Update #8 - The Move (Patreon)

Patreon moved its servers over to the UK, so if something went weird with your payment stuff that's probably why. A lot of American banks got declined which hit some people pretty hard, but it turns out most people backing me here aren't American so it wasn't a huge blow. This post will be set to public just in case someone is locked out of the page and then gets concerned about their bank getting a fraud charge. If that happened to you, it wasn't just you. Patreon should've emailed you, but we all get lots of emails.

Anyways, I'm on the verge of moving and doing all the fun back and forth trips. As for the next video, I have some footage from a few shorter games that I could use for an upcoming video though I'm not sure which I'll end up going with. I'm leaning towards a game called Dujanah since it can be completed in a bit over two hours, and would make for a very short video, but it could serve as something to make the "moving upload gap" smaller. I've learned that though my move is being pushed forward, the internet utilities to the place are still being "finished up".

The bad news: it means my PC could be without internet for a few weeks.

The good news: I'll probably be using fiber internet.

Currently, my internet speeds are around 60Mbps, so on a really good day I download things at around 6 or 7 Megabytes a second. Remembering the dark days of dial-up and also "high speed" kilobyte connections this is still pretty nice. The only thing that's awful is that my provider's upload speeds are significantly slower than the download speeds. Since I output my videos in high bitrates to try and diminish the effects of YouTube compression, this translates into the source file being several gigabytes (a few hundred MB after YouTube has its way with it). The filesize means that I usually end up leaving my PC on overnight to upload the video, since it can take anywhere from an hour and a half (a short video, a good day) to six or seven hours (a long video, a very bad day) to get it uploaded. Add YouTube processing time on top of that. Those days where my video was a half hour or so late was due to just that: the upload speeds.

While that stuff is mainly inconvenient, where it's really a problem is when something goes wrong. In the case of Sunless Sea, for some reason the audio went out of sync when it went on YouTube though the project file and rendered video was completely fine. A fault on YouTube's end. I ended up adding on about a minute or two on to it and uploading it the next day because the process for reuploading it would be several hours and would end up being in a really weird time in the dead of night American hours. I generally like uploading videos around the same time so that most people who are following the channel that closely will know if there's gonna be a video that day rather than upload them whenever I'm done. So if something breaks on Youtube, or I notice a glaring rendering error or something on YouTube, it means either having a delay or living with the error, which are both nightmares to me.

This is where experiencing Fiber Internet™  could be a game changer. With the CPU I got last fall, the time it takes to render a video is roughly equivalent to the video length. I know a few other YouTube people with fiber, and when they tell me that their 40 minute 1440p video uploaded in 5 minutes it sounds like witchcraft to me. This could give me hours I didn't have before to check things over for problems or tweak the video more if I could have a new video build rendered and uploaded so quickly. The price isn't much more than the internet I've been using, so I'm probably going to go for it.

I've had people asking me about streaming again, and I'll likely do it a bit when the good internet is around. I don't plan on having weekly streams or anything that frequently scheduled, since I think I find it more fun as a "once in a while" kind of thing. Plus it'd be pretty shitty of me to get money to make YouTube videos and then morph into a dedicated streamer. 

In the meanwhile, I might be slower to answer any emails. I've also never made a post on Patreon mobile, so I don't know how awkward that'll be to use. There's a possibility there might not be a post in this upcoming week. I'm aware that not everyone reads these posts weekly, but I try my best to keep people enough in the loop that they can decide to click over and see what's currently happening. So if you're reading this between the 10th and 17th of August it means that I'm buried in boxes or on a truck somewhere. 

I'm also on the hunt for a new monitor, since my current decade old ASUS one is going to become the new "second monitor for work". I'm not particularly interested in 4K gaming or anything crazy, but if you have any recommends let me know.

Thank for for your support! I'll return with some progress on the office.