weirdphil

Just the other week, Twitch.tv/weirdphil just hit a huge milestone. I’ve received my Affiliate status on Twitch and the channel can now receive cheers/bits and subscriptions. I’ve gotten to work some new assets for the channel, like a channel badge and candlejack emote, and a spiffy animated gif for the subscriber notifications through streamlabs. I still need to add more icons for those who continue to sub for 3 months and longer, and we’re only limited to 1 emote at the moment, but I’ll be breaking out some of the old-old candlejack-themed variations of profile pics and turning a few of those into emotes when I can/allowed.

So what’s next? Well, I’ll need to stream more often for one. I’ve abandoned StreamlabsOBS for now, since a recent update has killed the stream’s frames per second, so I’ve integrated all the viewer counts and notifications into regular old OBS Studio. I’ve been inviting my friends over for some streams on the weekends, as they are available. These live streams are replacing the former daily We Pway videos that we used to do, so instead of recording a bunch of footage that we would cut down/edit/re-render/upload/publish over some chunk of time, we’re doing it all live, and if the streams are good then we will put them on YouTube later. So, YouTube will still get some decent content every once in a while, and Twitch will get our live streams as often as we can. I am trying to get into a good streaming schedule alone, and every other week or so (at the moment, hopefully at least two weekends out of any month) I’ll have either of my buddies over for some co-op fun. We’ve played a bit of Earthbound a few weeks ago, we played Mario Bros 3 this weekend. Weeknight streams will usually go for two hours from 6pm to 8pm, and the weekend streams will typically go all day long (up to 6 hours or longer if we can manage).

Unfortunately, two of my old HDDs died. I was able to salvage the data off the old C drive, but the old D drive was too far gone, along with all of my data I’ve been saving and sitting on for the past 10 years. I’ve lost all of my music, pictures, all of my unedited videos for WePway (including the Ocarina of Time finale), all of my custom Candlejack avatars, everything is gone. I recorded some DOOM (2016) for the WeirdPhil channel this last weekend, and it looks great. I am still unable to properly record in 60 FPS, so I will need to buy a new PVR that will allow that. The Hauppauge HD PVR Gaming Edition 2.0 that I own can only record in 60 FPS at 720p or lower, and 1080p at 30 FPS. Further WePway episodes will be on indefinite hiatus while I work on making brand new assets, since we’ve lost all the channel art and thumbnails and templates.

I should be getting my HTC Vive sometime in early June, so we might shift our focus from daily WePway videos to live streaming on the old WeirdPhil twitch channel. So, here’s what I’m working with:

CPU is 7th gen Intel i7 7700k at 4.2 ghz GPU is MSI nVidia Geforce GTX 1080 at 8 GBs 32GB of RAM Dolby Atmos surround sound

I, uh, wasn’t really concerned before, when I would boot up my PC and it has a message telling my CPU temperature is too high. I knew my PC was pretty old and having issues, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this bad. I’ve got my chassis fan running at max right now and I’m going to need to get that new PC finished ASAP. All I need is that damn $330 i7 and then I’m good.

So, I hope this isn’t too immersion-breaking here, but the majority of videos playing on the channel, popping up Monday through Friday are all from our backlog of videos we stocked up on right before Christmas. That backlog is drying up and we’re unfortunately looking at a pretty grim future for the channel at the moment, and I’m not even getting into the whole “YouTube has removed monetizing from our channel” bull crap, though that part is indeed true. Right before Christmas, I suffered a head injury while working my overnight job, and since that happened I have been dealing with a concussion and post-concussive headaches that have been extremely painful. I’ve gone to doctors, I’m on work restrictions, and I’m to believe that I’m on workers comp, which is all fine and dandy, but it’s been rough for me as the sole do-everything-guy working on the channel with my friends. I’ve mentioned before, my friends only show up for the recording, and I do everything else from hitting the record button to editing and rendering and uploading the videos and maintaining the channel and our social media outlets. I’ve also been limiting my screen time on video games and haven’t touched my video editing software since the injury, so we really are scraping the bottom of the barrel here and we’re about to run out of content. Because I’m the sole do-everything-because-nobody-else-knows-o-wants-to-do-anything-to-help-guy, who also happens to be injured, we’re looking at yet another possible hiatus coming up.

