2016 is Almost Done, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent is

It will not be long before 2017 is here and we all start mistakenly writing 2016 on stuff. I'm looking forward to it too.
Anyway, finished recording Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and it is uploaded and scheduled already, with the dates on the release calendar. Those videos also mark the last of the recordings for this year, so 2017 will start off with Dead Space recordings, or another Audiosurf 2 one-off to fill out the last week of Amnesia releases.
This has been a fun year and I am looking forward to continuing this into 2017. If nothing else, it is a good excuse to play these horror games I'd possibly not touch otherwise.

Something New is Coming...

Tomorrow the final chapter of FEAR 2 will go public, along with the highlights for Outlast: Whistleblower, which will start releasing next week. This left Thursday empty, but I have filled it! Not too long ago I was very fortunate and had the opportunity to review the Tobii Eye Tracker 4C, over at Overclockers Club. For the review I focused on its primary purpose, which is to add another interaction layer with games that support it, and to summarize, it does a good job when the game works well. (Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Elite: Dangerous worked very well with it, but two other titles I tested had some issues not necessarily related to the tracker.) The Tracker 4C can also be used to track one's gaze while using any program, so you can see where a person looks as they game. It is not a scientific tool (Tobii has other equipment for that) but it gets the job done in a way I can share.
The video that will go live on Thursday is of Audiosurf 2, using music from the YouTube music archive (so I do not need to worry about copyright issues or even giving attribution for those I used) and has a blue bubble dancing on the screen, following where I was looking as I played. This is actually not the first video I made with the eye tracker, having also recorded a few worlds in Super Meat Boy, but those videos will come out later. Exactly when, I do not know, but eventually. In any case, I am very thankful I now have two kinds of physiological response I can record while gaming, and am looking forward to sharing the recordings. (Now I just need people to share it with!)

FEAR 3 is Uploaded and What's Coming

All of the FEAR 3 videos have been uploaded! Yay!
I know what the next six games will be, but I am not sure what order I want to do them in yet. It is one actual trilogy and three games from the same developer, with two being the same series, and I will alternate between them, like I have throughout the FEAR series. The question is which group to start with? I do not know yet, but I have plenty of time to decide, other things to also do in the meantime, and something new I am going to try doing. (With how long it will be before even FEAR 3 finishes, I am waiting to say what those six games are.)
Good times, basically, with more to come.

I'd Say Great Minds, But...

This does not have much to do with The Body on Games, at least not directly, but I felt like sharing it just because it is a little humorous to me. Earlier today I watched the first part of the Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter playthrough of Outlast. During the course of this video, the two personalities discuss their heart rates while playing and then one of them mentions never playing FEAR because of how scary it is. I'm watching this and thinking, 'I've recorded both of these games with real-time heart rate!'
Now, of course I know they have no idea who I am or that my recordings exist, but, I don't know, I guess what gets to me is that my idea to even do these recordings seems pretty good because other people also think of it. They aren't doing it, but the right kinds of thoughts are being shared. Maybe I should have some hope that the idea will catch on and more people watch them. Probably not, but hey, crazier things have happened.

What's Coming Up and an Interesting Note

It is funny how time both does and does not fly by. It has seemed like time is just going by as I make more recordings, but today when checking my calendar I saw that the FEAR 2 videos are not even coming out until next week! After that will be my playthrough of the Outlast: Whistleblower DLC. That did not take long to finish (and there was an issue with the final video, but not unrecoverable) and I have already started on FEAR 3, which, naturally, will come out after Whistleblower.
To cover the Thursday between these two games I will be releasing a recording I made in Killing Floor 2. Actually did a recording for each of the maps in the game currently and my plan is to release them like this to fill out weeks. With twelve videos though, that may take awhile, so I may be changing my plan. We will just have to see what happens and how I feel.
Now, here is the interesting note: since I have been recording losslessly I have been paying attention to the size of the recordings. With Whistleblower it was very understandable to see them be quite massive. This is because of the noise/film grain of the game. FEAR 3 however does not have such an effect (at least not all of the time) but the recordings are still massive, when lossless. Re-encoding brings them down to under a tenth the size. Not sure what is causing the lossless recordings to be so large, but at least they come down to a more manageable size easily enough.

Some possibly interesting

I mentioned in the previous post that I have been experimenting with the Lossless option for NVENC, which should give me a higher quality original version of the recordings to work from. After that I re-encode it for the archive, simply because I do not need lossless quality for the long term and it is a LOT of data (try 584 GB of these lossless archives for 12 videos, while re-encoded archives, the upload video, and a separate copy of the audio mix which is included in the re-encoded archive is just 69.7 GB).
Well, I couple weeks ago I spent the time putting together a file to use the blend filter in FFmpeg to show the differences between two videos. Decided to run that on the lossless version of one of the game videos and the re-encoded version, to see how different they might be. I can see some difference on my laptop display, but there is no way I would notice it outside of this difference video. You can look for yourself, but remember YouTube re-encodes everything for itself, so some detail might be lost for you:

The videos I've done this lossless testing with are of Killing Floor 2, which I used because recordings in it before seemed to demand a higher bitrate than I had chosen, so Lossless seemed a good fit. Just ran through every official map for a separate video and I intend on using these as on-offs to fill out weeks, so it may be awhile before they all come out. (There is no campaign component to the game, so this seems appropriate.)

