Say Goodbye to 1080p (for now) and Hello to New Recording Solutions!

There is sad news on this day,

So let me give you kind of a back story. I use Voila for screen recording my computer. Overall, it's okay. I would like to have the option to record 30fps video, but 25 is pretty good. Anyway there's one fatal flaw: whenever I play games at 1080p resolution while recording, every once in a while a key will get "stuck", that is if you were to press the "W" key in Minecraft you would keep going forward until you pressed "W" again. This happened frequently enough where I started to look for alternative programs. I scoured the Interwebs in order to find some solution. Alas, there were no solutions for this bug. I'm not sure whether I'm going to file a bug report or something since I have found a workaround. It turns out I have to change my screen resolution to 720p and thus record in that resolution. I just played Minecraft and Portal 2 and they both performed great (Minecraft got 35-45fps) and best of all I never got the bug. So, the point here is I won't be doing many 1080p videos until I get my new recording setup, which I'm going to talk about in the paragraph below.

There she is, the AVerMedia Game Capture HD. This is going to be the focal point for my new recording setup. I talked about this a long time ago in a Skyblock video, but I'm going to talk about this in a new video that I will make sometime. What this does is it records footage from a composite input. That means that the computer does absolutely no work. And it records 1080i! Although this looks slightly worse than 1080p, it looks very close to it. But since I am a videophile (?), what I'm going to do is get a HDMI splitter, split one HDMI cable to my monitor and another to an HDMI to composite converter which will then go to the box. Thus I get the best quality while still being able to record at a high resolution. All of this will run my approximately $210. You may be wondering, "Is it worth it just to record more pixels?". Well, if you don't know I have a PS3, Wii, and Nintendo 64 and my friend has an XBox 360 and an SNES (I don't know if you'd be able to record that though). So, this means I can record a lot more games by myself and with friends as well as vintage ones too. So in my opinion it is definitely worth it. I am very excited for when I will be able to produce more content in high qualitie.

There's one slight problem: I don't have $210. That's what I will be saving up for. I am hoping to have enough money to buy it by sometime in Summer (or maybe I could get it for my birthday. Who knows!?), assuming I don't spend it on Indie Game Bundles and iOS apps.

Oh look! Is that a new Indie Royal Bundle?!

- Aidan

Tons of Updates on the Server!

Hi,

I've been working hard on the server for a couple of days (losing needed sleep because of it) and It's coming along very well. Here are the things I've added so far:

• PermissionsEX 
• WorldGuard 
• NoSpawnEggs
• neoPaintingSwitch
• Multiverse Core and Inventories
• Grief_Logger (Not sure if I'm going to implement this one yet or at all...)
• Giant Trees
• bcVote
• RealMOTD

Now, I could have just drag and dropped all of these plugins in and defaulted to Op which is what was happening on the old server. Mostly what I've been working on is permissions for ALL the plugins. There are currently four groups: Guests, Builders, Moderators, Admins, and Owner (I will be the only owner). Guests only have permissions to access a couple of basic Essentials commands and to teleport to any world they choose (it took me 2 days just to get Multiverse configured). Also, Multiverse Inventories allows you to have seperate inventories for certain worlds which is what I'm using for the Survival world. I'm using NoSpawnEggs to disable certain groups from spawning bad mobs and things of that sort. neoPaintingSwitch will allow you to switch paintings with your mousewheel (only for builders and above of course). Giant Trees is going to be only for Mods and up. bcVote is for Builders and up. You can vote for the weather and time of day with it. RealMOTD is a plugin that allows you to have a more rich MOTD than Essentials when you log into the server.

Since Spring Break starts this week (yay!) I will be working overtime on getting this server ready for a public release. I will set myself a goal: by the end of Spring Break, I will have the server and all of the other things associated with it's release set up.

You thought this was over?

I am renaming the server. Why you may ask? Because now I do not only have just Moog and Thimble Lake City on my server, but I have a Survival world, End world, Redstone world, and Dongo Bongo Island. Since I couldn't name it the Thimble Moog Redstone Dongo Redstone Survival Server, I had to come up with a name to cover what this server is about. What I want this server to be is a place that you can go for almost all your Minecraft pleasures. Whether it's surviving, building, or exploring, you can do it here. So, this is the name for the server:

The few of you that get this: clever huh? For the rest of you, you're probably saying, "Why the heck did you name it '42'?". You would have had to watch or read "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" in order to get this because, according to the movie/book, the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42 (Even Wolfram Alpha concurs). I thought it might go well with the server because I want it to be the answer to your Minecraft server; the server that you want to go on for all your Minecraft desires. So, I'm happy with the name and I'm sticking with it.

I'm making a page on this service called Enjin on which you can make a page for a certain game. I'm making one for the server. I will talk about this in another blog post since I don't have anything ready on it yet.

I made the logo you see above. I did it in like 20 minutes on my iPad. I kind of like it, although I probably can do something better. For the time being, I guess that will be the logo of the Server. I guess I can make a better one over the break.

Since all of this is going on, video production will probably be lower than usual (although it wasn't very frequent to begin with). So yah. Hope your excited to come on this server as much as I am. I look forward to a big and great community. Who knows? We could expand over time and grow maybe to a 40, 60, or 100 person server. That would be awesome!

The future is bright,

- Aidan

P.S. I will probably be adding 42 to http://mcserverlist.net soon as well. Just thought I'd let you know.