Saturday, January 12, 2013

TCPRelay 0.3 beta 2

NOTE: there is a newer version of TCPRelay here.

TCPRelay 0.3 beta 2 is now available! Download the 32-bit or 64-bit version. You may also need to install the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.


What's new in this version:
  • GUI
    • NEW: the Target URI list is now saved to a file in the TCPRelay folder (serverlist.txt) and reloaded every time TCPRelay starts.
    • NEW: pressing Enter while typing a Target URI or starting TCPRelay will add the current Target URI to the list if not already present.
Check out the official topic on XSplit's forums and see for yourself all the great feedback people gave me.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Natural Selection 2 is so much fun. Streaming with OBS is so much better

Hey there people, happy new year! It's been a while since my last gaming-related post. As you may know, I am now playing Natural Selection 2 a whole lot. This means I must have been streaming a lot lately, right?

Well, due to what amounts to extreme laziness, I haven't been streaming too much. :( But this is going to change, as I just found out this new streaming program called OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), which is, simply put, a "free, open source XSplit", except it is much faster and lighter.

For starters, it loads and closes as fast as Notepad. I can easily stream with the screen capture feature without as much as a dent on the frame rate, which I found very impressive. I can play NS2 at over 60 fps most of the time with the aforementioned software screen capture, just as if I wasn't streaming at all.

It has pretty much the same features as XSplit, lacking only a few I never used anyways. Even if it doesn't come with them out of the box, there is a plug-in framework so that people can add the features to OBS. I wouldn't be surprised to see plugins that replicate or perform certain features better than XSplit.

I have one complaint though: the video quality doesn't look as good as XSplit. Maybe I'm trying to push too hard with just 2000 kbps of video bandwidth? Who knows. I'll be tweaking it a bit more...

Back to Natural Selection 2! I did stream some matches, and they're available on my YouTube channel. Here's one of my recent ones - a ridiculous pubstomp (70 kills, 7 deaths!) with those newbies that bought the game on the recent Steam Sale: