Some Quick Updates

Have some updates to share, including that To the Moon has been recorded and uploaded. Those videos will be going live after Bastion NG+, following the Tuesday release schedule. Even though it is a one-a-week release, I also recorded the heart rate overlay because it is an emotional game, so maybe things would happen.
Unfortunately to record To the Moon not at 640x480, I needed to run it in a virtual machine, and while that worked, the game audio is bad. There is nothing I could do about that. My microphone also went bad, which I did not realize until after I recorded four videos, so I did what I could to clean up the recordings, but there is still only so much that can be done. Now I have a new, and what should also be a better quality microphone, for future recordings.
Oh, I also made custom thumbnails for the To the Moon videos, which is something I might continue to do in the future. (Technically these are not the first videos with custom thumbnails, but you haven't seen the others yet...)

First Update of 2018

Been busy so I hadn't fully realized I had not posted anything here in the form of an update, so here it is: I have finished Dust: An Elysian Tail and all of its videos are up and scheduled now. Dark Souls is taking longer but I am making good progress. If I am lucky maybe I can finish by the end of the week, but regardless I have plenty I can upload before Monday, when I need one to keep to my schedule.
To make things a little easier on myself, I think there are two changes I am going to make to my process. One is dropping the highlight videos for every video. Not all videos have a moment to highlight and always forcing myself to find one is kind of annoying. Then working to upload and schedule them is another layer of annoying. The other change I am considering is to just upload the CSV files I have for the heart rate data, instead of pasting it into a Google Docs sheet and then formatting it. Honestly, Google Docs is a pain to work with in this way because of how long it takes for the formatting changes to be applied, so this will really ease things for me, especially as then I will just link to a folder with all of the data instead of each individual file.
In a way these changes are already in effect, as I never cut out highlights for Dark Souls (didn't have the time to previously) and failed to put up the heart rate data for the six videos I made last year (just forgot to do it then). Now I am formalizing these changes some. I might change my mind about either or both in the future though (could see myself doing the sheets again, as I have more time, but probably not the every-video highlights).
Any way, there is an update on things.
(PS. You can expect a lot of frustration from me over Dark Souls, if that is something you might enjoy seeing. Only thing is my frustration will turn to actual anger at times, and so is not very amusing.)

Have Three Weeks Ready

Last time I mentioned I did not have videos ready for the start of next week, which is just a week away, but I got three weeks worth, nine videos ready. Just need to upload and schedule them. These videos are the first six in Dark Souls and the first three in Dust: An Elysian Tail. In both cases I am using these videos as an excuse the play the games, though in the case of Dust it is replay. It is a good game and I am happy I had the thought I could do it with gaze tracking.
Dark Souls is... not my game. Basically, if you watch them, expect a lot of me bitching about the game. It does not help that I accidentally ended up going to the latter half of the game in the first hour, but there are still things that are pissing me off. I've found a 'solution' though. It is not ideal, but sometimes you just want to play the game and not get exceedingly angry at it. Really hoping Dark Souls 2 and 3 are more approachable/accessible.
The last video is still processing but I'll have them uploaded and scheduled in the next day or so. One change I think I may do going forward this year is to drop the highlights. When there is something cool/funny, I'll still cut it out and share it, but that does not happen every video, so I'm going to stop forcing it.
Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Year is Almost Over!

The end of the year has been creeping up on me faster than I would have liked, which could become a problem. I know exactly the next game I want to record in, but between finishing a couple higher-priority projects first, and a vacation, I am not completely sure if I will be able to play and record the game in time. It is supposed to take about 60 hours to do, but I think I can do it if I can focus well enough.
Oh, also I have some Dead by Daylight videos I recorded but haven't done anything with yet. My plan is to schedule them for the end of the year, which means 2018 will start with the next set of videos that I will hopefully find the time to record. I also need/want to record an eye-tracked game for the Tuesday release, but I am not sure if I will find the time. I feel less commitment to that schedule, but I still want to try for it.
Anyway, just a quick update on that and hopefully I will not miss a week. Even if no one watches the videos, I still want to keep to the schedule.

Big Day Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the day of the Extra Life charity stream and I can only hope I will be able to stay awake for all of it, because I am in fact going to be streaming from 10 AM Saturday to 10 AM Sunday (assuming I stay awake). I think it will be fun and hopefully it will also be productive.
While I do not have a firm schedule in mind, the games I have ready to stream are:

• Dead Space
• Dead Space 2
• Killing Floor 2
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Super Meat Boy
• Dead by Daylight
• Dead Rising 2

My plan for both Dead Space games is to do a New Game+ playthrough, assuming I do in fact play them. Haven't played Dead Rising 2 yet, but I think it will be fun, and Dead by Daylight I have only been playing this week. I actually recorded those games too, with the intent to play the recordings whenever I need a short break for one reason or another. (It seems like a good idea in my head.)
The stream will be here: The Body on Games YouTube live stream.
Extra Life donations can be made here: Extra Life - Jim Pitchford.

