ARK: Survival Evolved and Android App

Oh boy, I've been playing ARK: Survival Evolved for a couple of weeks now and having a ton of fun! This is a game about survival in a world filled with pre-historical creatures, mostly dinosaurs, where you can tame almost all of them and ride them around! The guys behind the game are constantly updating it with new creatures almost every week, tons of bug fixes and new stuff to build and explore.

I've been recording my adventures in ARK (in Portuguese) and uploading them to YouTube. Check that out:

In addition to that, I also took the time to learn some Android development and wrote a fairly simple app called Anacruse where you have to tell the note name from a staff. Go download it!

Natural Selection 2 - build 250 is out! Time to stream again!

This weekend Natural Selection 2 saw the release of build 250, along with a nice big -66% discount. This helped restore some of the game's popularity, at the cost of introducing a lot of newbies, which means the overall pub game level is quite low.

My team, CiB, has been quite inactive lately. No scrims, no competitive games, no internal practice, nothing except for 3 or 4 members playing sporadically. Even myself gave a little break to NS2 for other things, because once you get into the competitive scene, it's hard to go back to pubbing, because you'll end up breaking the balance like this. (I am smurfing as Ares.)

Thankfully, people are picking up the pace quickly. Today I played for a couple of hours and there were some pretty decent games, albeit not very balanced, and there were some funny moments in there too. Watch them below!

More competitive Natural Selection 2

Hey guys, I've been very busy recently with Natural Selection 2. Some of you may have heard of the free weekend and 50% discount on the game that went live last weekend. This brought lots of new people into the game, hopefully to stay. It's been really fun going back to the basics and teaching those new people how to play the game and win. The game is still on discount sale as of this writing, but only for 6 hours, so hurry up and buy it if you like it!

After a three week hiatus (due to some issues with my ISP), my stream came back with a couple of very good, very fun NS2 matches. The first one is a couple of ENSL Gather matches, one of which lasted over an hour and had its fair share of higher alien lifeforms and all sorts of marine tech destroying said aliens.

The second is a set of matches for the NSL Season 2 tourney, for CiB Highwind. We played against AtroX on the official map Veil and the custom map Jambi. Watch below my point of view for all four rounds, and also the official casts by RedDog and Neatchee: rounds 1, 2, 3, 4.

Have fun watching! :)

Getting into competitive NS2

My Natural Selection 2 team, CiB, is now entering competitive tournaments against teams from all over the world. Last weekend we played several matches in the ENSL Custom Map Cup, all of which I have streamed in first person: vs. VexX, KKG, Team 156, flow and AtroX (aPx forfeited).

Of course, we speak Portuguese, so many of you probably won't understand our chatter ;)

After you're done watching the games, or if you want to know the results right now, see our division here.

We did quite well for a newcomer team. We're on par with most teams in our division, but still need to work on Marine tactics and dealing with the higher Kharaa lifeforms, as well as playing them better. Since this was a custom map cup, we had to give feedback on the maps. My overall opinion about them was not very good -- most maps had several balance issues and bugs in the form of stuck spots, missing textures or holes.

After playing these competitive matches, normal (pub) games are no longer the same. They're just for fun -- hop in, kill some aliens/chomp some marines, don't care about winning or losing. It's all about the fun (and honing skills).

On the next weekend we'll be playing the NSL Invitational #1 Qualifiers (see our division here), although we won't be able to get past the qualifiers since we're not an EU or NA team. We're up for the challenge, to learn new tactics, get some practice and, well, just for the sake of playing competitive games (and because they were missing three teams to fill up the 32 slots and decided to pick us). There are two well-known, strong teams in our division: Goðar and True North. We also met Team 156 before. The rest of the teams is new to me; hopefully they'll be on par with the teams we scrimmed.

Wish us good luck!

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:

State of TCPRelay, and Natural Selection 2

It's been a while since my last update here. If you're wondering why I haven't been updating TCPRelay lately, it's mostly because there was no demand for improvements or fixes for it. Also, I work as a systems analyst and that involves a lot of programming, so it's also a matter of being burned out too.
Anyway, here's a few ideas for the next versions of TCPRelay I have written down:

• Stream delay: I'm not entirely sure this is possible without inspecting the stream data, but this is definitely worth checking out.
• A way to fetch server lists from other services (own3d.tv, YouTube, ustream, ...). Also enable users to add their own lists, keep them between sessions and share with others.
• Improve localization support and allow users to translate TCPRelay to other languages.
• Fork into TCPProbe -- basically TCPRelay with packet inspection and manipulation capabilities through .NET plugins. Could be useful for network development.

If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment.

