Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory - First Look - 2 of 2 - Shadow Server experiment
0This is our second day as a Troubleshooter in the Alpha Complex. What surprises does the Computer have in store for us today? What treason will we commit? What treason will we expose? Let's find out as we continue our first look at Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory.
This first look was played, recorded, and edited on a Shadow server. While the server is powerful enough for this game (only 12gb of ram means that many new games won't play with super high settings) we ran into problems with the recording. The headset I'm using has a pretty bad mic (corsair H270 wireless headset) that is made worse by connecting over the internet with latency, very occasional instability, and more occasional lag spikes. The pass through of the microphone completely fails for the last 10 minutes of the second episode even though it did not lose the headset completely. The sound continued to play in the speakers on my end. I had to deal with lag spikes for controlling the game as well. Even typing this description has been a real pain with frequent pauses caused by lag and other issues (the "u" in pauses repeated itself about 10 times). I was hoping that the recording at the source of the game, on the shadow server itself would mitigate some of the issues with lag spikes and latency but i'm not happy with the end result. My conclusion at the end of this experiment is that Shadow gaming is barely acceptable for some games in which latency won't matter much. Turn-based games would be the best case scenario with driving games (they feature one in their advertising) and first person shooters/sims being the worst. Anything that needs more than a keyboard and mouse passed through the connection to the server is also going to cause problems, even with something as basic as a microphone. Trying to record a game being played on the Shadow server itself is almost do-able but isn't ready yet mostly due to problems with the mic being passed through. You could record the mic on the local computer and then sync up that sound with the game in post if you absolutely needed too. But that is probably the only way you will get acceptable sound and setting up recording software on both computers at the same time might be problematic. I will probably try something like that because, frankly I have the time while on vacation and don't really have a lot of other options. But i'm not sure it is something I would recommend.