Archive for category Technology
Steam client beta: UI upgrade
Posted by Sam in Gaming, Technology on 24 February 2010
This was unexpected. It was something that Steam users have been crying out for for a while, and last night the opt-in beta for this redesigned UI popped onto our Steam accounts. Taking part in the beta and trying out the new UI is simple, just go to your settings and in the beta dropdown select ‘UI Update’ (if for some reason Steam now doesn’t load for you, add ‘-clearbeta’ to your Steam shortcut).
Almost every feature of the client has been changed for the better. The store now runs on a WebKit based rendering system which replaces the slow cumbersome IE integration of the previous version. The library now shows a lot more information on your games, for example who on your friends list have the game and who are playing it, as well as your achievements. Strangely, the community tab remains unchanged, which to me was one of the clunkier parts of the old client so it seems strange Valve have decided not to update it.
Not everything is hunky-dory though. It seems the new UI suffers from a bad strain of consolitis. Icons are bigger, fonts are bigger, and in general it feels like a lot of space has been wasted. Take the store for example, I keep my Steam window quite small and with the previous UI the store page generally took up twice the vertical space available in my window (e.g. not much scrolling). The new store however is at least five times as big as the window, causing a lot more scrolling. This isn’t the only case, two of the three new library views consist of huge icons which make it a nightmare for users with many games (admittedly, you can now organize your games into categories, but the interface for doing so is less than optimal at the moment).
Watch this space because no doubt Valve will be improving the UI based on user feedback.
Review: Logitech Illuminated Keyboard
Posted by Sam in Review, Technology on 28 January 2010
Reviewing a keyboard is always going to be hard if you’ve only owned two in the last five or so years, my previous one being the Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 which always got an ‘eww it’s all wierd’ reaction from anyone who tried to use it. I’m still undecided as to whether the split style was a help or a hindrance, as keys were further apart which made gaming trickier with small hands, and the fact that most other keyboard were of ‘normal’ variety… Sorry, this is a review of the Illuminated Keyboard, I get distracted easily. OOH! Bad Company 2 Beta has been released, brb.
The unique features of this keyboard are it’s sleek stylish design and laser etched back-lit keys which allow for easy night time typing. Sleek and stylish it certainly is, by far the best looking keyboard I’ve seen. There is a 5mm border of glass around the top and sides of the keyboard which glimmers from the light of my monitor. The keys can be illuminated with 4 different levels of light, which definitely looks the part and can help you find the key you want in the dark if you’re not a touch typer. My one gripe with the illumination are the function keys, instead of F1-F12 being illuminated, the shortcut icons (for opening email and other thing nobody ever uses) are illuminated in orange which does annoy me. It seems like they could have made F1-F12 illuminated too as they are on the same key, but they chose not to.
If you don’t like laptop keyboards then the Logitech Illuminated probably isn’t for you, as the keys have a similar depth to those found in laptops but I have no such problem. Key strokes are smooth and responsive and just feel right, as well as being a lot quieter than conventional keyboards which can be beneficial if you don’t want to hear clicks every time you cast a spell or jump, which brings me on nicely to my next point, whether it is any good for gamers.
This wasn’t a huge problem for me, I’ve never owned a proper ‘gaming’ keyboard with 10 gazillion programmable macro buttons, and I don’t use my computer solely for gaming. I type a lot, which you might expect with me being at university. The Logitech Illuminated performs admirably when it comes to gaming, though it is definitely not perfect. It’s all down to personal preference and some people may feel that chunkier keys are better for gaming while others may want the extra macro buttons which this keyboard doesn’t offer.
Moving on, one large flaw when I received the keyboard was that the W, Shift, and Space keys wouldn’t work together. This meant jumping while sprinting in games was impossible. After a bit of research I found that quite a few people have problems with phantom key blocking with this keyboard, which is a bit worrying considering it costs £50 and is made by Logitech. However, I got a replacement a few days ago and it works flawlessly. Something to bear in mind.
Positives
+ Very sleek and stylish design
+ Keys feel right
+ Easier to type in the dark
+ Excellent build quality
Negatives
- No additional functionality for gamers (could be a positive as well)
- Function keys only light up the media shortcut icons not F1-F12
- Could suffer from phantom key blocking
AltTabbed score: 8.5/10
Bioshock 2 rant on DRM
Posted by Sam in Development, Gaming, Technology on 23 January 2010
I’ll try to keep this as brief and civilised as possible. Now, Bioshock 2 as you may have known is the sequel to Bioshock, a game which caused many controversies over it’s use of DRM, more specifically SecuROM. Complaints from gamers persuaded 2K Games (the publishers) to drop the install limit from five to two, and then remove SecuROM from the game altogether.
