FFXIV

Remote Play Continued

I am not exactly sure why but I have been obsessing over the whole concept of using my laptop downstairs as a remote thin client for my gaming machine upstairs.  My grand hope has always been to be able to devote time and resources to the gaming machine, and just use any laptop in the house to play games remotely.  After last night I think maybe I have it working as intended.  For the last several days I have been struggling with Splashtop Personal, and in spite of lots of folks reporting good results with it… I never could get anything even vaguely close to playable.  Namely the biggest problem was mouse lag, and when you are playing games that require mouse movement… this is a huge problem.  I spent time crawling the forums, looking for answers and after trying a series of supposed registry hack fixes…  the best I could ever seem to get out of Splashtop was something in the neighborhood of 25 fps which a more common stable 20 fps.  Yesterday I installed a brand new AC1200 wireless card in my laptop, so that should literally rule out ANY connectivity issues.  I was seeing 650 Mbps stable wireless and did not see any significant improvement in performance as a result.  Now on the other hand…  web surfing and downloading anything is now absolutely amazing…  so I don’t regret the $20 spent on the new usb 3.0 wireless dongle.

Now I said I thought I had solved it… but as to this point have talked nothing about the failures.  What finally worked is Steam In Home Streaming…  with some hackery.  Steam Streaming has worked fine for steam games, but not every game that I want to play is on steam.  The biggest elephant in the room is games on Origin, but I think I found a workaround for this one.  If you add Dragon Age Inquisition to Steam and attempt to launch it directly, it will fail every single time.  However the workaround seems to be that you add the Origin launcher to steam and then remotely launch it…  and while that window is up you can launch the game you want to play.  The caveat is that you have to completely exit Origin after every game play session or it won’t actually work.  As a result Splashtop Personal is coming in handy anyway as a way of making sure I do not have Origin running before heading into game.  The same thing seems to work with the Battle.net launcher, and the Final Fantasy XIV launcher.  Having steam open those gives you access to the application that you are actually wanting to play over the remote session.  As far as performance goes, there was some strangeness with audio that I ultimately solved by setting both the client and “server” machine to 2 channel 16 bit 48000 hz  audio.  After that I was able to play Dragon Age Inquisition remotely with the exact same frame rate I was seeing sitting at my machine upstairs.  I am guessing the new wireless made all the difference in the world because I could feel zero lag input, and it made for a pretty amazing experience.  As a final thought if you want to play a steam game that does not have a launcher of its own… I have heard having steam open notepad.exe works the same.

The Heavensward Episode

I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the upcoming episode of AggroChat that we will be recording Saturday night and releasing Sunday morning.  After all of us had completed the 2.55 content, we recorded a full spoiler episode where we hashed out out ideas about what just happened and where the game would be heading.  This week we plan on doing the same thing for the 3.0 story content to date as a preparation for whenever we receive 3.1.  We had put off the show in an attempt to get as many people through the 3.0 story as possible, but at this point we figure the statute of limitations is officially up for these spoilers.  I am mainly writing today because we are taking input from the community.  There are several ways you can send us your ideas either through the aggrochat email or the aggrochat twitter account.  Of if you feel more comfortable you can leave your thoughts below.  Our goal is to talk through our own ideas and the ideas that we receive on air Saturday.

There is a lot of stuff that happened between 2.55 and 3.0 and some of it had some pretty major ramifications for the games story.  I’ve been extremely careful not to spoil too many details even with the screenshots that I use.  That said there are things I just need to talk about.  There are characters that we lost along the way, and new characters that we gained… and it is going to be good to finally be able to openly talk about all of this.  The final cinematic for 3.0 sets up a brand new villain that we will likely be facing, and I have so many ideas on what that one is going to mean.  Also there are less spoiler theories as well like this being the expansion of multiple element primals.  If you think of Ravana, he is very clearly a mixture of Fire and Earth.  Bismarck similarly is a mixture of wind and water.  Would that make the next primal a mixture of Lightning and Ice?  I cannot think of any existing summons from other Final Fantasy games that really fits that theme, so I am guessing they would be crafting a brand new one just for FFXIV.  That only covers three primals however and I fully expect that each patch will have its own new one.  So are we going to start seeing new elements, or are they going to tie directly into the new primary enemy that I mentioned above.  Essentially… we have stuff to talk about and would love to have your input.

Of Bird Boyfriends

The AggroChat game club game show is also quickly sneaking up on us, and I think of all of the hosts I am the only one who has yet to touch this months title.  Grace picked Hatoful Boyfriend as the game of the month title, and I have to say at first I had a small bit of trepidation about this title.  If you remember Kodra has gushed about this title numerous times and even streamed a bunch of his gameplay.  I watched some of it… and it seemed like pure madness.  At the core this is just not a me game, largely because there is not death and destruction.  That said I am actually starting to look forward to finally giving this a try, because it DOES seem like pure madness.  I could use a bit of surreal insanity in my life, and some of the possible endings sound so damned bizarre that I have to see them for myself.  I’ve been largely putting off starting however because I thought it might be funny to stream my first moments in the game.  As such I have been trying to find a time when my streaming would not be too much of a nuisance for my wife who is going through the normal “back to school” frustrations.  It seems like tonight however might be an excellent time and right now I am planning on starting my stream at roughly 6 pm CST for anyone who wants to see me attempt to date some “birbs”.  I plan on playing on voice activation so you can get all of my subtle responses and not just the ones that I want coming through over push to talk.  I am not sure exactly what will happen, but I have a mixture of excitement and dread at the same time.