Category Archives: Rambling

Twenty Twenty

I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything since December. Extra unbelievable considering I’ve had my next gaming log written for months now. Honestly, there are several overlapping reasons for why I’ve been slacking so much more than usual.

First and foremost, I started a second blog last summer that is geared specifically towards retro computing, particularly towards BBSing, which is something I’ve been heavily involved with since I was a teenager and still love today. This new blog aims, in part, to document my experiences related to some very esoteric subjects, such as programs I’ve written and projects I’ve been involved with, and that honestly feels like a more worthy use of my time. It doesn’t help that most of the regular readers of this blog (largely friends) have dropped off over time, while my new blog is slowly growing. This all led me to question whether I’d even want to keep going over here. I ultimately concluded that I still love putting together the quick “gaming logs” that dominate this blog, so I’ve decided to continue on with those and the occasional article (of which I’ve got quite a few on the back burner.)

That said, my new blog also covers more general retro computing subjects, and I’ve been tossing around the idea of moving my retro gaming reviews over there to take advantage of that growing niche audience. To complicate that, I’ve long wanted to post more of them, more frequently, but that would have to involve some kind of a major format change. Right now, they take way too much time to research, play through, and write up. I’m still trying to decide exactly what that new format might look like, but likely it’ll take a less structured approach, more closely resembling my gaming logs. Regardless of being my favorite part of this blog, retro reviews will always be massive time sinks for me, and with the time I’m spending gaming at a low lately, I can at least try to spend less time writing them.

I’ll post my long overdue next gaming log very soon. Thank you to all of those regular readers who are still dropping by, and to those of you who stumble upon this blog randomly and take the time to read some of my ramblings. ❤

A Farewell to FRAPS

I originally purchased Beepa’s FRAPS back in the early 2000s to do some gaming video captures for my old clan. I put together a couple of little video promos for us, and another couple just to show friends at work, but I did relatively little with it. Keep in mind, this was all in the infancy of gaming videos, a few years before YouTube launched, never mind became popular. A part of me wishes I had kept with creating and editing videos – you could be watching this on my hugely popular, fully monetized YouTube channel instead of reading it on a seldom visited, poorly written blog right now! I digress…

Regardless, FRAPS remained a fixture on my PCs thanks largely to me starting this blog and making it one of my goals to include my own high quality screenshots depicting actual gameplay whenever possible. Most people would agree that it’s much more convenient to bind screenshotting (and saving) to a single key rather than using any of the more complicated methods of capturing to the clipboard, particularly when attempting to screenshot a game you’re actively playing.

“Screenshot Options in FRAPS”

More unique to FRAPS was the ability to toggle repeating screenshots on and off. That is, instead of taking a single screenshot, FRAPS can automatically take screenshots over and over again at a certain interval. I’ve made great use of this feature to capture action rather than all of my screenshots consisting of nothing but character vanity shots and scenery. See The Tale of Garn series for a huge number of examples.

FRAPS was easy to use, very light on resources, and produced good results. Unfortunately development was never all that rapid, and suddenly slowed to a total stop in 2013. While the latest version (3.5.99) technically works in Windows 10, it doesn’t support DirectX 12. That, and it flat out doesn’t work in many games. With it falling out of favor with users, game developers have no incentive to ensure compatibility on their end either. Adding to the laundry list of issues, capture codecs haven’t been kept up, nor does FRAPS support many functions that would help keep its place as essential for today’s “let’s play” focused video producers and streamers.

In 2016 a story broke that Beepa were working on 3.6.0 which would include proper Windows 10 support. There was no ETA, just a vague assurance that it was being actively worked on. Yet, here we are in early 2019 with no new version of FRAPS nor even a single update on the official FRAPS site since 2013. It’s clearly time to move on.

Unfortunately moving on hasn’t been so easy. When searching for suggestions for FRAPS replacements, the most common responses by far are recommendations for other video capture utilities. Those popular with streamers such as OBS and Action! as well as some of the newer bundled capabilities such as Nvidia’s Shadowplay and Windows 10’s Game Bar are the frontrunners. But how many of them can do repeating screenshots? Seemingly none of them!

“Screenshot Options in Bandicam”

Then I stumbled across Bandicam. I’d heard of Bandicam a few times since it was released back in 2009, but didn’t know much about it. In fact, I was always under the impression that it was more for web cam use, for some reason. In reality, Bandicam seems to be as close as a 1:1 FRAPS replacement as I could hope for. Bandicam features an FPS overlay that works almost identically to FRAPS’s. Even the price and licensing schemes are very similar. It can record video in a number of formats, and it also includes some of those aforementioned “let’s play” features that FRAPS lacks – water marks, webcam overlays including chroma keying, and a separate voiceover audio channel. Most importantly, I was amazed to find that it supports screenshots with what seems like a carbon copy of FRAPS’s screenshot options screen. Bandicam is clearly gunning to replace FRAPS!

