Guide: How To Play Section 8 Multiplayer

Section 8 is a new team based FPS game reminiscent of the old BF2 gameplay mixed with a little Halo. It invloves a lot of teamwork, and many funky weapons, tools and gadgets. I am not gonna spend time describing the story or anything else dealing with the singleplayer. This is an all out, exhaustive multiplayer guide.

Once you load up the game the first thing you should do is setup your graphics and most importantly, your keybinds. Once you are done, click on the “Dropship” option in the main menu to be sent to the loadout selection screen. This is where you “create” your player, much like you kit him out in BF2142, but in much more depth. I would suggest you look through the pre-made classes, but once you are done, click on one and lets get customizing. Once you click on a loadout, this is what you will see:

You will notice several things. It lists Weapons, Equipment and Modules as cusotmizable things and shows them all on the paperdoll on the right.

Before I get into the customization I am going to explain several basic things. First, you can not only jump but fly with jump jets for a very short time before they need to recharge by holding down your jump button. Second, you can use “Lock-On” by aiming at an enemy (with zoom) and pressing your use button. This will lock your reticule on them for a very short time, making sure all bullets hit. It is basically an aimbot built into the game. It might sound cheap, but there are many ways to counter it which will be discussed later on in this guide.

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XFIRE: New Broadcasting Method

Well it seems that the people at Xfire have decided to finally swith broadcasting providers! They are now in a partnership with Livestream and provide higher quality video with no viewer limit, and (hopefully) much less lag for the broadcaster. I am going to be embedding my own Xfire broadcast at some point later today as well as updating the  broadcasting guide to reflect these changes. Woot!

On a sidenote, Section 8 open beta is well… open. Go try it out.

The MMO Wars

With the upcoming release of Aion, Champions Online, SWTOR and many other great looking MMOs, I thought I’d comment on the whole MMO situation going on.

For several release cycles now, MMOs have been released after great hype, great promises, great ambitions but ended up as incredible flops. To count a few: AOC, WAR, Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London, Darkfall. There are always going to be people that think that these were great games. Sadly those are fanbois, who are about as objective as FOX news.

The MMO industry has had an incredible drop in quality after WoW released and claimed the throne of MMOs, and the listed flops serve to prove that. There is a reason for that too. There are two mentalities that have dominated the developers for these flops: “Let’s try to steal some WoW players!” or “Let’s be completely different than WoW!”. Both are catastrophically stupid. I will try to break the flop reason down and provide some discussion for each.

Let’s be like WoW

The people who already play WoW will not want to switch to a WoW clone based on PvE and raiding. Unfortunately the WAR developers seemed to have trodden knee deep in this mistake. Not only does WAR try to immitate WoW with the gear grind and dungeon progression that they have implemented, they also marketed WAR as a RvR game. DAoC was a RvR game. WAR is not. Mythic did not grasp what made DAoC special in that aspect and sprinkled forced PvE for great gear into the PvP, much like they did with the TOA expansion for DAoC, which many people say was the reason they stopped playing.

The other extreme is being completely different than WoW and abandoning “standard” MMO guidlines. For example Darkfall or Tabula Rasa. They tried completely different systems of gameplay. TR tried mixing in FPS gaming within an MMO along with the capturable mission hubs. DF tried a skill based system and Morrorwind-like gameplay. Both seemed great on paper, but paper is a flimsy thing that turns seethrough when you rub grease on it (yes I stole this shamelessly). The FPS portion of TR was more of an annoyance than a feature, the capturable mission hubs were supposed to bring players together but just annoyed them because they could not quest in peace. DF just seems… off… with its fighting.

What MMOs need to do is copy the good parts of the competition, discard the bad and add in their personal touch. Champions Online has the “joing scenario from anywhere” mechanic from WAR as well as the PQ system and AION has taken some of the better parts of WoW gameplay. Copying good ideas is why WoW has stayed so incredibly popular. It has interated all the good ideas that have come up in other MMOs and modified them to fit into WoW. If another MMO manages to do this then it will be on a good path to success.

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How to Broadcast Live Gameplay

So, you don’t just want to record and post videos of your gameplay but broadcast it live? That is very much possible.

I will be discussing 4 different ways to do so, each having upsides and downsides. Before I do that however, you will need to do some basic things.

First of all, you will need to know your upload bandwidth. To do this, go here and test your connection. If you are in the US, make sure you select a location on the OTHER SIDE of the country. If you are not in America, select a location in the US. From your recorded upload bandwidth, take roughly 75-80% and write it down somewhere. This is the bitrate at which you will want to set your broadcast.

Secondly, you have to know your PC’s power and select a broadcasting method accordingly.

That is it for starters, read below for the individual breakdown of each service.
ALL SERVICES LISTED BELOW ARE FREE

Xfire

This method is fairly simple. Download Xfire from here and set it up to broadcast live under Tools -> Options -> Broadcast. Even if you don’t use it for broadcasting, Xfire is a great gamer networking tool.