32 Threads of Awesome

Actually it was last week that I built my new computer, but I haven't started a new set of recordings until this week, and it is so nice. With an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X overclocked to 4 GHz, I'm able to record gameplay, the heart rate overlay, and the gaze tracker overlay all in real-time and all on the CPU. Oh, it is wonderful to be able to do that, as it means I can produce higher quality recordings, and I am not dependent on the h.264 ASIC on whatever GPU I'm running.
One unfortunate thing is that the FFmpeg filters I use are only single-threaded, so they present a bottleneck to the processing at the end while x264 can use all of the threads I can throw at it. In a way though, this is still a positive because I can use the veryslow preset, giving the most efficient compression x264 offers without a loss in speed (the bottle neck is that severe). Think I want to play around with voltages to hopefully drop temperatures, but regardless, I now have what, for me, is practically a dream computer (higher single-threaded performance would be nice for those filters, but this is still a rocking setup).
Now, if only I could get a capture card so I can work with some console games too...

Oh, also (I should probably make a separate post, and I will later) I'm planning on taking part in the Extra Life charity stream on November 4. I've wanted to participate before, and now that I have a better computer, I figure the time is as good as any.

Small Update and Maintenance

One disadvantage to being able to build up a schedule of videos to come out is you forget about the maintenance the comes along with them releasing. So, now, finally, the playlists for Dead Space 3 and Portal 2 are public.
Actually the main reason why I am posting this is because I have updated the channel logo. What spurred me to do this was some people looking at it and reading it heart I had as an A, making the logo read TBAG, which is rather contrary to my desire. So I found myself a new heart that is less triangular and, after a some hours of editing it and adding color, I thought of another change to make to the logo.
You see, something I had thought of when I first made the logo was to update it as I found ways to add more biometrics to the videos. Even though I have had the gaze tracker for quite some time now, I hadn't added it to the logo, partly because I was not thinking about it. Last night I was thinking about it and what dawned on me was to add the green circle to the logo, as though I were looking at it with the gaze overlay activated. I think it does a good job of representing the tracker.
No other news than that, but that I will hopefully have a new computer built by the end of the month, and after that I will start making some new videos. (Actually I could start making videos now, but I want that faster processor first, though I could change my mind.)

Full Schedule Through September

Huh, I didn't realize I hadn't posted anything here for so long. Anyway, if you look at the release schedule you will see I have videos uploaded and scheduled all the way through September! I also finally finished playing the six games I have been working on for a while; the Dead Space series, the Amnesia games, and SOMA. While I am glad I finally played the five games I hadn't (I played Dead Space some years ago) it is nice to know I can get back to playing the horror games I just feel like playing.
Some other things have come up since the last post as well, including (finally) getting a job, which has had an interesting impact on these videos. One is obviously the loss in time to make these recordings, but the other is that the increase in activity from the job (a lot of walking) has lowered my resting heart rate significantly. Thanks to the 100+ hours of heart rate data I have from the thirteen months prior, I know my resting heart rate was around 75-77, but now it is around 67-70! I first noticed this just two weeks into work, so that was a quick, unexpected, and welcome impact. Due to this I have changed up the R script for generating the histograms so they will show the lower heart rates. You will see this impact in the Dead Space 3 videos, which are the recordings I started after starting at work.
Also, because of how much the length of the Dead Space 3 videos varied I have further tweaked the R script to add the length of the video to the graph (but I have done this after making these graphs, so they will show up on the next set).
I am not sure exactly when I will start the next set of recordings, but I am leaning towards Layers of Fear because it has gained support for Tobii Eye Tracking!

Something Different and Not Necessarily Returning

So the other day I had an idea and decided to do it. I do not have a copy of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, so I cannot play that currently. The people at Achievement Hunter do though, so they put one of their more reactionary people in front of the game and a face cam, surrounded by people who really just want to make it worse for him. Now, they do not have a pulse graph setup like I do, and I kind of doubt they ever will, so my idea was why not watch their video with the oximeter connected, and record that?
I didn't say I thought it was a good idea. It was just something I figured I could do, so I did, and this meta-video should have gone live about twenty minutes ago.
Now I cannot say I intend to ever do one of these again. It just isn't as much fun to do, compared to actually playing a game, but maybe I will. Only time will tell. In any case, here's a link to the original video:
Let's Watch - Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
Also, to be clear, there is no endorsement in either direction concerning this video. I say that a couple times in the video, include Rooster Teeth's statement in my video's description, and here it is once more:

This is not endorsed by Rooster Teeth in any way.  Views, opinions, thoughts are all my own.  Rooster Teeth and [Achievement Hunter, Let's Watch - Resident Evil 7: Biohazard] are trade names or registered trademarks of Rooster Teeth Productions, LLC.  © Rooster Teeth Productions, LLC.

(I really do not want to be contacted by RT Legal. I'll take the video down if asked, but I hope I will not be asked.)

For Future Reference

A while back I started using the Lossless preset for all the of the recordings, so that I have the best masters to work from, and it has been working well ever since. That is until Dead Space, which I am almost done with. My guess is that the problem comes from how NVENC interacts with a high-framerate game. Dead Space is going at over 100 FPS quite a bit because of its age relative to my hardware. That many frames might be chocking the Lossless preset, causing stuttering in game, in the videos, and even causing serious stuttering in the recording of the overlay. Only today, after making nine of the 12 Dead Space recordings (one per chapter) did it dawn on me to try setting a constant bit rate. Fifty Mb/s might be much lower than the 150 Mb/s Lossless produced, but it is certainly enough and without that stuttering, it is many times better. I do intend to go back to Lossless for future recordings, unless this issue comes up again, but I do wish I had thought of this before playing 75% of the game.

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.

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.)

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.

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.