer Technician, I want to give my input on what to look for and how to test for this, to help keep your system performing the best it can, for your gaming adventures…

» And More… Off the Topic of Gaming, I have a few short posts I have jotted down, ready to 'polish-and-publish' when I can.. For one of them, I took some time to analyze it and I think I have figured out 'The Answer' to that everlasting and infinite query: “In A Movie Theatre, Which Armrest Is Yours?” (the idea came via Philosoraptor, credit will be given in the post). I believe the result could actually be a contributing factor to finally bringing about World Peace...

I guess I could say these topics are 'some things to look for in the coming year', heh. When I can finally get around to finishing them, I hope you enjoy them all.

Until then... See You In The Game!

And More: Deals and Sales - Guild Wars 2 is $24.99 Right Now

Woohoo! I have no idea when it started and no idea when it will end, but I just saw this with my own two eyes... if you are looking for one last reason to get GW2, it is now on sale for just under $25 American Dollars. That's about £15 British Pounds if you are from the UK, руб890 Rubles if you are from Russia, 1500 Rupees if you are from India and what works out to be about $10,000,000 Canadian Dollars:

I just might get my own copy finally and be able to stop begging others to play theirs (you know who you are)... Go to http://buy.guildwars2.com/ to get it while it's On Sale and See You In the Game!

GTAM Minute Tutorial - Editing the Bouncy Yellow Text in the Minecraft Menu Screen and Fixing the 'ZWN BSF' Problem (and Locating the Minecraft.jar file)

Yes, I had to put absolutely everything in the title. As many of you already know, the yellow 'bouncy' text that shows up on the Main Menu screen of Minecraft ("Splash Text") can be edited to display whatever you want it to say. The problem is, when editing that text, one weird 'error' that can occur is, just before your personalized text, a little box with ZWN BSF (it's actually ZWNBSP) can show up. I've seen this problem talked about on many different forums for a while now and as I was editing the file myself, I figured out this way of fixing it and thought I'd share it with everyone:

In this GTAM Minute Tutorial, I'm editing the Splashes.txt file inside the Minecraft.jar source file [in Windows] to simply say, "Game Mode: Hardcore!", when working on recording some future Hardcore Mode Playthroughs. I show the problem as it pops up while editing [it's a one-take video] and then immediately show the fix for it. I don't think this is the only way around it, but it solves the problem and worked for me multiple times and since people are still talking about it; I thought I'd throw this out there to help others.



To locate the Minecraft.jar source file the game uses (for almost everything including Mods/addons), there are a bunch of ways, here are some [N.B. - (3) works on all operating systems]:

1) If you are playing Minecraft in Windows, you could do a couple of things**:

 - Open Windows Explorer and in the top Address Bar area, where it says your location on your computer, type in
%appdata%
and it will show the location of the ".minecraft" folder, where game files are normally kept. There is a "bin" folder inside, it should be in there

 - Click on the Start Button/Orb and where it says "Search Programs And Files" type in
%appdata%
and it will show the location of the ".minecraft" folder, where game files are normally kept. There is a "bin" folder inside, it should be in there

- Open a Windows Explorer window and navigate to C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Roaming and this is the location of the ".minecraft" folder, where game files are normally kept. There is a "bin" folder inside, it should be in there

 **You may have to 'show Hidden Files And Folders' in Windows by opening a Windows Explorer window and pulling down the Tools Menu and choosing Folder Options. In here, click on the View Tab and under the Hidden Files And Folders category, select the 'Show Hidden Files, Folders And Drives' Radio Button and click OK. You may also have to UNCHECK the 'Hide Extensions For Known File Types' checkbox in the View Tab if you want to see the '.jar' file extension/ending

2) If you are playing Minecraft on a Mac:

- Open Finder and in the Go To Folder section, type in
~/Library/Application Support/Minecraft/bin
and it should be in there

3) If you are on most other OS's (such as Linux):

 - Run the Minecraft game and go to Options, then Texture Packs and choose Open Texture Pack Folder
 - Go up one level to the ".minecraft" directory and there should be a "bin" directory inside, it should be in there

 Have fun editing the Minecraft Splash Text for your video projects and See You In The Game!

The Game Tips And More Blog's Ludo Ludi (Game Play) #1-3

I wanted to start a video series that was Random Gameplay Video Clips that I have collected over time. I started out calling it FLASHBACK, creating a logo for it and everything; but I wanted a way to archive/share them out a little bit faster/easier, rather than 'Featuring' them every time, so I came up with the concept of "Ludo Ludi".

It means "game" and "play" in Esperanto. The idea was to not label the gameplay clips or state what they are, in order to have other people enjoy the "surprise reminiscence" of the games. Viewers could try to guess what they are for fun or just enjoy them as part of a playlist where they didn't know what was coming next. For the most part it would be easy to guess them of course; if you played the game, you'll know what game it is and what class I played, etc.etc. But, I still thought it would be entertaining to have a bunch on a playlist of some sort, with no obvious names, having a transitory video (without logos/intros) of something loopable such as static - as though changing the channel on a television - in-between videos. With Youtube's Playlist and Randomize features, this can now be done and one can sit and reminisce on games of yesteryear with my video clips showing snippets of gaming moments recorded from a wide variety of games! Everyone with ADD/ADHD can just click the Next button on the playlist to skip to the next one if the current one isn't holding their interest! Everyone is a winner! With this in mind then, I now present one long paragraph and the first three installments of :

The Game Tips And More Blog's New Gameplay Video Series, "Ludo Ludi (Game Play)"

Enjoy and See You In The Games!

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!