Bioshock 2′s system requirements have recently been released however, showing the decision to start using SecuROM again, along with a myriad of other measures which I can only assume are to help prevent piracy, or they would be if they worked. SecuROM is being used as a disk check, that’s all it’s there for. It gets installed on your system to prevent something which can be cracked in a matter of minutes using readily available user made patches. Using disk checks to prevent piracy may have been viable ten years ago but it’s 2010, the age of digital distribution, aren’t disk checks a thing of the past?
On top of that, 2K games are knowingly installing software onto user’s computers which they know will cause problems for certain systems, as they had many complaints from the first game which used the exact same software! The icing on the cake is that SecuROM includes a tool to uninstall it’s software from any computer, safely and legally from their website, in case your system isn’t compatible, which begs the question why bother in the first place.
Also required to play the game is Games For Windows Live (GFWL), Microsoft’s Xbox Live’s bastard offspring, giving you 15 activations before you have to phone up Microsoft and ask for more. Not to mention the requirement to be online to save your game and earn achievements.
It’s time publishers start to realise that these sorts of DRM systems only affect the honest paying consumer, while pirates are free to download un-restricted versions without SecuROM disk checks or GFWL activation limits. Systems like Steam are the way forward whether the industry likes it or not.
Wallet Crippling; Could sales be a bad thing?
Posted by Sam in Development, Gaming, Technology on 23 December 2009
Christmas has apparently come early for a lot of us in the form of a massive Steam Sale that will be going on for the best part of a week. Notable games include Grand Theft Auto (£4.99), Stalker (£1.39), and Mirror’s Edge (£3.24), along with hundreds of others. However, it reminded me of a letter I wrote to PCGamer a while ago on how these sales could be damaging the PC gaming industry.
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Could digital downloads be a bad thing for consumers and developers? I’m starting to think so, and we’re already seeing the early stages of it. Read the rest of this entry »
Guide: Create your own gaming movies #2
Posted by Sam in Guides, Technology on 14 December 2009
This is the second part of the ‘Create your own gaming movies’ guide here on AltTabbed. To read the first part, click here.
You should now have a series of short video clips in .avi format if you have followed the guide. We will now put these clips back together, add a title, encode the video, and then upload it.
Open up Premiere Pro, or another video editing suite, and start a new project. Give it a name and continue. You will now select the settings you want for your video, select HDV 720p30 or HDV 720p25 depending at what FPS you recorded at. It doesn’t particularly matter if the resolutions on your video and these settings aren’t the same, you can always crop the video when you come to encode it.
The next few steps rely on a bit of knowledge with Premiere, however it’s all drag and drop so shouldn’t be hard to figure out even if you’ve never used the program before. Open up the folder you recorded your video in (‘Fraps\Movies’ for Fraps users), and drag everything relevant into the top-left panel in Premiere. You now need to drag each segment of video onto the timeline, and in chronological order. You can do this by holding CTRL and then clicking on each part one by one in the order you want them in (order is important), then drag everything selected onto the timeline. You can now use the panel in the top right to play through your whole movie and make sure everything is in order.
You could finish here, but there are a few tools you can use to spice up your video.
- Use the Razor tool (C) to cut up the video on your timeline to apply transitions and effects to small parts.
- Effect and transition presets are in the bottom left panel, effects apply a whole clip in the timeline and transitions apply to the start or end of a clip. Drag and drop them onto the timeline.
- Use the Effect Controls panel to adjust effect settings.
- Add a title by going Title > New Title and picking a title type. Give it a name and then add text and give it styling. Once done, close the window and drag it onto the timeline. Drag it onto ‘Video 2′ so it displays on-top of your video. You can apply transitions to titles as well.
- You can also add music by importing the music file and dragging it into an empty slot on the sequence (‘Audio 2′). You can delete any in-game sound by right clicking on the clip and ‘Unlinking’, then deleting the audio.
Remember that there are many guides for Premiere Pro already available online. Once you are happy with your movie, select the timeline and use File > Export > Media.. (this might be different on older versions). Here you can crop your output movie, change it’s resolution and most importantly the format. The best format for online play is .flv (and .f4v), so select that from the drop-down menu and then 720p from the preset menu. You will then want to fiddle with bitrate settings until they are a decent size for uploading, I usually go for 1.5 Target Bitrate and 2.0 Maximum Bitrate.
Segment your video if uploading to YouTube
If you are planning to upload your video to youtube, and it is longer than 10 minutes, split it up into 10 minute segments using the tool under the preview window, drag the pointer to just under the 10 minute mark and then click the out-point button. Premiere will only record the section between the in-point and out-point, so repeat this step for 10-19 minutes, 20-29 minutes etc until you have all sections done. When you are happy click OK and then Start Queue to start encoding.