For the Second Time...

For the second time I have had to go in and edit the audio of a video because of a copyright claim. Not sure if I believe it, but this is an easier solution than trying to dispute it. So, from 18:28 to 19:12 in FEAR - Chapter 9 the game audio will be muted, and as soon as I upload a version with the new audio, the mic will still be there. (I told Google it could just mute all of the audio in that segment.)
For the record, unless I am confident the copyright claim is legitimate and am allowed to monetize the video, this is what I will do when this happens. In this case I am not confident in this claim and WB Games actually does not want videos of their games monetized. Not sure what would happen if it were monetized but for someone else, but don't want to push it either.
Now for some better news, I finished playing FEAR 2: Project Origin and finished uploading all of the videos yesterday. Something I want to mention is that there are two versions of Chapter 1 because I decided to try recording the gameplay using Lossless option for NVENC. (I did this test after completing the game, so you know and because of some issues I had, the original Chapter 1 lacks the ending of the game's first section. So if you want to see that, you can in the Lossless Test video.)
I think I will do this in the future, because while it can make the original recording very large, I already always re-encode the archive to something smaller but with settings that should not compromise the quality (crf of 15, max crf of 18 and a max bitrate of 25 Mb). Happy with the results so far and as long as I have the space to do this, I intend to keep doing it.
The FEAR 2 videos are already up on the calendar and I have a plan for what will be on the Thursday between Alien: Isolation and these videos and what will be between FEAR 2 and FEAR 3, but both I want to keep secret for now.

Alien: Isolation Starts Tomorrow and Other News

With the FEAR videos having finished last week, and the System Shock Demo video releasing last Thursday, the Alien: Isolation videos are finally going to start going live. The Monday/Thursday will continue for the several weeks that will take, which is pretty nice because it will give me plenty of time to make some more recordings, while also getting other work done.
The other news I have is I took the time to put the together a Google Calendar with all future video release dates on it, so you can see when those Alien: Isolation videos will end. I also set up YouTube to tweet out each video going public. Easy enough to do so I figured why not? Maybe someone will appreciate it. (Link to Twitter account.)
Haven't started recording yet (been busy with other things) but the next game I will be recording in is FEAR 2: Project Origin.

Alien: Isolation is Coming

Earlier this week I finished Alien: Isolation and earlier today, the last video finished uploading! So, starting the Monday after the FEAR videos finish, my 16 hour journey in this horror title will begin. (After Alien: Isolation I plan on having FEAR 2.)
While doing the Alien: Isolation recordings I had some hiccups (incorrectly judged where a checkpoint was, was sick, and hit the wrong checkbox in OBS) but the end result should make these a little easier for me to make. Also I am trying to set up how these go out a little better. For one thing, I've tried setting the videos to put out Tweets as they go public, but I have also started putting them on a Google Calendar when the videos release. Hopefully I'll be able to embed the calendar on more than this post, but it is below, if you want to see it:

Some Fun Video Stats

Part of the reason I made the last post, 119 GB, was so that I could make this post after the videos finish re-encoding with some statistics from it.
The original FEAR archive files totaled some 119 GB. The compressed archives though come in at 59.9 GB, which is a huge improvement for my limited HDD space. I was also able to get some benchmark information out of FFmpeg for two of the files. One of them took 16 hours, 45 minutes, and 20 seconds of CPU time and the other took 20:28:27. I actually start both of these files re-encoding at about the same time, and they finished about ten minutes apart, which is why it is important to note it was CPU time, not real time. Pretty sure that means how much time a single core of my CPU would have taken to complete it, and since I am doing on an Intel dual-core with hyperthreading, that would explain why it really took more like 8-10 hours. FFmpeg probably just shifted resources around, which would be why one file took an extra four hours of CPU time.
For the future, I have changed the command that makes the final videos that get uploaded to also make these archive files. This should save me some time, just because I will not have to remember to make the compressed archives. The actual re-encoding might take long, as there is more encoding to do, but at the same time there is less decoding, because the source files only have to be decoded once. There should be no influence on the quality of the uploaded videos though.

