I am a kickstart-aholic. I check it late at night, and during lunch breaks to get my kickstart fix.

Recently it has come to my attention I am spending far too much time browsing the website called kickstarter. The short version of it is that someone will put a project up on there, and will set a goal for it to reach in order to be made or done. You pledge your amount to the project, however it will not be taken out of your bank account unless the goal is met.

If the goal does not get achieved, then the show is over for everyone, as no money will be taken from you leaving the kickstarter with nothing. This lends to a high energy atmosphere for products that are done right.

The atmosphere of this funding model lends well to things which have been planned out but would not get mainstream backing by a traditional bank or other places due to lack of perceived interest or amount of risk tied to the project.

According to my profile, I have been going a bit crazy with buying things lately. Links to above projects also after the break.

Keep reading more to see what I feel are what I’ve noticed in good and bad projects so far on kickstarter.

Kickstarter projects backed by SuperRoach

1. Airtracks
2. CTRL+Console
3. Zircon – “Identity Sequence”
4. LIFX – Light bulb
5. iControlPad 2
6. Fangamer Retrowear
7. Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa
8. Video Game Orchestra
9. Up up down down Left Write
10. Digispark
11. The Kick
12. I’m fine, Thanks
13. Pants by Bluffworks
14. Carmageddon: Reincarnation

Looking at the list of things I have backed myself, you can see I’ve gone largely for hardware related to video production, or small items which have low goals to get the actual product.

The catch is, that kickstarter projects will have more than one level to fund a project, and it is totally up to them to specify what extra goals can be given and used. For example, Bluff works pants had its lower options giving you a nice waterbottle. You can still get something nice from the project even if you couldn’t afford the pants. You could option yourself for multiple pairs. The higher levels even involved him making a short film based an an idea you give him.

In other words, he tries to allow for many different demographics to fund the project. People interested in seeing the idea succeed, wanting the product or wanting to through their reputation into the project are all able to help in their own way.

People who fund projects with the higher levels are not uncommon – Notch who is well known for his development of minecraft will often see game projects and dump the highest level available, as seen for Double fine productions and more recently on Planetary Annihilation. Getting these people interested in your project is free publicity, and will make your project more appealing as it will be shown as closer to reaching its goal.

Stretch goals

A kickstarter should also consider the chance that they may need to think about what happens if they become overfunded. Funding does not stop when you have reached your goal, and it is intended in good will that you will invest those resources back into the project. A video game would at least offer more levels given a large enough raise to hire an extra developer. Video game orchestras will seek licensing to include more popular tracks. Some projects will even lower the cost of parts which was the case with the Digispark arudino clone project.

The important thing is that these goals will flow back to everyone who has pledged to the project. Everyone now has an incentive to go tell their friends about the most awesome new project they found by helping the project potentially reach higher goals.

Noted amazing things to happen in projects I have backed

Planetary Annihilation

This game appears to have almost done everything right, from having the perfect background (previous developers of well loved game Total Annihilation), to a down to earth attitude that come through in their updates.

Publicity for this game was almost a given due to it’s background, which leaves the stretch goals to talk about. The goals are all awesome, and the (accidental?) theme of making everything be more awesome just spread as more goals come up. Not all of the stretch goals were laid out at the start – you had to fund the previous stretch goal before the next one would be announced.

The most impressive stretch goal was the “Galactic warfare” goal, which will hopefully give both casual players and people looking for a more meatier game something to stay playing this game for. People can jump in an out of a persistent universe, helping their team out take over entire planets.

The entire team in the final hours of the project streamed from their working offices them partying and being excited about being able to work on the project, along with mini celebrities sitting in and having fun like John Patrick Lowrie, the guy who done many fantastic voices for characters such as the sniper in Team fortress 2 (for nostalgia points, he even done the voice overs in Total Annihilation).

Pants by Bluffworks

A charming video had my attention from the start, however the amount of passion this guy has is infectious. I really wanted to help him get off the ground after watching the video and his updates. You could tell that the project was difficult, but his updates fully shown that he was aware of all the steps needed, and he had more than enough help ready and waiting to go for him to start production.

Stefan was also the very first person that when I pledged money to, wrote a mail thanking me and asking me some general questions. It felt great to connect at such a level!

It seems to help greatly that he is a good speaker as well.

Lifx light globes

Working on your imagination, this project worked on something that most people would love to have in their homes, but likely would consider to be impractical – to have more control over their house lighting than just a switch on the wall. The video worked well to show a sense of building up on the amount of awesome things that you can do.

This project’s idea was so infectious that it received publicity from all around the globe, forcing them to cap a limit on their project for worry of it growing too fast internally. This is definitely the right kind of problem to have.

Coming off the high – the downsides

There is a downside to all the excitement for Kickstarter however. I have noticed a few trends of bad things you can do for a project.

Lock in a solid, google-able name

Don’t call yourself “cool lamp”. For maximum viral effect, you will need people able to visit your page without knowing anything but what their friend has told them. For an example of what not to do, Chris Roberts new project has an easily mistakable name. Am I looking for Space Citizen, Star Citizen or Squadron 42?

From watching the trailer, I would have no idea that Squadron 42 is the name of the single player campaign, and Star Citizen is almost too generic of a name which can easily get muddled up in transport in our mushy brains

Does it make sense as a user?

Look at your funding goals as someone potentially going to fund it. If you have a cool space game (again) to fund, what would someone like from that game? Ingame content that is awesome. Physical content for memorabilia.  On the contrary, some people mightn’t like physical content for a game, so offer them a digital only tier which has any kinds of nice perks you are also offering such as alpha/beta access or special content. Otherwise you are forcing them to choose the lower “just give me the game tier”.