So, how’s it actually work? Well, I had some major issues with the screenshot capture. Setting the repeat screenshot to repeat every 2 seconds, I noticed that every screengrab caused the frame rate to dip drastically – dropping from 70 – 80 down to the 40s for a split second in the first game I was testing with. Obviously this caused my average FPS to be a lot lower and, more importantly, made the game feel noticeably “hitchy”. It wasn’t utterly unusable per say, but it was far from what I was expecting. With FRAPS I usually had zero indication that the screengrabs were even happening.

While I was disappointed, I don’t give up that easily. I tried different save formats, I tried saving to a different physical drive, and I tried switching to various other games in case it was a incompatibility with that specific engine, only to find my performance was either unchanged or actually worse. Out of curiosity, I tried capturing video and was surprised to find that there was only a tiny performance hit – less than 10 FPS for a high quality 1080p capture. Whaaa…?! Why in the hell is screenshotting so taxing?

As a last ditch effort I switched Bandicam from “Game Mode” (which hooks into DirectX) to the basic screen grab mode and configured it to do a fullscreen capture of just the monitor I usually game on. The result? No performance hit at all and the screenshots looked great. Well then…

“Bandicam’s Status Bar (Pinned)”

The only downside of using Bandicam this way is that the FPS counter display requires that I’m in Game Mode. Almost every game these days has its own way to display the current frame rate so no big loss there, but in both FRAPS and Bandicam, the counter is also used for indicating when the program is actively screenshoting or capturing video. This is extremely useful for verification of whether a screenshotting or video capturing has been toggled on or not. That said, Bandicam does allow you to “pin” a little status bar to the top of your screen when using the basic screen grab mode which, while a little intrusive, seems like a fair trade-off. Alternatively, you can just collapse the main Bandicam window and have it on a different display. Not bad!

So there you have it – I’m making the switch! Oh, and just to make sure you don’t think I’m getting paid to shill for Bandicam, I should mention that it’s released as shareware, with the only limitations being a watermark and a 10 minute limit on videos. While this probably prevents the free version from being too useful for any serious video recording, the screenshot functions appear to be entirely uncrippled. Enjoy!

A popular video capture software that actually *does* support repeating screenshots is the well-loved Dxtory. Unfortunately Dxtory seems to be early in the process of going the way of FRAPS – support seems to be slowing for it, with no new updates in two years or so. On the contrary, Bandicam seems to be adding more and more features every few months and virtually every issue or missing feature I’ve seen people complain about has been addressed in the last year or so.

World of Guildcraft

Outside of my last post I haven’t mentioned World of Warcraft in quite a while, chiefly because I haven’t been playing it. In fact I had (finally) cancelled my account for the first time since launch mere months before the release of Mists of Pandaria, only reactivating long enough to level my main character up to 90 and complete a few miscellaneous end game goals such as grinding out a full set of PVP gear and some decent epic weapons. Now, with Warlords of Draenor on the horizon and the general urge to hit up an MMO again rising I dusted off my old characters and started to try to get into the the spirit of Warcraft once again. So far I’ve mostly spent time leveling up alts and PVPing with my main but one subject has been in my head a lot lately: guilds.

It’s no secret that playing with others can greatly enhance a gaming experience – seemingly everyone loves a bit of co-op. MMOs are ripe for this kind of thing as group gameplay is usually, at least to some degree, built into the core game systems. It’s odd, I’ve always been somewhat of a solo player in the MMO space. I know this sounds like a contradiction but I appreciate other people being around in the game world, making it feel more alive, and having the option to interact with them if and when I choose. That said, some of my favorite MMO memories have been with other people: all the way from meeting random players I eventually became friends with when PVPing in Ultima Online’s faction system (Minax for the win!) to daring coordinated zone raids in Planetside with The Praetorian Guard or cleaning house in Warhammer Online PVP scenarios with my guild there.

Even gameplay aside, I enjoyed those clans and guilds that had a high degree of “community” outside of the game. People that got along and even if they weren’t always on incredibly friendly terms but still felt like family all the same. One of my favorite ways to experience this was in private forums – in fact I selfishly volunteered to get TPG’s going and despite waxing and waning in activity over the years, they remained active throughout its lifetime. Even relatively recently as I looked for Age of Conan and then WAR guilds, a semi-active forum was one of my requirements. Sadly, between the push towards “social media” and the more instant gratification focused players that games like WoW have bred, it seems like private forums, or at least active ones, are becoming a thing of the past. You’d think they’d be more useful than ever with all of these serious raiding guilds and their complicated policies about looting and attendance and whatnot. *shrug*

You know, I’ve never really had a real guild in WoW which is pretty shocking considering how long I’ve played it despite it being a casual on and off kind of affair the entire time. When I started World of Warcraft I rolled with my old Planetside and America’s Army clan “The Praetorian Guard” of which virtually all of us were playing WoW. Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that there weren’t really enough of us sticking around the same levels to really play together. That’s to say we didn’t have huge numbers in the first place but when some of us were powerleveling through the game and others playing multiple characters or moving at a much slower pace we couldn’t exactly run dungeons or even quest together. We didn’t have this problem in games like Planetside or Star Wars Galaxies where your level didn’t so strictly dictate what you could or could not do in-game but in WoW it was crippling.

