I fancied trying do some game content creation, I'm currently playing Hearthstone and Player Unknown's Batllegrounds, so I thought I'd start with those.
I found a broadcast system in Open Broadcaster Software and found it really easy to use.
I had created a card deck in Hearthstone to play arena (a game mode). I'd already played two games because I was messing around with the Nvidia in-game experience, but didn't have any success with it.
So I got my webcam set up and found a template overlay so it looked reasonable.
Basically, you start with a blank "page". You drop a picture over lay which as you will see, is just a background with a few black boxes.
There is a larger one, which you overlay the game screen and two smaller ones for webcam and the chat log, if you are live streaming.
As expected, I was terrible. I lost both games, but whilst I was disappointed, it wasn't about that.
After a quick google, I found a few sites which reviewed open source video editing software. The general consensus was that Blender was a really good choice. It wasn't.
The interface looked so complicated and cluttered. I managed to import a video, but couldn't work out how to do anything else. Uninstalled. I then Tried Avidemux as it looked quite simple. It was crap. The interface itself was simple and easy to use, but was severely let down by its output. It's like it removed the audio entirely as well as every other frame.
In my disappointment, I uploaded as is and posted.
Here they are, if you're interested:
Hearthstone: Arena Run Game 3
Hearthstone: Arena Run Game 4
During post-processing, I realised I hadn't set it to record game audio, so its just my voice and the sound of my mouse clicking right now, but the overlay looks cool, even if its not quite wide screen and there is a blank space where the chat live-stream should be.
I would appreciate any comments you might have on suggestions on game play, but I'm really looking for a simple video editor, just so I can crop the beginning and end, I don't really need to do fancy transitions or dumixing at the moment.
As an experiment, I believe it went well and I have learnt a few things. Hopefully the next ones will be better. I'm planning on doing a Player Unknown's Battlegrounds next, it will likely be a little longer, but hopefully a little more interesting.
Sunday 20 August 2017
Friday 18 August 2017
First week down
It's Friday, we're live and I'm on the way home...
So that's the first week done.
There's a lot that is still up in the air, but I'm slowly gaining visibility of the problems at least.
There are still a lot of problems, some of which I'm sure I'm still unaware of, but here's a few
I've been hearing that phrase banded around a lot this week and I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that it means people have no idea what's happening with it.
I now have proof of concepts running in parallel on my own machine for network monitoring applications, one of which is actually gathering data. I have a laptop and monitor set up on the end of the team pod which shows a dashboard of the data, which at least gives more visibility in my team. This has been noticed in the office and I've noticed some people looking at it. :-)
It has become apparent that my "team" is made up of two teams, IT and fraud. A group of eight of us, becoming nine. With this in mind I have suggested a desk move in order to better seat the two subdepartments so they can communicate easier. I haven't discussed this with my boss, but the teams seem keen.
In addition, there is a large pile of tech "crap" accumulating adjacent to our teams desks, which seems to be stuff people have dumped when no longer required, after four days of looking at it I got a tidy on. UPS' are now stacked together, along with monitors, towers and monitor stands. I also tidied a few cables into a box and threw some boxes out. It made me feel a little happier about our shared workspace.
I've also started talking to people about the idea of getting it off the shop floor altogether. So this is also going to happen on Monday, again, I'm yet to discuss this with my boss.
During regular conversations with my boss (when he's around) he seems fine with me doing stuff generally, so a lot of the stuff mentioned above I'm just doing until someone tells me to stop.
Everyone seems to be dreading Monday for one reason. The project manager for the department Is due back. From what I can tell, no one really likes him. He sounds ranty and micromanaging. I'm told that he is likely to get me to do stuff, so I'm sure that will be an interesting conversation.
I have endeavoured to explain my outwardness to the rest of the team and they seem to be ok with it, but they have said that myself and the other new infrastructure engineer will likely be seen as additional lackey resource to be moved around. This won't be the case.
I have a shit load of reading and information gathering to do at this point and I am under no delusion that next weeks actions will only increase this.
Having said all of this, I'm still looking forward to getting started on Monday morning and see what we can do.
So that's the first week done.
There's a lot that is still up in the air, but I'm slowly gaining visibility of the problems at least.
There are still a lot of problems, some of which I'm sure I'm still unaware of, but here's a few
- Progress seems to have ceased with regards to getting the fibre trunks in.
- Business process seems to be all over the place
- Developers are doing support
- Documenting of projects isn't happening
- Lots of important information is sat in different people's heads
- Lack of visibility of projects and progress across business units.
I've been hearing that phrase banded around a lot this week and I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that it means people have no idea what's happening with it.