Take a step back and look at  your project

Do you sound like you are on top of the project? Have you shown us that you’ve tried as much as you can before the funding? After all, if you really don’t need Kickstarter to help, why not just get a traditional loan and finish it yourself for maximum profit. Show us in the simplest way possible why we need to help your project.

Give it all you’ve got!

Kickstarter allows you to specify how long the project has before it is closed. It is common to see places set a large timeline – upwards of 45 days or more, in the goal of getting more funding. The problem is that this is a very long time for a funder to be sitting in hibernation, and for your project to be doing nothing as well. Setting a lower amount of days helps to increase the strength of the curve of funding at the beginning and end, and can make the difference from your project falling into obscurity to having a strong finish. To quote Archer, you have got to get in the Dangerzone!

Kickstarter or nothing

As much as I am a fan of website diversity – Kickstarter is an idea, not a singular thing after all, you need to have your pitch on Kickstarter.

There are downsides to Kickstarter as someone making a project. Kickstarter will take a percentage (unconfirmed to be 5%), along with the forced use of Amazon for pledges also taking a percentage off what people are giving you, leaving you with less than the actual total seen on your page.

I’ll name drop my favorite old show, Pure Pwnage. FPS Doug telling us he can run faster with a knife and creating the entire Boom headshot? That was him. The crew are coming back and making a movie, so check it out!

The problem is, they deserve so much more attention, but are stuck to crowd funding website Indiegogo, which on paper sounds perfect to them. It’s local, takes less fees, offers multiple payment options.

As you can see by it’s current funding, by name alone they could be getting more than double that. Publicity however so far has been fairly low.

One obstacle for Kickstarter is that they technically require you to be a company in the United States. If this were to be taken literally, it would be funny to see how much smaller the projects on Kickstarter would be.

The workaround currently, is that proxy companies will place in a project with their details and your pitch. It’s unknown if this could backfire in the future, although really it’s just a step of complexity that projects such as PurePwnage or Lifx will have to deal with, being based in different countries.

Conclusion

I will have to be more careful choosing projects. I’m aware now of ones which are not worth my time. Using the addictive recently launched link in Kickstarter, then I need to be fine with waiting the entire length of the project actually receives funding and begins. Will I be able to stop using the site altogether? Not likely, unless gadget minded people are able to pursue ways to let me purchase their stuff on their own terms, which I am more than ok with.

I think I would make a lot having a Kickstartee’s anonymous program, I wonder if that idea can make it…

The Raspberry Pi is a small computer that is able to be produced for a very low cost. Although intended for mass educational and learning use, They also are a fantastic gadget to use for your own personal hacking around and learning in many different computer areas.

I’m writing this though to talk about the variety of casings that are available for it. Much like the unique situation the Raspberry Pi is in, there are plenty of fun and unique ways to have a case for it. For example, using thick paper, you can print your own case. You can even have a 3D Printed case.

I decided to try out the PiBow case, designed by Paul Beech, who also designed the Raspberry Pi logo itself.

The unique thing about this case is it can be easily sent via post, because it is arrived in layers. Like lego parts, you stack them on top of each other to build it.

Here is a video review I made of it, you can also click to read more about my impressions

Collection of photos:

Firstly, the case looks great. Ignoring the garish rainbow pattern, holes are done well and the perspex on the  top and bottom lets you keep that “weird gadget” look to it.

Compared to the paper case I had prior, this one is a lower form factor. It is also much easier to take with me, I do not have to worry about the case becoming crushed and then snapping it during transport. In terms of weight, it does feel slightly heavier. This is partly a good thing, as when it is connected with all sorts of devices it is less likely to slip around.

Another fun part is the underside of the case is also clear. Multiple times with the paper case, I had to take out the SD card (top in the image above) out and insert it back in. Without a audible click or resistance however, I never knew if I had put it upside down or not! This solves that problem in a fun way. I also noticed that I seemed to have lost one of my lives  while building this – looking at the heart meter in the bottom left.

Another reason for that could be that I built the case up the first time around without taking the white paper sheeting off each piece. I felt silly discovering that at the end when looking at the “frosted lighting” version compared to what it should have looked like on the website.

Nothing is perfect however, which comes to the first gripe I ran into after having it assembled. With the power connection, Raspberry Pi uses a Micro USB adaptor. Due to mobile phones adopting the standard as well, these cables are around in heaps of varieties. Some however, will not work with this case design, as the recessed hole is not wide enough for some cables – my Samsung Galaxy S3 Charger for example. This is a bit of a shame, and I have not found a solution besides using ones with a standard connection.

Overall though, the case is fun and if you are looking for an permanent way of casing up your Raspberry Pi when the Punnet just won’t do anymore, this could be it.

Portability is a big thing to me, as I often prefer to be able to take everything with me on foot. This limits me in a few ways. I do not have the ability to use powerful lighting or other high performance gear, because I cannot assume I will be able to work in a powered setting. The advantage it brings though is a lot of components can work on battery power, and I can get into very remote or constrained areas. Used properly the location can give your interviewee a more of a relaxed tone and help in a setup where you may not have assistance with you.

First off, the backpack:

My photo does not do it justice, but the product photography on their page does. It’s called a Speck Aftpack.

Read on below the fold to see what madness lies inside!

The rear of the backpack gives a nice store space for your laptop.

As normal as it looks, the build quality of this bag is amazing. You can really feel the thought put into this case with it’s nice features. To briefly go over a few, the back of the bag has a zip, to access a extremely heavily padded compartment dedicated to it. There has been many times when I’ve needed to access just the laptop part, for either doing emails or uploading photos, and this has been a great convenience.