Your video is now encoding, this could take up to a couple of hours depending on the length of your video and how fast your computer is. Once it’s done, check the output file and you’re ready to upload.
You have a number of options when it comes to uploading your video to the Internet. The most reliable and popular is YouTube, which is great if your video is under 10 minutes or you don’t mind splitting it up into segments. Other options include WeGame (which will massacre the quality of your video, but say they are releasing a HD soon), Gamerstube (which has excellent quality but is quite unreliable at the moment), and FileFront (provides a direct download link, and a low quality stream). Be wary of uploading to hosts who specify they do not allow gaming videos as they may delete your movie. Such hosts include Blip.tv and Vimeo.
After choosing your hosting service, all you have to do is follow the instructions on the website to upload your video, then share with your fellow gamers to show them how pro you are.
Important! If you get an unsupported file type error when uploading, rename the video file to .flv instead of .f4v.
That concludes this week’s guide on creating your own gaming video, I hope you learned something from it and that you will check back on this blog next week (and preferably every day in-between!) for great new content. Feel free to ask as many questions as you want in comments and I WILL respond to all of them. Good luck!
Guide: Create your own gaming movies #1
Posted by Sam in Gaming, Guides, Technology on 12 December 2009
This is the first in what will be weekly guides with the intention of showing you how to try out something a little different. Most guides will be tailored around gaming, so check back here often and leave comments if you have any questions.
In this article I will be explaining how you can record yourself playing a game and upload it to share it with your friends. Let’s get started. These are the programs you will need.
Video recording software – By far the best is Fraps, it costs $37 (roughly £23), and allows you to record video from any game at ful or half resolution, and with sound. In the newest version you also get the ability to record from the desktop, and to record sound directly from the microphone which makes shoutcasting (gaming videos with commentary) even easier. If you don’t want to buy Fraps, there are free alternatives such as Hypercam which perform the same function but with fewer features.
Video editing/encoding software – The perfect package for this is Adobe Premiere Pro, which will provide all the functionality we need. There are probably free programs available which can do the job, but I wouldn’t be able to recommend any without searching for and testing each one out one by one. You can grab a free trial of Premiere Pro from here.
Our first task once you have the software installed is to load up Fraps (or another recording program), and configure it to our liking. Your monitor resolution is important here, as it determines what resolution we record the video at. Chose a hotkey, preferably one that isn’t used by the game you want to record.
Next determine what resolution you want to record at. The optimal resolution for recording in HD (high definition) is 1280×720, note that this is for a widescreen monitor, if you have a 4:3 aspect ratio then use 1280×1024. The best way to record at this resolution is to set your resolution in-game to 1280×720 and then tell Fraps to record at full size. Another option if you have a large monitor is keep your native resolution and record at half size, for example your native resolution is 1920×1200 then half size would be 960×600.
Lastly, take into consideration the speed of your computer, more specifically your graphics card and hard drive speed. The best way to make sure your computer can handle the resolution is to test it out in-game. If you get stuttering, lower the resolution and make sure you’re not recording above 30FPS. You also need to have a large amount of disk space available before you start recording, 50GB per 30 minutes at 1280×720 is a good estimate.
All that’s left now is to record your footage, load up the game and when you’re ready, hit your record hotkey.
To summarise:
- Do not record above 1280×720 (or 1280×1024).
- Set FPS to 25 or 30.
- Make sure you have at least 50GB of free space per 30 minutes of expected footage.
- Ensure that you have tested that your computer can run these settings before starting!
After recording, you should have a series of short 1-2 minute video clips ready to be imported into your video editing software.
This concludes the first part of the guide, check back tomorrow for the conclusion, where we will be stitching together these video files and exporting as a video file to upload onto the internet.
Click here to read the second part of the guide.
Christmas is upon us
Posted by Sam in Gaming, Life, Technology on 11 December 2009
The time where you start to look through piles of hardware (you don’t all have piles of hardware in your room?) that needs replacing has come again! This time I think my keyboard need some special attention. By ‘special attention’, I mean throwing it away and buying a brand new one. Much research had to be done as always before deciding on the right purchase for me, and I have settled on the Logitech Illuminated Kayboard as an apt replacement for my withering Microsoft Ergonomic 4000.
As you can see (or conversely, can’t see), the W S and D keys have been rubbed off, and the E key now looks like an F, not so useful when you’re yelling at somebody to, “Press F to chain this attack or you’re going to DIE!”.
I chose the Illuminated Keyboard because I have never been interested in gaming keyboards that boast ’50 additional programmable macro keys! Store up to 5 thousand key-strokes on a single button!’, because I just wouldn’t need them, and they take up precious desk space (don’t underestimate how valuable desk space is). Plus the fact that it is undeniably incredibly pretty.
Expect a full review once it arrives on christmas day.
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