I now have proof of concepts running in parallel on my own machine for network monitoring applications, one of which is actually gathering data. I have a laptop and monitor set up on the end of the team pod which shows a dashboard of the data, which at least gives more visibility in my team. This has been noticed in the office and I've noticed some people looking at it. :-)
It has become apparent that my "team" is made up of two teams, IT and fraud. A group of eight of us, becoming nine. With this in mind I have suggested a desk move in order to better seat the two subdepartments so they can communicate easier. I haven't discussed this with my boss, but the teams seem keen.
In addition, there is a large pile of tech "crap" accumulating adjacent to our teams desks, which seems to be stuff people have dumped when no longer required, after four days of looking at it I got a tidy on. UPS' are now stacked together, along with monitors, towers and monitor stands. I also tidied a few cables into a box and threw some boxes out. It made me feel a little happier about our shared workspace.
I've also started talking to people about the idea of getting it off the shop floor altogether. So this is also going to happen on Monday, again, I'm yet to discuss this with my boss.
During regular conversations with my boss (when he's around) he seems fine with me doing stuff generally, so a lot of the stuff mentioned above I'm just doing until someone tells me to stop.
Everyone seems to be dreading Monday for one reason. The project manager for the department Is due back. From what I can tell, no one really likes him. He sounds ranty and micromanaging. I'm told that he is likely to get me to do stuff, so I'm sure that will be an interesting conversation.
I have endeavoured to explain my outwardness to the rest of the team and they seem to be ok with it, but they have said that myself and the other new infrastructure engineer will likely be seen as additional lackey resource to be moved around. This won't be the case.
I have a shit load of reading and information gathering to do at this point and I am under no delusion that next weeks actions will only increase this.
Having said all of this, I'm still looking forward to getting started on Monday morning and see what we can do.
Tuesday 15 August 2017
End of Day 2 as a Infrastructure Engineer
On Monday, I started a new job.
I had been preparing for the new job by researching DevOps, ITIL and the like.
From the conversations I'd had with my boss, he was very keen on the whole agile methodology and that's where I made an assumption.
I assumed that that would be the method in place. I was wrong.
After two days, I have realised that this is a broken team. Like, properly broken.
The Infrastructure is a mess. It's mis-matched, there is very little resiliency, many single points of failure, there is little-to-no-backup and what little documentation that exists is 5 years old and incomplete.
I have realised there is a lot of work to do. I am starting with network monitoring because there is none. I'm also going to be advocating a who new backup system.
On the plus side, budget doesn't seem to be tightly regulated, or indeed particularly planned.
My boss copied and pasted a PO that a colleague had made in order to fashion me with a workstation. It turns out that order was test rig for a designer.
Its has :
I installed the hyper-V role on the windows 10 pro build that was handed to me on a flash drive (build 1603, so it took most of the date to get updated) and proceeded to get the virtual switch working.
Normally this is a trivial task, but this time around it would not play ball.
After I realised that the virtual adapter disables IPv4 on the NIC, windows 10 once again got an IP leased, but the virtual switch would not allow the guests access to to the external network.I'll tinker with it more tomorrow.
I know, it's been literally ages.
I had been preparing for the new job by researching DevOps, ITIL and the like.
From the conversations I'd had with my boss, he was very keen on the whole agile methodology and that's where I made an assumption.
I assumed that that would be the method in place. I was wrong.
After two days, I have realised that this is a broken team. Like, properly broken.
The Infrastructure is a mess. It's mis-matched, there is very little resiliency, many single points of failure, there is little-to-no-backup and what little documentation that exists is 5 years old and incomplete.
I have realised there is a lot of work to do. I am starting with network monitoring because there is none. I'm also going to be advocating a who new backup system.
On the plus side, budget doesn't seem to be tightly regulated, or indeed particularly planned.
My boss copied and pasted a PO that a colleague had made in order to fashion me with a workstation. It turns out that order was test rig for a designer.
Its has :
- 8 core Xeon processor
- 32GB of RAM
- 2 120GB SSDs (one M2 straight on the board and a kingston from stores)
- 1TB WD blue
- 2 27" HP monitors
I installed the hyper-V role on the windows 10 pro build that was handed to me on a flash drive (build 1603, so it took most of the date to get updated) and proceeded to get the virtual switch working.
Normally this is a trivial task, but this time around it would not play ball.
After I realised that the virtual adapter disables IPv4 on the NIC, windows 10 once again got an IP leased, but the virtual switch would not allow the guests access to to the external network.I'll tinker with it more tomorrow.
I know, it's been literally ages.
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