We’ve been playing the Director’s Cut edition on PC for a while on our WePway channel on YouTube, and whenever we record footage for Deadly Premonition, we’ve added more and more mods, for the sake of keeping the game running smooth and preventing crashes. Unfortunately, we will not be finishing the PC version of Deadly Premonition Director’s Cut. After doing more research, it appears that there is no fix for the game’s horrible memory leaks. From what I’ve read on the PC version, the entire world is loaded into your RAM when you walk outside of a house, and while you may start the game with 60 FPS, it slowly begins to dip lower and lower the longer that you play. I’ve had issues with the game crashing during specific cutscenes, and while I’ve been able to get around most of them we’ve run across, I’m learning about other crashes and errors that can happen much later in the game that can potentially corrupt save data. Deadly Premonition looks to be a fantastic game, and it’s a shame that the PC version will never get fixed entirely. We spent 3 weekends recording footage for use on our WePway channel, and I’ve been forced to make this decision, though not taken lightly.

Hey guys! So I’ve read that YouTube has changed their rules yet again, and have turned off our ads since we have less than 10,000 lifetime views across our We Pway channel. If you wouldn’t mind helping out, please check out our We Pway channel and watch some videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCixUwUZlGva2zuXGgXweisw

Maker sent me an email a few weeks ago, confirming what everybody already knew. I’m one of the 60,000+ (or whatever) channels being dropped so they can focus on Markiplier and Jacksepticeye exclusively. (I kid, but, you know them)

I don’t know what sort of changes this will cause for my channel. I’m sure the ability to create or edit “Shows” will be missing perhaps, and I might see a bunch of copyright notices that I hadn’t seen before while I was partnered. What I can tell you, is switching to Maker from Zoomin’Games was easily one of the worst ideas I’ve had for this channel. Zoomin’Games sent me money every month, there was no threshold that I needed to hit, no quotas I needed to reach. My only beef with Zoomin’Games was the fact they were located in Europe and I felt that their location might cause an issue for me in the future.

I have been mostly just been spending my time working on videos for WePway, noticing issues I’m having with my aging PC which now has issues recording newer games like God Eater and Senran Kagura Estival Versus. Menus look all fine, but once the gameplay starts, the frames drop on the capture. My only workaround I have at the moment outside of building the new PC would be to run the PC through the Hauupauge connected to the Lappy. Easy enough, but I would then need to connect my PC to the smaller TV instead of my larger monitor. It would actually look better when captured that way as opposed to using OBS. Speaking of OBS, I tried to switch from OBS to OBS Studio, and while I’m still having the same issue with those same games, I have noticed the frame drops to be smaller, but still not something I would want to upload due to it’s lack of quality.

We’ve already recorded, and have uploaded some new Link to the Past videos for the channel, but we’ve been forced to keep them on the back log for the last month. We got hit by Copyright content ID matches, not by Nintendo, but by COMPASS_CS or something, some sort of company located in Singapore, who Youtube has allowed to Content ID match us with -get this- the BGM from the Dark World. Since two thirds of the game takes place in the dark world, you can imagine this will likely effect the remaining LttP videos. We’re anticipating this also. Heck, if Nintendo hit us with Content ID matches, I’d be fine with it, but this isn’t even Nintendo doing this. I’d already disputed the videos effected, but it seems it’s going to take the entire 30 days to wait through this, likely because this so-called company in Singapore doesn’t check their inbox, are run by robots, or don’t actually speak any English. I’m hoping this doesn’t cause too many issues for us, as it’s our goal to continue to provide daily videos for the channel, but if it keeps happening then that means we need to render even more videos and put them up on YouTube and just let them linger in the back log until we’re sure the mindless YouTube bots have combed over all of them and the appropriate disputes have completed.