Set the quality to highest and decide if you want to stream audio or not. Test your stream afterwords to make sure you are not overloading your connection.

PRO

- Easy to set up and use
- Now uses Livestream instead of Dyyno
- Chat with viewers while gaming
- Very little FPS impact
- Personal broadcasting page (same URL every time you broadcast)

CON

- Does not support all games
- May cause high lag in multiplayer games
- No “On Demand” or “Auto Pilot” features avilable, unlike regular Livestream
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How To Encode High Quality Gameplay Videos

So, you’ve seen all those fancy game videos on YouTube, downloaded WoW videos or other MMO gameplay and enjoyed the high quality ones? Well you can do it too!

I am going to provide a step by step guide for creating high quality, full screen resolution (1680×1050 and above is very possible, although half size should be used on slower computers) videos of any game you wish to apply this guide to really. It is highly recommended to apply this guide to decently powerful systems of a dual core or more.

We will be using MeGui as our main encoding UI and x264 as our codec. AAC will be used for sound. First of all, you will need the following:

Sony Vegas (optional, any video editor will do, except Movie Maker)
Fraps (you need the full version to record more than 30 seconds)
MeGui
NeroAACEnc
AVISynth
Lagarith Lossless Video Codec
Time

Order of Installation

1. Fraps
2. AVISynth
3. Video Editor of choice
4. Lagarith Lossless Video Codec
5. MeGui
6. NeroAACEnc

First Steps: Setting Up

The first things you should do after you download and install all this software is to setup Fraps the way you want it. For most games, it is now very possible to record at full screen with sound at 30fps, with no lag, on a decent computer (Dual Core or above). These are also the suggested settings. Make sure, if possible, that your recording directory is on a different PHYSICAL Hard Disc than the game. This allows for much smoother gameplay while recording. Recording at Half Size is also decent, if you have a weaker machine and it will speed up encoding somewhat because you can choose lower quality settings but will, obviously, look worse than full screen videos.

Then, open your task manager, right click on fraps.exe and click on “Set Affinity”. Make sure that Fraps is running on at least 2 cores, as shown in the following screenshot. Once you start your game, alt+tab out of it, and, if you have a quad core), set it to run on the two cores that Fraps is NOT running on. Otherwise it should already be running on both cores most of the time. This way you get no interference and both  the game and FRAPS can run at maximum efficiency.

How to make sure FRAPS is running on multiple cores.

Now that we have Fraps all set up, let us take a look at MeGui. It comes with a load of different codecs for both video and sound. The first thing you should do when you run it is update (Options -> Update). This will download the newest version of all codecs as well as MeGui core files. Next, you need to add NeroAACEnc to the list of encoders for MeGui so we can encode the game sound (if you want to keep it). Go to Options -> Settings -> Audio and search for where you installed NeroAACEnc. That is it for now, you can close MeGui.

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AVP is coming…

So, the new AVP has been announced. Shit. Is. BRUTAL! Check out the trailer here.

How to play MW4

Well, considering MW4 is a pretty damn old game, there have been many updates and patches etc. First of all, MW4 and all the XP packs will soon be released for free my MekTek.net. If you have discs lying around somewhere you can use those too I suppose, but the DL version will not have the CD protection and you can play without the disc in the drive. In the meantime, you can download all the updates and MekPacks, which include a ridiculous amounts of new mechs and weapons. You can also get the Co-Op mod for Mercenaries and HD Texture pack.

Get the patches and MekPaks here.
Get the HD patch for Mercenaries here.
Get the Co-Op mod here.
If you have all the XP packs you can get an updated Co-Op mod here.

After you are done, make sure to run the .reg file in your MW4: Mercs directory in order to change the multiplayer server to the one hosted by MekTek rather than the one by Micro$oft.

HUGE FUCKING ROBOTS!!!

Well, haven’t posted anything in a while. That would be because I was in hospital with my mouth hurting like a bitch. Wisdom teeth pulled, then got sick. Guy broke a crown on a nearby tooth as well. Lots of BS happened. Anywho!

Ok, so. In honor of the new Mech Warrior that was announced I decided to dig up my MW4: Mercs and start messing around. Bunch of friends did too so now we’re messing around on Hamachi all day making mechs and seeing who can come up with the most awesome combination for each weight class.

Also, in case you have been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks:

Don’t mess with the Fett!!!

What if Boba Fett had Force powers and a Lightsaber? Hmm?

GTA 4 Stunts

Here are some of the videos that I have created for GTA 4 so far:

GTA 4 Stunts/Crashes/WTF Moments Compilation 1

GTA 4 Stunts/Crashes/WTF Moments Compilation 2

GTA 4 Stunts/Crashes/WTF Moments Compilation 3

GTA 4 “Tank” Rampage Part 1

GTA 4 “Tank” Rampage Part 1