Weekly Update: I did it. (Patreon)

Hey Saucy Ones,

We had a doozy of a day yesterday so I'm writing this Wednesday morning just before you read it.

I ended up finishing the Fallout: New Vegas CA Compliance challenge way ahead of schedule despite some pretty intense setbacks, one of which being my computer just stopped having any and all sound on Monday and I had to run a full system restore. Here's an artist's rendition of how that went down from the Discord:

Well one system restore later and my PC has sound again like nothing happened. Apparently I am not nearly the first or only person that this has happened to after installing a recent Window 11 update. Screw me for wanting to keep up to date on builds for security reasons, right? It's been a bumpy road overall though: It seems I'm having some sort of hardware failure in my mic setup based on some persistent crackling in my audio that went away when we switched to any other mic, the Absolute HELL that was attempting to fight Legate Lanius on very hard.

We all found out on stream just how much FNV lets the Legion's coolest OC-donut-steel straight up actually goddamn cheat if you don't speech check him. I'm talking like Legion Veterans that are literally floating in the sky with assault carbines and Lanius straight up going "nu-uh" when you try to cripple any body part among a lot of other BS. I kid you not sometimes the game will just not let you take your VATS action and instead the player character just stands still for 30 seconds while Lanius gets to kill you and your companions or sometimes when we finally did kill Lanius and we were mopping up the Praetorian Guards and Veterans the game went 'nu-uh' again and just crashed. According to my death tally from the stream I died over 50 times in that fight figuring out how to get around all of his BS.

Then there was finding out it's literally impossible to win a fight against the NCR rangers in the Wild Card ending on very hard because the game forces you into a specific position for the cutscene/final conversation with general Oliver and the rangers will kill you inside of a second even with high endurance, a fully repaired set of power armor, and enough Med-X to kill super mutant behemoth in your system. We ended up settling for a speech check that I could just barely make with a level up. Whatever, after an eight and a half hour marathon stream we got to the end.

And if that wasn't enough, I think I forgot to hit 'apply' when configuring my OBS settings after reinstalling because while I clearly remember telling OBS to split my clips every 10 minutes I got myself a single, monstrous mp4 file that lags my computer any time I try to edit it. At least it saved okay.

But all these problems already have solutions.

If it wasn't obvious already, I did a system restore and all the problems with my computer are gone. It's good as new.

I'll probably rummage through my cables today or tomorrow and look for a replacement for my mic because I've actually had this issue with sporadic mic crackle before and the fix is just to replace the USB-A-to-C cable connecting my audio interface to my computer. Apparently Scarlett Solos just like to eat USB cables. If that doesn't work I replace the XLR cable, and if that doesn't work I have more than enough time to order a brand new microphone, but I don't think it'll come to that.

The big, hard to work with file that is all of yesterday's stream? Well I've re-downloaded Adobe Premier and I'm currently conforming the file now, it's big so it takes a couple hours. I'm gonna just make a bunch of subsequences with names like they'd have if they were a bunch of small clips I'd normally label after the fact and, export, let media encoder do it's thing. I already have all the other clips from previous streams organized and labelled so once those are done everything goes into a new premier project and I can start proxying everything while I start writing the script. My PC might be on for a couple days straight as that's 200+ proxies I've gotta encode, but everything'll be good to go well before I'm even ready to record. I'll also be downloading the twitch VOD of the stream as a safety backup since things were so screwy.

As for all that Lanius and FNV engame stuff, well we did beat it and I've got the cheevos to show for it.

I'm usually a full NCR man or occasionally a House run so these were new for me.

According to me Steam stats this playthrough only took me 37 hours compared to the 90 that Fallout 4 took me. I was fully expecting to need to next two weeks to get this playthrough done Even with all these setbacks I'm still two weeks ahead of schedule now, hell even if it's worst case scenario and I need to order a new mic I've got a solid week of buffer time and it's not like I can't write the script while I wait. I seriously doubt replacing the cable won't fix things though as this seems to be a common problem.

In closing,

It's been a stressful couple of days, but also a couple of days that leave me with a lot of hope that I'll get things done with time to spare. I told you all I'd talk more about stuff with the channel later this year and I'll keep me word on that once this video's done and I've had a chance to collect my thoughts and rest.

Stay Saucy Everyone.