On another note, I've been looking for a strong, competitive FPS that's reminded me of the old, but fun formula of Unreal Tournament and Quake: fast-paced action with insane movement skills and pinpoint aiming accuracy required. Unfortunately, since 2007 (when UT3 was released), there was not a single memorable FPS that followed the formula and caught my interest, turning me off from the genre. I went on to other games, including World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Borderlands 2 and several casual and indie games. That is, until last month.

Natural Selection 2 was developed by Unknown Worlds Entertainment and released on October 30th. I haven't heard much about the game until then, but instantly got addicted the moment I got into a multiplayer game. It's an amazing blend of RTS and FPS with a surprisingly friendly community -- the complete opposite of most popular games such as Dota 2, LoL and Starcraft 2. People in NS2 actually help each other out, newbies ask questions and learn tricks and tactics from veterans (there's even some pro players giving out "classes" for free on their servers! See here and here); there's no split between the n00bz and the pros. Teamwork and coordination are absolutely required to get somewhere. Trying to Leeroy Jenkins your way into the enemy base *will* get you killed, unless you happen to be an Onos fighting against a bunch of rookie marines (and even then, if they know how to press the fire button and move their mouse to follow a giant suicidal gorilla-rhino-thing around, you *will* go down).

I highly recommend NS2 to anyone who has been yearning for something other than the generic "realistic" war shooter #235 with killstreaks and "realistic" gunfights, or anyone who enjoys either the FPS or RTS genres at all. It may not be as popular as LoL or Dota or SC2, but it's definitely competitive and interesting to watch. Refer to this topic on the UWE forums for a list of streams/YouTube channels/whatnot on NS2 competitive play. Oh, and it's cheap on Steam -- just 25 bucks.

Now Playing: Borderlands 2

This is going to be my first gaming-related post (yay!). I had a blast playing the first Borderlands game a while ago. Picked Mordecai, grabbed sniper rifles and pistols and chose a set of skills with emphasis on sniping. Cleared the whole game, including all DLCs. Leveled to 61 (before the cap was raised to 69). Then I got bored and hacked my character to make the most insanely powerful equipment out there -- 1.2k x4 damage pistols with near-perfect accuracy and very fast firing rates (and the ability to crash the game once in a while), "god mode" shields (which displayed as negative 2 billion and never drained), insanely fast sniper rifles and even some overpowered Eridian guns, and maxed out all skills in all trees just because. I remember doing a critical hit for the maximum possible damage of 99999 with a melee attack once. Needless to say, the poor victim exploded in a shower of gibs.

Back then I didn't have a computer powerful enough to record my gaming, nor did I have an YouTube channel or a stream, so unfortunately I got (almost) nothing to show you. :(

When the sequel was announced I was pumped. I watched every trailer and every bit of gameplay and just had to play it now (er...  then). Borderlands 2 was released three days ago (September 18th), but I had to wait two more days as the game would only release on September 20th here in Brazil.

The wait was over, and I had to stream it. Unfortunately, my microphone is really bad, so I couldn't comment on the stream itself.

Here goes my personal opinions on the game:

• Borderlands 2 has an amazing sense of humor. Claptrap's lines are among the funniest, as are Handsome Jack's and pretty much every other non-srs-bsns characters'. If my microphone was working, you'd hear me laughing about every 10 seconds or so.
• The guns are much better polished, and each brand feels unique -- an addition I liked a lot. I quite enjoy Jakobs pistols - they let me fire as fast as I can pull the trigger, which is to say, really fast. Tediore weapons are fun; you throw these cheap pieces of garbage away when reloading and a new gun materializes in your hands while the discarded gun proceeds to explode. I also like how Bandits can't spell their weapons properly.
• Enemies are much smarter now too, and they also feel more "natural", more "realistic". Bandits will actually look for cover or just put their faces straight into your gun, and they also seem to work as a team now. They also have better environmental awareness and try to avoid/use explosives to their advantage (at least that's how it feels to me).
• The world is HUGE. I've partially explored three major areas and this makes about 5% of the in-game world map. Each individual area is much larger than the previous iteration's areas. You also get a bunch of side-quests right at the beginning (OK, not too early) and there's always something to do or explore everywhere. Not to mention the vistas are amazing!
• The new UI has a bunch of improvements, but the inventory feels a little clunky and not much of an improvement from the first game. Comparing items was made easier, but equipping items isn't as simple as before. To switch a weapon, you have to go to the backpack column, click on a weapon, then click on the weapon slot you want to switch. Switching shields, mods and stuff for some reason requires the same steps as above, even though there is only one slot for each. Buying and selling items, however, is much better than before.

And now, a bit of gameplay! The video quality should improve after YouTube decides to process the videos. Oh, and sorry about some videos being cut before the actual end. You're better off watching the videos from my stream channel anyway.


You can also watch the videos on my stream channel in 1080p: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7-1 7-2 7-3 8 9 10 11-1 11-2 11-3

Also, watch me live here!