Later, when we started reaching max level we soon discovered that there weren’t enough of us to experience end game “raiding” and not all of us were even that interested in doing so in the first place. This became a bit of a contentious issue which threatened to pull the guild apart as some of our main players plotted moving their “mains” to other guilds. I personally saw this as quite shortsighted and selfish but in hindsight I was being a bit shortsighted and selfish myself even if my heart was in the right place. I don’t really know what the ideal solution would have been, honestly – some of us wanted to be in a hardcore raiding guild and some of us didn’t. If we could have done some major recruiting we might have survived but our position as a guild, both internally and in the makeup of our particular WoW server, didn’t make that a very realistic possibility. Soon most of our top members (including our leader and practically all of the officers, tragically) went separate directions in the pursuit of bigger and better loot.

Since then my WoW experience has mostly revolved around either very casual solo playing (questing, PVPing, and working on professions and achievements) or playing with a few specific friends. In fact other than a few brief excursions into guilds with other games (often mentioned here) my multiplayer gaming as a whole has been pretty similar to that. Other than the occasional bit of pick up grouping when doing world PVP and the like I’ve barely got a glimpse of guild gameplay.

Sitting there with my WoW account thinking of the looming release of the latest expansion it only recently occurred to me: I really, really, REALLY miss being in an active clan/guild. It’s hard to describe to those who haven’t done it but playing a game, particularly an MMO, with a friendly group can be an incredibly social experience. It becomes a regular thing, something akin to a group of inseparable friends who spend almost every evening or weekend together. In this respect even the most casual/social group is still better than none at all providing you’re all friendly and get along. So, I’ve decided… I’m going in!

There are a few challenges with this. First, despite WoW’s immense popularity spawning all kinds of 3rd party guild finding sites and Blizzard themselves having added a in-game guild finding feature in Cataclysm it can be pretty difficult to really a gauge a guild from the outside. In my case I’m looking for an adult but not necessarily “family friend” guild of cool people. Even if the guild you’re applying to sounds AMAZING on paper you won’t really know how well your personalities mesh until you’re really in it. This is another reason I like forums – they’re a great way to try to figure out what the overall personality of the group is like before you even talk to any of them. One of my suckier community experiences was applying for a Battlefield 1942 clan that seemed to appeal to my tastes, making it through the application process (which included an intense and challenging tryout) only to discover that I had little in common with any of the members and, in fact, most of them were giant douchebags. Ugh!

Another problem is that I’m definitely not looking for some “serious” guild. I want a group I can socialize and level my alts in without constantly being criticized for not meeting some raiding, arena, or rated battleground criteria or item level or something… and I definitely don’t want a guild that makes massive demands of my schedule. Unfortunately most WoW guilds present themselves this way regardless of how casual friendly they really are. That’s fine though, I’d rather not be part of a guild where non-raiders (or whatever) are treated as second class citizens or something. Casual guilds in their various forms, or even social or “leveling” guilds aren’t too hard to come by regardless. The problem is that many of them are horribly unstructured which is a bit on the extreme side of what I’m looking for – a group of random people who simply all share the game guild tag is not my idea of a good guild.

My biggest problem is this area is probably simply that my server is dead. Fucking dead. Elune on the Horde side is a virtual ghost town these days. In fact, checking the Realm Pop statistics it’s the least populace Horde realm in the entire US region. Wow! There are definitely active guilds there, sure, but my selection is relatively slim to start with and by the time I factor in what I’m looking for I don’t have much wiggle room to be picky with. I’ve thought about simply starting my own guild but that contains more variables than I’m comfortable trying to deal with at the moment. After a brief cast of my net out into the cesspool of various guild recruitment forums I’ve really only found one guild that seemed to strongly meet my requirements: have a decent, semi-roleplayed name, have a good community feel with mature, decent people, have good out-of-game website and/or forums, and have a decent amount of active players online without being one of those guilds who just blindly invites anyone without a guild tag. Unfortunately that guild is both on another realm AND Alliance instead of Horde.

Thus I begin considering the potentially expensive process of moving servers and changing realms. Actually, more troubling than the money is the fact that I’ve been playing Horde since beta. I love the Horde! I mean, I’ve had Alliance characters before, don’t get me wrong, but ever since falling in love with series in Warcraft III playing anything other than a green skinned brutal yet honorable orc as my “main” in WoW has never crossed my mind… and playing a fucking Human? Forget about it! Ignoring the travesties brought by the Alliance on my beloved Horde and my own personal defeats to them in the various battlegrounds of the world, I don’t really identify with or otherwise like many of the races on the Alliance side. They really are quite different. Most of all I’m worried that as I do my banking in Ironforge or Stormwind I’ll have a sudden, inescapable feeling that I’m some kind of lowdown traitorous, sell-out bastard. Ugh!

Still, it’ll be nice having people to chat with and an auction house with, you know, actual stuff on it… 😉