My First Cast

It's good for a first cast, but:
- Icondistance should be lower, sometimes you zoom out a bit and it gets hard to distinguish units
- turn on LOS view, especially in the scouting phase, this way you can also see if people have radar or not and can see what the enemy is up to(like when steel_blue sends in his scorcher raids)
- Try to explain some game mechanics like leveler AoE getting trhough thug shields, why it's good to raid, ...

A good thing you did was focusing on the important battle in the middle from time to time.

Keep on casting! :)

I like how you describe whats happen around.
But for me it is too cramped, try to be more flimsy like if u see it first time and u are surprised what happens in a corner. It has no action in it, sorry. But for your first cast it is good. :)

Ah and I really dislike that u can't really identify vehicles or other units sometimes even if u know them, is there a better graphic possible?

Keep goin, I think u can become a good caster!

edit
and I like that u show all commands. The identifying of unit types is maybe because of xray shader or how it is called? Maybe remove it too!

Nice! Your talking was quite composed for your first cast.

Dual cursors was weird.

I liked how you moved the camera at one point to a different angle. I also didn't know there was a command to return it to the "regular" angle, but apparently so since you used something like that.

sprang, I think the reset-camera-option only works for the non-engine camera. It's some widget stuff. I think cofc, but the newer version/name.

Not bad, especially for a first cast. I only have a few small criticisms:

- Lower the in-game volume. It should be audible, but still at most 1/10th of the volume of your voice (i.e. 10db lower). I'd recommend doing some tests with Audacity to figure out what volume settings you need to have while casting to get this. Depending on how you are recording this, you can actually have the best of both worlds (unless you are using Skype to dual-cast): Record your voice on one track (either via Audacity or DXtory's multi-track recording, or if you use OBS you can adjust the mic volume separate from system sounds), and the game audio on the other, and then mix them in later to more appropriate volumes.

- For some reason the fullscreen YouTube video seems to push everything to the right. That might be a YouTube issue, not sure. I'm guessing you don't have a widescreen monitor handy, but that wouldn't be a bad investment.

- Microphone quality was pretty good, what kind of microphone do you have? I'd recommend a bit of tweaking to reduce noise a bit, but for a first cast it worked nicely.

- I disagree with Flipstip about icon distance. Never forget that everything put on YouTube is not just for current ZK players, but also potential ones, and icon wars isn't the flashiest way to show off the game. Experiment with unit visibility settings to try to find a combination that you think gives the most visibility at distance without icons. I find XRayShader + Outline works beautifully, and if you set icon distance to ~210 the XRayShader will hit maximum right at the icon transition (given default XRayShader settings), though I find having the minimum and maximum set to 2/3rd of default best keeps the details of the units visible as they fade into the distance. If Outline is too taxing on performance, then I wouldn't recommend using XRayShader with Spotter or Teamplatter.

- Good use of the COFC rotation. I've got to remember to do that more often myself.

- Don't be afraid to get excited when exciting things happen. It makes the casts much more entertaining. You've got sober colour-commentary and analysis down pretty well.

Skasi: That map border thing is just fog setting in Map Extension. I've debated using it, since it is a pretty basic (i.e. OpenGL 1.x fixed-function fog) effect. Currently I've been using the Map Border widget to cover that base.

What recording software do you use? That's really important and may be the cause of the cursor and graphics issues. Also, when did you add "Return to starting viewpoint" to COFC? I would very much like to use that.

As for noise, it sounds like a combination of low-quality compression and speaking wind into the mic. I don't hear a lot of environmental noise, but I do hear a lot of fuzziness on sibilants. Do you speak directly into the mic or across it (i.e. it is off to the side or below your mouth)? Speaking across the mic is really good for keeping volume without needing a pop filter (which kills treble/harmonics) and without getting air from plosives and sibilants into the recording. For my recordings, since about mid-November I've been speaking with my mic right at my cheek at about a 6db internal boost (or 50 on the standard Windows volume control settings) and it avoids noise from my computer while keeping my voice easy to hear.

As for icon distance, I find that no matter what visibility settings I have, it needs to be at most 215.

quote: I think I know where the problem lies, and it's probably with Windows or Spring rather than OBS.

I was right.

If you change Windows text size, then run Spring in Windowed mode, Spring gets the wrong resolution. I'll file a mantis bug for it. Eventually.

Wasn't there a reset-option for cofc before? Something like alt+ctrl+shift+middle mouse or so. Never used it myself, but seen it mentioned when someone had trouble with their camera. Might do something completely different than I expected though. :)

I'm not really hearing a lot of noise (although you can hear his keypresses), but the high end suffers pretty hard. Not sure how it loses so much quality (i doubt it's the mic itself), check your sound encoding? Has something telephone-ish to it...

Skasi - Ctrl-Alt-MiddleClick will reset the COFC view. It'll take you to directly overhead, maximum height, north towards the top. It's the "I've gotten lost on the map or gotten the camera stuck help help help" button. But that's different from "take me back to my 'home' view" which is what I implemented.

MauranKilom - The default OBS audio encoding bitrate was pretty low; that may have been what you and Shadowfury were hearing. I've bumped it up to the max now.

Shadowfury:

quote: how does the resolution get wrong

It's a DPI thing. When you change your text size, you're changing the Windows DPI setting, which tells Windows and all compliant apps to rescale text and icons and related UI features, but without altering image sizes and other things which should be scaled by pixels rather than inches.

Not every application gets this right. When you change your DPI, Spring renders its output at a resolution which makes the in-game text the right size for your new DPI... but which also renders EVERYTHING ELSE at that new resolution. In my case, that effectively lowered my Spring resolution. Spring rendered in low resolution to a window, and Windows / the graphics card / the graphics driver scaled up that low resolution output to match the desktop resolution. So I was getting a scaled-up low resolution video.

OBS captured the low-resolution video without regard to the Windows upscaling, because it's getting it directly from the video card. And yes, I could adjust the position (very easy, very intuitive controls, yay OBS) but that didn't help the basic problem - Spring was outputting low resolution video. OBS can't do anything to turn it into high-resolution; upscaling just makes it bigger, it doesn't add back the missing details, clarity, and sharpness that Spring didn't put there in the first place.

There are similar problems in all three modes: windowed, non-windowed fullscreen, and windowed fullscreen borderless. They result in slightly different issues, but none of them work right, and they all have as their root cause that Spring doesn't deal with DPI changes correctly. Turns out there's even a mantis ticket for this from 2009: http://springrts.com/mantis/view.php?id=1729

But everything's working now. I'm getting perfect hi-res video captures now, because I gave up and set my DPI back to standard. It makes it really hard to read menus and text and such, but since most of what I do with this PC is play Zero-K it's an acceptable trade-off.

FWIW, here's what I'm doing now. I run my desktop at 2048 x 1536 (4:3) with DPI set to 100%. I run Spring windowed, maximized. Now that I've solved the DPI problem I could probably also do either of the other two modes, but I'm used to this now so I'll stick with it. I run OBS and capture at 1920x1080 aka 1080p (16:9). I center the Spring output in the OBS capture region. Then I move the UI panels that I want to show into the capture region and keep the ones I want to hide out of that region.

In my Spring window I see the entire UI and the game at 4:3 ultra-high res. But OBS captures a cropped subsection of that, which is functionally native 1080p. And due to the placement of the UI panels, it looks like a real 1080p Spring window would on someone's widescreen flatpanel. And it plays back in full 1080p on youtube.

So I'm cheating again. :)

Edit: The DPI issue is also what was causing the double-cursor thing. OBS was getting information that it was in two different places - one with the right DPI scaling, and one without. No idea why. But that's what was happening.

quote: We have much to discuss about making a better spectator view.

In keeping with Spring / Zero-K tradition, I expect we'll end up with multiple better spectator views. :)

I expect you and I want similar things here, but not exactly the same in everything. As I get time I'll be scratching my own itches, and if I can scratch some of yours in the process, well, then, I'm happy to help.