This means that no matter how messy the rest of the bag is, your laptop is always going to be easily grabbable.

Another workflow this enabled was for packup time. If I’m at a venue and I’ve done all I need to do there, I can begin packing up, by going off power and putting camera and audio equipment in the bag after copying their contents on to the laptop. With that done, I can be ready to go minus the laptop, with it being ready to slide back in. I’m also always paranoid about leaving things behind, so while waiting for transfers or uploads to finish, this gives me time to resort and double check I have actually packed everything else. It’s like mental multitasking, but it actually works!

The next part this bag does well is pockets. It does not go overboard with pockets, it gives you just the right amount. Almost every kind of pocket is included in there, with differing types of padding. The frontmost area is easily accessable for small objects, while the flap for the bag when opened gives access to other compartments. You even have a mesh area on the side which expands to fit a water bottle there. This is an excellent thing for when you are walking a decent distance for interviewing a subject.

The last part for this backpack is the straps. I tend to overpack and weigh myself down with this bag, so the oversized, extra wide straps give extra padding so it does not cut into me. They also have a unzippable gadget that can lock the two straps together for extra rigidness. It doesn’t sound like much, but this feature can let me run for reasonable distances without worrying it’s going to easily fall off.

With the bag covered, lets get into the gadgets!

What’s in my bag

For an itemized and labelled list, check the original post on flicker here

From top left row by row though, I’ll list the items.

• White Portable battery charger
  handy for charging phone without power available.
• XM 2000 Dynamic Microphone in padded case
  I would maybe get the Shure SM57 reading reviews now, however this mic has served me very well. XLR pinout.
• 10 Metre XLR to 1/4″ Connection
  Plugs the microphone into various things. Long length because I want to be able to cable manage it and hide from camera shots.
• Speck Aftpack
• Microphone flag
  The plastic thing with a hole in it. Use these to give yourself free branding.
• Small 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable
  Easy method to connect the H4n to the video.
• DIY 4 Input to 1 output.
  Cheap way of mixing multiple sources together.
• Headphones in circular storage case
• Black multiple types memory card reader
• Notebook with pen
• Spare AA Batteries (rechargeable)
• iGo Stowaway keyboard.
  Arguably the finest built bluetooth keyboard ever made.
• Flexible leg tripod
  Able to grip onto nonflat and other surfaces like a pole for untraditional shots
• Large assortment of cables, hand picked then bagged up, in a plastic box.
• Zoom H4n recorder/mixer/monitor with clear plastic case
  The heart of this setup.
• Kodak Zi8 Pocket camcorder, with magnetic lenses
• Green iPod third generation nano (go the older sizes!)
• Netbook (Asus 1005HAP)
• iPad

It’s a bit daunting to see the dot points and how much that goes into the bag!

Major components

The major parts of the kit I will go into why they made the cut and are well worth considering.

Zoom H4n

I have detailed this in another post I have done earlier, but to recap this  device makes interviews much easier. You get the ability to monitor your audio at anytime. You get the ability to turn to use (or not) auto level gain adjustment. You can plug in a variety of equipment of all kinds. Non powered and powered mics? sure. Computer audio? easy. Guitars? yep. It lets you focus on more important parts of your stuff like well, doing interviews.

You can mix all of the possible inputs together for a battery powered 4 Channel mixer of doom. Bam, there is a large power hungry part of your kit gone already.

Memory card can be used anywhere and is good to go. No buggering around with weird formats. Speaking of the formats, you can do MP3 or WAV fine. Bam, all your formats for audio covered.

Kodak Zi8 Pocket camcorder

A pocket camcorder, Kodak seemed to never make a better camcorder than this one. It has a lot of features much more cameras have not bothered with – Stereo audio input, Small size and decent battery life along with good codec support.

Codec support is good with MP4. Bitrate leaves something to be desired but is still above most phone cameras. The format is easily able to be thrown without transcoding into many video editors. I’m aware it’s not lossless, but you run with what you have. As it  is, you have a format that can either be uploaded directly to youtube for a turn around time that will make the Road runner blush, or edit it together for a a branded clip with titles quickly to make your sponsors happy.

The sensor size of this camcorder is also great – 1/2.4″. The closer to an inch (I hate using that measurement format) in pocket sized recorders, the better quality is possible especially for low light. Of course, a DSLR will often have a full frame sensor a multiple larger, but then you have a separate set of issues to deal with.

With the small format, you can get cheap and easy additions to change the look of your recording. Not instagram, but for real! I use these to get a macro photo for closeups if I need it (rarely), or bettter is a wide angle shot to get the venue in.

Audio monitoring is shown on the Zi8 which is a nice touch.

It has a tripod mount, some don’t. Never take features for granted on a video camera.

Phone cameras (at the time of writing, a Samsung Galaxy S 3 and iPhone 4S won’t make the cut) will one day get good enough to replace this. But small home cameras won’t – the most common thing for a cheap camera is to forget the darn audio input!

The sum of all parts

The strength with this kind of kit isn’t with the individual parts as much as it is with how well they go together. Some parts due to their low cost will often cut corners, which is where another part may come to the rescue in order to compliment it.

The Zi8 with it’s audio input lets me do a direct recording ignoring the average internal microphone. The fact that this is then plugged into the Zoom H4n means that I have a live mixing deck, with Microphone quality being right up close to the subject will sound a world better than being a few meteres away (recording crowd noise as well!).

The lens attachments are easy enough to use to have the wide angle on at the start to get a opening shot. Then pause, lens off, and resume shooting. I can trim it out or go with it as is.