119 GB

The way I do these recordings is kind of weird on a few levels. For one thing I record the gameplay and pulse graph separately, combining them later so that I can change the placement and size of the graph after the fact, but I also keep the original recordings (but all muxed into a single mkv file). The thing is I record at such high bitrates that this adds up to far bigger files than are needed, and I keep them for recreating the video later, if needed.
For the FEAR videos alone, I have a total 119 GB of these archive files. The final videos that get uploaded to YouTube are just 24.2 GB, for comparison. As I do not have unlimited storage, I've come up with a plan I think will work.

Finally Finished It

Took longer than I would have liked, but I finally finished F.E.A.R. yesterday, just ahead of the first chapters becoming going public. Coincidentally, it took 13 chapters to complete.
Next up is either F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin or Alien: Isolation. I am currently leaning more towards Alien, but I am not firm on that. In any case, here is the highlights playlist and the full video playlist:

FEAR Playlist

Nearly There

Next week the final chapter of Daylight will go public, as will the single video I made in the Doom demo. After that, the next series of videos will begin featuring F.E.A.R., from 2005. Unfortunately, I have not quite finished the game yet (10 chapters and counting), but what I have is uploading. With ten videos so far, that means I have five weeks to finish, but I do not intend to let it take that long.
Following F.E.A.R. I will either move on to F.E.A.R 2 or possibly jump into Alien: Isolation. I've been wanting to play that game for some time now, and I think a break from the F.E.A.R franchise is not a bad idea. Any way, we will see. I've got plenty of time to decide, after all.

Unwelcome Discovery

So I just discovered something that I wish I had known days ago. To cut down on file size, and hopefully improve the quality of the video files, I decided to do the final encoding with the x265 codec, instead of x264. I even remark on this in one of the videos. What I have just discovered though is that YouTube does not accept videos using the h.265 codec... which means, I have to re-encode almost every single file.
That is not as bad as it might sound though, for one specific reason: I have all of the original recordings. This is just going to be a cost of time, but is still pretty annoying. I mean, really, if I can work with h.265 video, why can't the big and mighty YouTube? It just needs the ability to decode the video, since everything gets reconverted to the format and settings it wants. Maybe that will come as more hardware decoders become available.
Anyway, I've finished off the Daylight recordings, so once they finish re-encoding, I can get them up and move on to the next game.

Might be Delayed

I have started working on the next game to do this with (and while I haven't checked the data too closely yet, it is definitely affecting me well) but there still might end up being a delay between it coming out and when the Outlast videos finish. I've been fairly sick recently, definitely better now, but it has disrupted my ability to record videos. I'm not quite feeling up to making new videos yet, and also should have some work coming up this week, which is why there might be a delay. Hopefully there will not be, but it is possible.
The new game, in case you are curious, is Daylight, a game I have already played and beaten, but that is not making it an easier experience on me... not at all.

Got a Positive Response!

Something the average person uploading gameplay videos to YouTube probably does not have to worry about is licensing. Short clips of some awesome stunt probably will not draw the ire of a developer or publisher, especially if it is not monetized. But complete playthroughs of games are a different matter, and since that is what I am doing, I have started reaching out to some companies to check on their licensing policies.
Some companies publicly state their policy (like Red Barrel does) but others have not. WB Games has not publicly stated its policy, so you have to email them to check. I did and heard back already that I am good to go, as long as the videos are not monetized. It was not a definitive, "you're good," but more of a, "be respectful and we're cool with it," which is fine with me. I certainly have no intention of being inappropriate with any of these videos, so I am quite happy and looking forward to jumping into some WB published games. I don't want to say which, because I am not sure when I will be able to start recording in them, or when such videos might go public. Have other things in my life to do after all.
Anyway, there is that news, and I am hoping to hear back from another company about its video policy soon as well. Hopefully it will be equally positive, or more.

First Post and First Videos!

First post!

Okay, now that I've done this, first video!

Now that's done too, so I can get to some actual details. However long ago I had an idea, and earlier this month I finally started trying to make it happen. That idea was to play video games while monitoring the way they affect my body, in real time, and to burn that data into the video. Took a bit of research, but I finally found the equipment I needed to make it possible. Got it earlier this month and got to work testing it.
Took some work to get things the way I wanted them, but finally I had it ready (enough, still tweaking things) and decided to finish playing Outlast by Red Barrel Games, which I had started for testing. In nine videos (I call them chapters for now) I play through the complete game and you can watch how every jump scare and chase affected my heart rate. You can also hear my reactions to everything since I had a mic set up, but that's not special.

I am planning on releasing these on a schedule, something like a video Monday and Thursday, but this Thursday there will be two videos made public. The reason I am releasing Chapter 2 and 3 together is because the mic audio for Chapter 2 is bad. (Chapter 2 is also boring as it is mostly me running around, not remembering how to get out of the basement.) I did cut out some highlights though, based on my spikes in my pulse, and those are all public now. Should probably give some links now, so here they are:
Playlist: Outlast - Highlights
Playlist: Outlast

Hope you enjoy them and find them as interesting I as did while making them.