but first, the Tomb Raider final boss skip

My original plan tonight had been to maybe do an “official” speedrun of Tomb Raider. Which is to say, the same as the last one, but on normal mode (which is the traditional difficulty used by Tomb Raider 2013 speedrunners).

Frankly, I was most worried about the fact that it had been several days since I had done a proper stream, and I was worried that I was going to end up losing my nerve and dropping the entire project altogether (a clear possibility at any given moment!).

I did stream. So that was good. But it’s been a few days and it became quite obvious quite quickly that I was way too rusty on Tomb Raider to do a speedrun tonight. I’d be lying if I said that potential viewer base wasn’t also a factor (I often look at the twitch listings for Tomb Raider if I’m considering streaming, just so I know what I might be up against… basically, is there any room left for little old me or are some bigger name streamers on and probably gobbling up all of the viewers).

Anyhow.

On the plus side, I did manage to get the end boss fight skip. Sort of.

First, “what is the final boss skip?” I hear you not ask. Well, when you get to the top area at the last bit of Tomb Raider 2013, instead of jumping off of the platform to the right and starting the procession of enemies, you instead head left. To a railing.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out how to get from that railing (tricky in and of itself) all the way over to the platform where the final boss cutscene occurs.

I think on the PC, the trick is to use some sort of jump boost to get to the platform. I can’t describe it though, because I’ve never tried it (who wants to speedrun on a computer that gets 15-25 FPS).

From what I’ve seen on the xbox 360, you get on the railing, jump to the pillar in front of you to get more height, and then immediately jump from there to the final platform.

Here’s where things really get hazy. Making it up to the platform is not sufficient. You need to do some backtracking to trigger a checkpoint otherwise you will soft lock the game. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world and I think it’s remedied by going out to the menu and reloading your last save. And I think in that case you still skip everything leading up to the end boss.

But for whatever reason, on the PS4, the checkpoint does not appear to exist.

In the times that I was able to get to the platform, I never could trigger a cutscene, and regardless of where I ran around, I never triggered a new checkpoint because dying or restarting from checkpoint would always result in my starting over from the very beginning of the final area (in other words, I’m pretty sure that means I never found a single checkpoint up on the platform).

If it’s true that the PS4 has a checkpoint that’s either not there, or requires different circumstances to trigger then, this would be the first thing that I’m aware of where the PS4 differs substantially from other versions of Tomb Raider 2013.

I just really can’t fathom that this supposed graphical-only upgrade would suddenly have one particular area that diverged significantly from the xbox360 and pc versions (though I suppose it would make some sense if it works the same way on the PS3 version (can’t find anyone speedrunning that though)). I figure the problem has got to be that I was doing something wrong/forgetting something.

So far, speedrunning wise, the PS4 seems to be just like the other platforms with the exception that it seems to occupy this murky limbo area where xbox 360 tricks won’t work because the PS4’s FPS is higher than 30 and then where PC tricks won’t work either because you need a keyboard to pull off the trick or you need an insanely high frame rate (I’ve heard 150+ though I’m not sure which tricks require the high framerate (nor why)).

Either way, to have worked on that trick for so long (though still probably pales in comparison time-wise to the radio tower skip), only to find out that it might not even be usable in a PS4 run…

Bummer.

the playstation 3

So my PS3 has been unplugged ever since I got the PS4 (about a month) because I simply didn’t have the space for it.

I still don’t. But I basically cleared space for it on a shelf that’s sort of near the TV and then wired cables all the way back to the TV. It’s a mess.

I swear, if there’s one thing that will be the death of me, it will be cables. Either from tripping on one and breaking my head or from flying into a hulk rage unable to tolerate all of these maldita rat’s nests everywhere.

If my area were more permanent, I’d probably start shopping for some proper shelving units to hold things and then start buying cable straps and stuff to get all of the cables out of the way. I freaking hate cables.

But off of that.

I also took the opportunity to get the PS3 wired into the elgato and test out OBS.

If you missed the earlier blog post, my big point in going with OBS over streaming direct from the PS4 would be:

  1. well obviously in the case of stuff that is not the PS4 and can’t stream on its own
  2. to be able to run an onscreen timer for when I do my speedruns
  3. to have “be back shortly” images to show for when I’m on a short break so that people who show up in the middle of the break aren’t greeted with either a pause menu, or just my character sitting there doing nothing
  4. to be able to get a good quality local recording of what I’m working on with my commentary
  5. and with the latest twitch drama… to get access to more streaming options than just twitch and ustream

Right now #4 is what I have concerns about.