Bluetooth keyboard can work with either the iPad or the phone, giving me an effective way to quickly type up a decent amount of words with a post.

The flexible leg tripod cannot hold much weight – so the pocket camcorder of the Zi8 is suited to this well.

The iPad works well as a remote interface as well as in a two person setup – get the interviewer an iPad while you sit at base with the netbook – you can relay progress between each other including questions effortlessly without interupting the actual interview. It also can entertain the interviewee while you are setting up with games.

The iPod nano gives the choice of using your royalty free background music during openings, with the advantage that the scroll wheel gives you a ghetto way of fading the audio out at your given speed. Pair that up with the H4n and your microphone can be above the background, recorded live into your footage from the Zi8. Best of all if the audio sucks, you can pull the original clean source audio from the multichannel recording of the H4n.

Again, it’s how you plan out the workflow which is what matters. Plan for something to fail, then you can work around it much more nicely.

Horror stories

With experience, comes horror stories, or things that can go wrong, will. This probably could be another post by itself.

Horror stories with recording in the past include trying to record the audio from a phone placed in between us. This worked at home in a quiet setting perfect, and I even had an option to record directly to mp3. That’s perfect, I can upload that straight from the field without editing I thought…

When I tried it, firstly the most obvious thing happened – the phone constantly crashed. When loading the program, and then again during recording. You could imagine the stress of something crashing during recording would introduce to you as a interviewer. To the person I was interviewing at the time, I would have looked like I was about to grab his booth equipment and run as my eyes keep glancing down to check my phone if it was still recording and giving me any audio levels.

Batteries? Oh dear. I have had close calls with all day recordings sapping all of my battery on the Zoom H4n mic. Spares have saved me so I’m glad there is nothing to report there. Digital Cameras too will tend to be sapped quickly, so I take their associated chargers with me too.

Tripping on the phase power before an event? I don’t advise that. Luckily fuses saved me being very red faced. Also, don’t let a wireless mic run out of battery during recording. You do not want to hear the crowds eardrums pop from the static of it bursting through the stage speakers. Nope.

Currently, I need to take much more with me as my focus is in multiple areas including streaming and video, however the backpack is still going along with me with not much of an alteration. Some extras now just mean I take more bags with me; Things like a DSLR style camera will not fit in due to its separate packaging, so that gets slung on a spare shoulder. Then comes the need for more laptops, so I may take a minimalist sling style bag with me as well.

With luck this may inspire you to post up your own writeup about what is in your kit – I feel that it’s  a good learning experience for anyone reading and in the field.

The following post is for an often run into issue regarding the use of Graphics cards to accelerate making videos and was originally intended for the XSplit forums, a program used to Broadcast yourself or games onto the internet.

As we know, XSplit is a high performance program, which in order to do it’s task needs to do many things – Capturing audio from many different sources, taking user input, streaming it all to the web.

The most intensive parts are getting the Video, as well as taking that and putting it into a usable format (encoding).

Currently XSplit can use tools such as Gamesource and DXTory in order to get the video using the other powerful part of a computer – the Graphics card aka GPU. This can help in reducing the amount of cpu use and bottle necking or frame rate drop that a computer will normally have.

At this point, it would be natural to wonder about if the encoding process itself can be sped up to further help with making XSplit have even less of an impact.

There exists many available options to do this – like programming for the CPU you have languages and specifications to make programs run on a GPU including OpenCL, GPgpu and Cuda.

Unfortunately there is something getting in the way – lies.

The encoder XSplit uses is provided by the very talented and clever people working on the Open source X264 Project. Many people over the years have been contributing code, adding features and optimizing it to help provide the latest and best quality available when used to create your video. If you’ve used VideoLan Player aka VLC before, its player uses the X264 codec for both playing back and encoding. If you have used Handbrake to convert videos for a more friendly format for your mobile device, you can thank X264 for that as well. The configuration options and tweaks available are a labyrinth, but well documented. Mastery of these settings will get you the absolute best quality for low and high bitrate video (the amount of storage or bandwidth it will end up taking).

When marketing your product however, what matters is that your device can outperform the others, which leads us to how one can outdo the other.

The Performance war

You need to be able to give the marketing department a number, and now.

Twice as fast as ...X?

What is omitted (besides how much faster it really is), is the quality of the encoding. The hardware used is built for specific purposes, and in basic terms can only look so far when “optimizing” your picture. It is common to shortcut the process to get your end result for hardware based encoding, both because marketing wants speed above all, as well as the amount of eyeballs on the code is much more limited due to the proprietary nature of both Closed source and Non Disclosure Agreements.

A more detailed look which prompted me to write about this in the first place has been done by the lads at Extremetech, Titled: The Wretched State of GPU Transcoding) which I recommend you take a look at.

To be fair, quality can be forgiven in some places such as taking a source and downsampling it for a mobile or bitrate constrained device. But it is never optimal.

Mind the bugs

The initial allure of GPU Based encoding is due to it being an order of magnitude faster at given tasks compared to a CPU.  The differing languages of writing for a GPU muddy the water of making cross platform capable code. Nvidia and AMD have their own nuances you will need to cater for. OpenCL is looking to be the cross platform code of the future, however Nvidia have a proven interest to get game developers to use Cuda as much as possible to help their own sales.

I would not like to be on the receiving end of support when one user tries software which works differently on one graphics card to another – or worse not at all. This is another dealbreaker currently for a company looking to add support for making video.