I’ve been trying some things out in my spare time to get to the bottom of this issue. I’m not a dev, but I’ve had a tech support background working for jobs that I can’t mention due to Non-Disclosure Agreements, so I actually find bug reports to be a bit fascinating (Crazy, I know). This save data issue on RWBY has been causing issues for myself and clearly others. I’ve reported it to their dev team via twitter and their google-doc-powered bug report form. We’ve seen their response the other day. the “We’re aware, we’re working on it” sort of response that also mentioned connectivity issues.  Clearly, they are getting to the bottom of it, but in the meantime, we don’t know for sure what’s causing this issue and we don’t know how long a patch is going to take to reach us. We need to know what is causing the issue and how to avoid it, because I don’t want to just stop playing and wait for a patch, I’ve got monsters to vanquish.

So I’ve been going over everything in my head, figured I might as well post my information that I have gathered up here in hopes that this helps other folks besides just myself, and if anything, we can think-tank a temporary plan to avoid what’s causing the loss of data. Here’s everything that I know right now.

1) It definitely happens during or after online play.

2) Getting no feedback (response) from selecting your Profile name from the main menu in order to force a prompt asking if you wish to change profiles is a clear sign that any further progress is doomed.

3) This is NOT related to external HDD. I moved the game data from my external the other day and didn’t see any further issues pop up until this morning when I attempted online play again.

4) Selecting “Cancel” while the game is performing matchmaking or a search for open lobbies could be causing this issue. Go ahead, try it yourself.

5) Selecting “Cancel” after the end credits when you’ve killed the final boss is a definite “NO-NO”. I did this on my very first session. I spent about 4 hours playing a single online session with a brand new level 1 Weiss, unlocked several achievements, completed several requirements for advanced skills (countering, ranged kills, reviving party members, etc) and maxed her out at level 10. After pressing, Cancel, I returned to the main menu, then visited the game’s xbox live hub to look at my achievements and browse the LFG tab. On the LFG tab, I noticed an open group named “Save data is lost after exiting game” which instantly got me worried. I exited my game, rebooted the game, and found all of my progress from the entire morning lost, including my level 5 Yang that I played around with in single-player before going online in the random quickplay to start leveling up my level 1 Weiss. Keep this in mind: All progress that was made during that entire session whether online or singleplayer was lost as soon as I hit Cancel on the online lobby search prompt. It’s likely that hitting Cancel at any time is what’s causing the save data to forget that you played that entire session. The problem is, it could also be related to the online connectivity issues. The only reason that I’ve hit cancel on those prompts is because they were taking longer than usual to begin with. That said, the issue could be cause either by selecting Cancel, or simply by trying to access the online features, which defeats the entire point of playing RWBY.

At least I think it is. I haven’t gotten an email back saying it isn’t, so I’m just going to cross my fingers. So, as long as I’m being honest and saying I’m planning on getting the Switch, I figure I should mention some concerns here.

32 GB of internal storage / Up to 256 GB expandable via micro SD.

To support our new YouTube channel We Pway we’ll be live on https://www.twitch.tv/weirdphilp streaming whatever games we can think of. Don’t know when the stream will start, possibly 4pm, and it’ll continue until my pals need to head home to sleep. For sure, we’ll be going until Midnight to celebrate.

We’ll be playing games, chatting up with the viewers, promoting the new YouTube channel, might give out some Steam game keys I’ve got laying around here... Be sure to swing by the stream. We’ll have Dan (AmazingBeado) with us for sure with a possibility that Hootz may show up.

New laptop is here and it’s already proving quite useful. I may start testing my plans with the haupauge either tonight or tomorrow. In related news, we’re kicking off Christmas with our Xmas We Pway episodes. We’ve got a Megaman Christmas Carol, Duke Nukem in Nuclear Winter, and a few more as holiday exclusives (no plans to record them outside of the event) and we’re also running episodes of our Undertale sessions during AND beyond the event. Yes, we are also doing 2 episodes per day (at least until the event is over) as sort of a test to see how many more episodes we can crank out now that I have this laptop. It sucks being chained to a desktop while also rendering videos at the same time, mostly because I really can’t do anything else while I’m rendering in order to avoid issues with the renders.

That said, this is just a test for now for running two episodes a day. If I can keep up with the daily videos for We Pway, then 2 a day might continue later on. Again, we’ll see, we’re looking into it. But for now, here’s another link to the new We Pway channel. Check out our new videos!

We Pway

And here’s episode 01 of Undertale!