My desire is to get a pristine 720p copy from my elgato and then stream something much lower res out to twitch/hitbox/whatever.

Well, it appears that OBS gives you FLV files that are simply whatever bitrate you’ve chosen for streaming. In my case, I think it was like 1000. It produces okay recordings. That’s about it.

I figure there’s got to be some way around this. Sadly, maybe the solution is to basically just record native into the elgato app and then, wait for it, basically just stream a picture of the elgato window. I think that’s basically how mac apps like camtwist are able to stream imagery from the elgato (they’re not reading the device data, they’re just copying the visuals in the application window). I’m not sure how much that would make my CPU freak out. And it still doesn’t resolve the issue of how I’ve had horrible sync issues with the elgato stuff. Clarified, it’s not just sync issues but drift too in the context of a single session.

And on that note, I didn’t use a mic at all for my test streams tonight.

I basically got Uncharted 3 up and going and then started streaming a coop match to an alternate twitch account I had (I finally realized that I could use a second account so that I wouldn’t have to bug my followers with emails about my going live for something that’s nothing more than me testing out equipment).

So I can say that, on my pitiful internet, I was able to get away with streaming to twitch with a bitrate of 1000 (er, I have no idea what the units are but it’s a setting in OBS) and successfully carrying on some multiplayer games of U3. I did have some connectivity issues in one match, but that may well have been other factors (e.g. the other players) since I have seen that sort of thing before when I wasn’t streaming.

The huge missing piece was the lack of a mic, so now I don’t get to have any experience with if the elgato/OBS combination drifts. In my experience with the elgato’s built-in recording, the mic audio would both be out of alignment with the game audio in general and worse yet, it would also drift over the course of a session. Oy.

See, that’s what I love about streaming direct from the PS4, it doesn’t seem to have any of these issues. Whereas with the elgato, I’ve got to not only sync once, but then try to compensate for the freaking drift over one session, with the PS4, based on what I’ve heard on my own twitch playbacks, the PS4 never has any of these issues. It just freaking works.

I have started to wonder how much of it might be CPU issues for me though. Technically my Macbook Air falls below the minimum system requirements. But elgato’s support pages just make vague references to some features not working if you don’t meet the minimum requirements. There’s zero mention of what these features might be or what the other consquences of an underspec’d computer would be.

During my sessions in OBS, it only ever showed a tiny fraction of frames being dropped which I’d tend to think would mean the CPU had been more than capable (well, but maybe a decent computer would have 0 dropped frames and maybe that tiny amount of dropped frames really adds up over time, I don’t know). I can cross my fingers and hope that OBS will be much better than the elgato software and that sync will never be an issue.

In reality though, I kinda wonder if my elgato based streams are just going to need to be restarted every 30-60 minutes to avoid the sync issues.

And funnily enough, on the subject of CPU usage, the mac I was using to view the twitch stream was complaining much more loudly (the fan) than the mac that was actually doing the freaking transcoding. Of course, the quieter one is like 3-4 years younger. I’m sure that had everything to do with it. I still found it funny though.

I need to get my mic working inside of OBS but I’m really not looking forward to digging into audio on the Windows side. I was shocked to find that in 2014, it was just as bad as when I left (~2004). Or at least from when I was playing with OBS earlier this week.

Frankly, it’s to the point that I’m almost considering having a mac setup to just handle the mic audio. It’s not like I’m made of computers, but quite possibly my ancient macbook pro would be up to the task of:

  1. running reason
  2. letting me hear what I sound like live
  3. applying a noise gate
  4. maybe a bit of reverb
  5. outputting it somehow into the streaming computer

I can’t remember the names of the stuff, but it appeared to me that trying to get everything appropriately routed inside of windows itself was going to be a headache and a half. It probably wouldn’t be much of an issue if I were streaming a local game (e.g. PC game), but going through the elgato means that I need to:

  1. hear myself live (no delay)
  2. introduce a delay for the part that gets fed into OBS so it’s in sync with the elgato

Yuck. Yuck. Yuck yuck. Yuckity yuck.

A decade of working on audio stuff on the mac side has spoiled me into thinking that it’s normal for things to just work.

And I find myself intolerant of any of other situation.

That’s going to make this, um, fun.