If you take a look at the feature sets of new graphics cards, you will also see them touting the latest in GPU Transcoding (converting a video from one format to another) and Encoding. AMD Ati Graphics cards have software called Avivo, Nvidia have Badaboom. It’s not exclusive to expensive graphics cards either – Even some Intel Processors are offering on board graphics cards with technology called Quicksync. Other software offer the ability to use the encoding in places, Cyberlink and Arcsoft both being developers who often bundle in with graphics cards advertising their accelerated encoding.

With this information you could be eager to ask for XSplit to go add support themselves for doing this, then we can get on with broadcasting the Battlefield 3 bug of the week and Call of Duty commentary.

Some users have suggested using certain products which can be used in a dual PC setup. This means that one pc is playing the game, while the other computer is capturing the first one. The products offer the option to capture straight into the H.264 format. Wow, you can skip the entire process of encoding right? Well another pitfall – The software still needs to take it, and do compositing with your titling, transitions and other effects along with the audio. You would even need to encode again, a suboptimal solution.

Small sidepoint – capture cards or usb dongles which suggest they are doing H.264 encoding are either lying or will give you some very specific restrictions on things such as bitrate and resolution. With all of the problems mentioned above of using a fixed function encoding process meaning a lower quality.

There is equipment broadcasters and TV Stations use – but it comes at a large cost.

The Darim MV401 is a mid level broadcast version giving high quality H 264 support. It is currently $8900 USD. You can't do High Definition at this level..

The computer is also likely tied up already using their GPU for other intensive purposes such as playing a game. The free overhead when encoding a video from the desktop is a significantly different environment to a dynamicly changing, frame rate chewing game. The GPU does not have a hidden unused section of the card waiting to be used for your encoding – by design they excel at being reconfigurable to use as much of itself as possible for its current task.

The last and most important problem specific to XSplit is compared to the more common use of the apps, The conversion needs to be as close to realtime as possible. While the use of a GPU can be quicker, in the context of the Application in a timesensitive environment, you now need to throw back your video data back and forth the CPU for further compositing. Time is everything, and your viewers will notice it as the varying loads of your GPU will affect the amount of synching your video will have with the audio.

Afterall, noone likes a mime. (CC Licence: Natalie Lazo)

 In Summary

Hoping for your graphics card to encode your video perfectly is still a pipedream. In theory it may be possible, but the execution in the realworld will eat away from resources that can be used elsewhere (making XSplit better!) as well as many quirks which will crop up due to GPU programming’s immature code state.

Like the Extremetech article (link again), CPU based Software encoding is the best quality and only option for making your videos.

The World Cyber Games (WCG) are known as the largest international competitive eSports company in existence have dropped a bomb shell announcing that they will be moving away from covering PC and Console games anymore.

To give an idea of how long these guys have been around, they were formed in 2000 – In business this is a while, however on the internet and especially gaming it is the venerable Gandalf the grey watching over the hobbits of Cybergamer and MLG.

In a leaked announcement, they said the following in regard about their view for the future of gaming and how it relates to them:

In recent years, the gaming and IT trends have been moving so fast. In the current status of gaming and IT industry, one of the most remarkable information to us was the mobile shipments have exceeded the PC shipments.

As wide spread mobile devices, mobile gamer would rapidly increase as well. In this situation, the major PC game publishers have been expanding their investment and business in the mobile game development & publishing.

This information was very cruel to us since we had been committed to the PC-Based gaming event for long time. We have witnessed that there have been many companies and organizations who went out of business because they didn’t put effort to change. Therefore we concluded that we should create WCG’s new identity.

Under this circumstance, we made a hard decision that we should bring the mobile, new key sector in the game industry, in our event concept. Hence, WCG decided to start the Mobile Game-Based Festival.

To create the Mobile Game-Based Festival, WCG is under the discussion with the sponsors and game publishers regarding new event structure and the countries for new festival. Therefore, there will be no longer present event module, such as Pan Championship, and PC-Based National Finals. And, the official game titles of WCG will consist of mobile games.

Bolding by me for emphasis. The move for WCG to drop gaming is a dramatic one, however should have been seen coming for a long time. The previous years WCG finals were held had a $40,000 First place prize for the mobile racing game Asphalt 6. The prize for Counter-strike was $25,000 which is $15k lower than a mobile game (have a look at the full listing on the wcg site).

Competing in a mobile game has an shallower learning curve. This is for multiple reasons, the larger ones being the catering to gaming in a shorter timespan (quick fix gaming while you are on the loo or at a lunch break) as well as the input or control to the game needs to be simplified due to the control surface also being your actual screen of your phone/gaming device. While Asphalt 6 HD is an technically amazing game, for gameplay its depth revolves around unlocking newer models of cars, and upgrading your ingame steering and engine.

This pales to greats such as even the Wipeout series on the first playstation. Besides the analogue controls giving you an advantage, actual independent buttons to press left you with micromanagement options such as juggling weapon/shield powerups, shooting behind you and various forms of braking. The simplification of game mechanics hurts the ability to refine a players technique for longer term play.

The short term of this barbaric stripping of core mobile gaming by WCG may give trouble to event organizers planning their own smaller events – WCG themselves will not be supporting them for any events, impacting sponsorship and players attending for WCG in the first place (qualifying events for WCG were often held in gaming local area events, with the winner getting invited to go to the next level and flights to the relevant place).

Sponsorship is a risky business for promoters. They need to write up paperwork and prove that the money they are giving away to events is going to give a return in the investment. A common way to do this is to show prior examples and a strong area that they are going to sponsor – showing larger events and their return is a good way to give a comparative judgement for people who may not understand gaming itself. With WCG effectively gone for pc gaming, that is both a big event you can’t use, and if they are following any news about competitive gaming, they will have noticed WCG going for mobile only.

We’ve talked about why Mobile based gaming is a bad choice for competition, but we havn’t discussed why the direction of mobile has been taken. Well, that’s simple – getting your game’s name in the media sells more copies. It’s difficult to get your game into the competitive region. It takes time, recognition and plenty of support from the developers themselves to foster a healthy community (which on a side note, DICE are messing up for Battlefield 3). Gaming companies can give the recognition an artificial kick by giving large sponsorship and prize money deals on conditions of their choice for the game. Samsung proudly show off their endorsement for Asphalt 6, they make sales and more eyeballs on the game. Win for them!

The equivalent of this would be the offering of extra XP in games by buying soft drinks in store. That’ll never happen though…

In the longer term, I hope for smaller companies to pick up the slack, and take competitive games to a new level. Streaming technology which I believe is the future of gaming currently is becoming cheaper and more accessible, leaving a large market to tap into. That market however will depend on a fully supported ecosystem – gamers playing together long enough to form well disciplined teams, which then have the ability to focus on long term tournaments with eventual payoffs in their time spent to make it worthwhile. That sounds a bit like every other sport doesn’t it?

Australian competitive gaming is currently on shaky ground, and we will see if and how much this will affect it. I look forward to healthy competition to come back and bring strong communities. But first, we will need new games to bring new gamers in… While it is silly to argue graphics over gameplay (gameplay should always come first), it is harder to sell an older game for sponsorship. Besides age and graphics, there are newer ad opportunities in recent games, which will only get bigger as the streaming wild card comes in to hopefully boost gaming into a golden age.

On the other end of the stick, we don’t ask for AFL 2.0 do we? It is up to the following of a game to dictate where it will be played, and I feel its a waste for companies to turn their back on LAN based play for reliable setup (and the preservation of hair on event organizers heads) and match making outside of a casual lobby.

RIP WCG, Your may your sugar filled mobile addiction give you peace before you die of malnutrition from the people that supported you during your beginning – the gamers.

Also, I was able to do an Interview with Lark, who were nice enough to play some Zelda tunes for me. After the fact, I realised I should have asked for some Battlefield themeage. To hear that theme with the Violin would have been amazing!

Pimping out their facebook though, they are available at

http://facebook.com/larkband

And the actual video interview I done with them:

http://www.gamestah.com/file/view/5137

Logistically to do such a thing can be stressful, however when it all comes together it is well worth it. Here is a video from ON3 regarding the size of the event as well as what it is.

For more of a description about what I was doing there, we were interviewed as well. (I’m the one on the right!)

Overall the event was great, and I think I can provide some insight in a few points about what I learned and I felt done right and could be improved on. Above all, at a live event nothing ever goes perfect and it is how you cope with these hiccups that lets you get on with having a good event.

Read on to find out more about what I feel are important parts to doing a event like XLan

Prior Planning

• Scribble down your goals, and how you think you can achieve them.

Don’t even bother about trying to make these formal (if you need to hand off a well presented set of information, then do that by refining what you write here).

The important part is you are committing to memory what you should be doing, and how you think you should be getting that done. To do this I used pen and paper as well as some basic drawing software to jot down notes.

Even though my writing would probably let me become a prescription writer assistant for a doctor, having supporting notes lets me establish in my head what I still need to do from there and build on them until I get to a point where I feel I’ve got what they want covered, with backups.

Your infrastructure

Ensure you have all of your own parts, or the ones you are sourcing are locked in. It’s common for some equipment to be provided at the event – be it certain computers, projectors or lighting. Check that these are going to fit in with your plan well, or you are going to run into a what if that you might not be ready for on the day.

Where you can, do a test run with your equipment to ensure everything is charged and good to go. A checklist will go a long way in helping you setup and packing up after the event too, so do that to help avoid you forgetting to take everything back with you.

While I did plan and bring a lot of expensive equipment to help at XLan, a lot of it was for backups and emergencies – The larger screened production pcs we were provided done the job, even though on the first day of setup we went through three dud machines. Including one that had a dual graphics card setup that would only boot with one, and a super redundant raid 1 setup which had only one drive functional.

Keep an eye on your variables

I’ve never been at an event where you are doing everything – this means it’s important you assist others when you can to help what you’re doing come out better.

How are things outside of your direct control running? Is the event on time? Keep these in mind so you have an idea on if you have more time to help prepare, or if you should think about trimming sections if possible to help get the schedule back on track.

For XLan, this meant things like chasing up what sponsors needed to be shown, as well as what the people in the crowd wanted between games. For our own team of commentators at XLan, we used iEtherpad as a low maintenance, collaborative editor as a way of quickly recording results for matches (which we latter used when putting recordings on the web), or keeping track of where everyone is. If there were enough people and organisation prior, I probably would have considered a more wiki approach, but the most important part is to keep it simple stupid – it’s preferable to have as many onsite notes as possible from everyone, instead of only a select few being tied up awkwardly editing something convoluted.

What if…

Never underestimate that things can go wrong – because they can and do! What you think of and try to plan for can make the difference between it being squeaky clean and entertaining, to something that can cause you a lot of headaches. Try to think of everything, from the most basic things and if you can – get someone else to think of things that can go wrong! For example, think of audio alone:

• You have a dead microphone
• Cabling for the microphone / mixer may not work
• Wireless microphone interference or the battery dies
• You need an adaptor to get your microphone working
• Multi microphone setups and mixing

Things quickly get much more tricky when you introduce streaming and video because you get problems such as a larger amount of tech needed to keep it running. You also need to make sure all that tech is working in synch. What happens if part of it fails? are there redundancies available?

An example of redundancy was that one of the games (Bad Company 2) was made in a way that made it impossible to use our computers to jump in and spectate what was going on. Our workaround was to use extra long microphone cabling and have a person stand behind each team and provide commentary, with Web Cameras giving the viewers a live feed of what’s going on with us explaining it. It got the name of a bootleg shoutcast and ended up being the match with the most views so far.

In the future I would like to scribble some muse about the technical aspects I encountered for XLan 2011. In the meantime, feel free to follow my twitter on @SuperRoach

Many devices you buy now use the Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 Standard and plug – keyboards, mice and even Hard Drive docks. It’s built to give a variety of gadgetry to be able to talk to your computer in a standard way. USB 3 Is a newer standard offered to give much more room for the neat future devices that need it.

The common item to think of when wanting to use USB 3 is for Hard drives – you will be able to copy files much faster to and from it with a USB 3 Device. Let’s backtrack briefly to find out the different kinds of USB 3 that exists in order to try and find out what went wrong.

It began on a bus

Typically, a device had multiple modes of USB that it could implement. In the beginning, it was easy where there was Version 1.1 of the spec being the first mainstream one used. It offered a Low (1.5MBit) and High (12MBit/s) speeds. That sounds pretty obvious which one is which.

The next version arrived in 2000, with Version 2.0 offering 12MBit/s as well as the higher speed of 480Mbit/s.

The cheap way to sell speed

Things were going well with USB 2.0, with both modes giving cheap and speedy access at the time. The higher speed mode was well desired, however manufacturers of gadgets didn’t want to need to retool – so they used the labels of full-speed, and hi-speed. Lets have a look at one of them:

Oh great, I like that one, lets get devices that use the higher speed method right? Actually, that’s the lower speed one. “Full-speed” is the version you are looking for to have the higher 480MBit/s transfer speed.

To make things even more confusing, These labels were both under the 2.0 Spec – USB 2.0 Hi-Speed versus USB 2.0 Full speed. Even while writing this, I needed to double check which one was actually the faster one due to the vagueness in their naming.

Making marketing moves at a low level like this should not be done in order to both allow the consumer make the right decision, as well as give an idea of the meaning of what it actually represents.

(Reference for more information about the USB 2.0 labelling incident available at arstechnica)

In effect, the marketing team made it confusing on what each version was, making both of them sound like the faster version. It’s like wanting a Pony and then realising it’s a straw stuffed imitation that’ll fall apart – nice going guys.

The dark side of USB 3

Looking at the Wiki article on USB 3, It’s main goal was to be offer a transfer rate of 5Gbit/s. This is great, where there is plenty of growth and speed improvements given in this technology. Unfortunately the implementation of this technology appears to have also been clouded – in a different way to the labelling issue with USB 2, we now have the real problem of not being able to find out what true speed we are getting without trying it once you’ve purchased your new computer.

Deception 3.0

We’ve established the problems with USB 2.0’s release, and we have shown there is a potential problem with the newer version. Are there any examples of it being misleading already? You betcha.

Drawing from personal experience, I ordered an Zotac H55 ITX CE Motherboard. Among other things, it offered speedy USB 3, as seen by this press release:

Two USB 3.0 ports enable the ZOTAC H55-ITX WiFi (H55ITX-C-E) to support the latest SuperSpeed USB devices. USB 3.0 is capable of speeds up to 5 Gbps for 10x the performance of USB 2.0 for external expansion that matches the performance of internal devices.

- Source: Zotac Press release

The term super speed USB 3 means it works at the full rate of around 5gbp/s.

However in practice, this is not the case, with the motherboard running it’s USB 3 ports with a shared total bandwidth between the two ports of 2.5gbp/s.

The Gigabyte H55n Motherboard also promises 5gbp/s operation, as seen in this promotion.

In practice, this is also potentially misleading. When using the integrated graphics of the CPU, More bandwidth is assigned to the USB 3 Port, giving you the full speed.

When you plug in a discrete graphics card however, the bandwidth is then assigned to the graphics card, with the USB 3 port again having a shared total bandwidth available of 2.5gbp/s. This is not user definable in the bios.

All of the reviews mentioned and listed benchmarks showing the USB 3 Ports performing quicker using a USB 3 harddrive. This is a nice feature to know of seeing as its the most common use for the port at the moment. However, it is not an accurate reflection of how the USB 3 is actually allowed to work in your pc, and could cripple the port.

Why is USB 3 Super Speed a sham?

When your computer communicates with your USB 3.0 Port, it will be doing it by interfacing using your computers PCI Express interface. You may have heard of this more commonly when you buy a graphics card, where it’ll be mentioned that it works at 16x PCIe speed. This gives your graphics card an enormous amount of room for it to talk to your CPU and use it to give you the High Definition visuals you are used to.

A single PCIe lane means you will have 2.5Gbit/s available to you – a decent rate. To be able to offer USB 3 at its intended specification of 5Gbit/s.

Laptop manufacturers will often connect only one lane to their USB 3 Chipset. This means that the port will be running at half the rate it should be, and you have no way to find this out.

To make things more confusing, There are three versions of PCIe too – 1x, 2x and 3x. Each one works at double the speed of the previous version.

Devices that make use of USB 3

Now that we know that USB3 Based mechanical hard drives do not max a crippled USB 3 Port, and an expensive SSD can have it’s connection be the bottleneck, what else can?

The original reason I have learned all of these nuances of how USB 3 is being used is that I wanted to use a great capture card from black magic design known as the Intensity Shuttle. These devices offer uncompressed HDMI Capture of other computers or even video game consoles, which is perfect for my needs. Due to the raw bandwidth needed in processing massively sized frames at a high rate, it will actually use the full potential of an USB 3 Super Speed port. This is where the cracks begin to show in current USB 3 Devices.

Although lightpeak may have stolen usb 3’s thunder, Small Raid devices will also take advantage of the higher possible throughput of multiple devices.

Higher throughput cameras may also choose to use USB 3 as well – the current maximum rate a good webcam can transmit data is around 1280 x 720p, using the admittedly efficient UVC encoding method. With the USB 3 standard, It’ll offer another alternative possibly to Firewire, and in the future Thunderbolt

Notable hardware which is known to restrict your USB 3 Speed

Besides the Gigabyte H55n , Zotac H55CE-ITX Motherboards, some common chipsets I have found will have problems

• H55/P55 Chipset based motherboards which use a Intel 1155 Socket CPU have the potential to support fullspeed USB 3, however almost none do, opting instead to most lanes for the PCIe Graphics card.
• Sandybridge based motherboards (H67, P67, Z68) Have the same amount of PCIe lanes as the previous 1155 Socket generation, therefore will suffer the same problems.
• Intel X58 based motherboards have 40 PCIe Lanes available and have native support for USB3. All boards will support Full Speed USB 3.

The future of things to come

It will take awareness that the USB 3 Specification can be crippled depending on how your computer uses the actual port, and labelling is not provided to warn you if the machine is actually providing the lower speed.

Current workarounds are available; You can buy a USB 3 Card, and plug it into an available 4x PCIe v1 or 1x PCIe V2 slot of your desktop. This is far from ideal, as its an extra cost, and not an option on an laptop which will have no ports available.

Some Laptops do have an available Expresscard slot which use an PCIe lane – however it will require support of Expresscard v2.0 on top of an USB 3 slot in card which takes advantage of the specification. The specification itself essentially requires the laptop maker to assign 5gbit/s of bandwidth to it, which will be enough to power one super speed USB 3 port.

On top of all of this, Light peak which eventually became known as Thunderbolt is essentially an 10gbps PCIe port, and has potential to have an adaptor to allow us to forget all the problems with the USB 3 speed issues. If you have a Thunderbolt port though, will you really need to care about USB 3 at all? Until more devices come out with an thunderbolt interface, that will be yes.

TL:DR;

Be careful buying a computer, laptop or motherboard with USB 3.0 port. Many of them internally will use a lower speed connection preventing it from doing Super Speed and you may find in the future it will be a bottleneck. As of writing there isn’t an easy way to determine if a machine can truly do the Super Speed implementation.

Jeresig adapted what comes up as the top result for searching for jQuery hotkeys, however it’s out of date and partially functional now.

This one worked:
http://www.stepanreznikov.com/js-shortcuts/

Sample syntax is better summed up in the link, but uses the following syntax:

$.Shortcuts.add({
    type: 'down',
    mask: 'Ctrl+A',
    handler: function() {
        debug('Ctrl+A');
    }
});

// Dont forget to start it!
$.Shortcuts.start();

And that’s it. Worked happily once I added in the reference to it, and trying it out now.

The project I’m using it for is a live titling scoreboard, with the difference being is that it’s made in html and jQuery. Shortcuts are a quicker way to update the score, and any score updates will make the board animate to show, then slide the text away.

Ideally, I would have loved to be able to send hotkeys to a webpage while focus is on a separate program, but have not found any proprietary ways to be able to do it. Even sending a hashtag to the webpage so I can act from it would be sufficient.

The premise is holding up a shape that has a black rectangle around it, which will be picked up by a web camera, then ran pattern detection to find the presence of that shape. When the shape is found, that can then be used as a registration or “Zero point”. The detection of the pattern can allow interaction in a 3D space – You can move the shape you are  holding around, and the rotation and position will be reflected.

Another option is that with a pattern placed on a table, a 3D object can then be controlled by a traditional input surface like a keyboard and mouse, the best example I’ve seen of that so far would be an ad for BMW, for their Z4 car:

More information about this after the jump!

One use I’d like to investigate is for single person blogging attempts. Often when watching a formal video blog, or news reel there will be various overlays, which is used to give you titling to support what you are talking about. Titling in a video is important, but have two key problems:

• Post production:
  The titling and overlays are done after the production. This does mean you cannot do it live, and the time involved in scanning through the original timeline to do this cannot be done quicker past a certain point. Quality wise, this is always going to be the best option.
• Real time:
  Thanks to powerful mainstream computers, most people are more than capable of having a full production studio on equipment they already have (that would be worth another post in the future…) If a person can block out what they are talking about, they usually can work with their software to help them do the overlays. Although processing power looks to be definitely there, software can do with a more catch up – especially in it’s use of things like antialiasing. Jaggy text from lack of antialiasing stands out a mile away for me, and makes it look less professional. Ending the rant here, the catch with this method is that you are tethered to a keyboard in order to trigger. Your eyes will also be focused on the screen, and not on the camera. Your hands will be tied up interacting with the computer.

I’m in favor of time, so unless I’m given direct funding for doing it in post production, I prefer realtime.

To help with realtime, I think it would be neat if it is possible to use printed cards as a way of queuing titles up, while still being in control of the presentation of video cast away from the computer. So, inbetween all my other projects, I’m following the references below to try it out.

References:

FLARToolkit: http://www.mikkoh.com/blog/2008/11/flash-augmented-reality-flartoolkit/

Adobes Official Tutorial: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/augmented_reality.html

Tinkurnut’s how to create augmented reality apps. Excellent guide and jam packed full of info:  http://tinkernut.com/archives/772