Pyrion

I wonder if Camtasia itself is just trying too hard (or not enough) to compress the video such that it's forcing the game's framerate down lower than the recording setting (which is what this is starting to sound like) due to either wasting too much CPU to compress the video (and forcing the game to step down its framerate further) or not compressing it much at all and thus lagging the hard drive to the point that, again, the game has to slow down. What compression settings are you using in Camtasia, if any? Cuz FRAPS doesn't have anything along those lines, its codec does just barely enough compression on its end to manage a realtime recording but spits out 4GB AVI chunks that can contain anywhere from 10-20 minutes of video to a few minutes at most depending on what's being recorded.

Yeah, pay the licensing fee, get FRAPS, record at your leisure. Although it'll still limit your framerate, at 60fps it's not really all that noticeable. Even 30fps is fine for most games (although not all...) Thing to bear in mind that two of the key factors for recording video at high framerates are the resolution you're recording at, and the speed of your hard drive. Not necessarily capacity (although that helps too), both the sequential write speed of your hard drive and the spindle rotation speed are huge factors. All of my AudioSurf recordings are recorded at 60fps (previously 960x600 (1920x1200 half-res), and now 1280x720) on a 150GB WD Raptor, preferred over a 1TB WD Caviar Black, for precisely these reasons. EDIT: What also helps, is to record to a drive that doesn't also contain the game you're playing (as loading game resources will interrupt the recording) or the Windows pagefile (as any activity there will also interrupt the recording).

Randall Munroe puts it all in perspective.

It just irritates the hell out of me how panicky people get when the terms "nuclear" or "radiation" are used in a news article that it almost instantly elicits a comparison to Hiroshima or Chernobyl. Often with the obligatory mushroom cloud photo. The news media is almost certainly unreliable here because inciting panic is a great way to boost ratings, little things like facts be damned. Yes, I know, people are stupid (the pearl harbor/global warming pics proved that easily enough), but there's no excuse for it anymore.

In terms of actual radiation release, this so far doesn't come anywhere close to being comparable to Chernobyl. We're talking the difference between 300 Sv/hour and 0.4 Sv/hr (400 mSv, at its highest on Tuesday (EDIT: And this is assuming they actually mean millisieverts and not microsieverts - the comparison gets even more absurd if they mean microsieverts). Best part is that the inverse square law applies, so the farther away you get from the source, the actual exposure drops off dramatically. Again, for this to be "worse than Chernobyl," the same sort of circumstances and (lack of) precautionary measures from Chernobyl would have to apply as well.

Another explosion, unit 2.

Meltdowns don't create fallout. The ultimate consequence of a total meltdown is the molten radioactive slag hitting the underground water table. Chernobyl isn't an exception to the rule either - Chernobyl was in fact a partial meltdown (as was TMI), but its graphite core was exposed to the outside air and ignited. Something similar would have to happen here for the above map to have some semblance of relevance.

Just get another wireless router (set to router mode rather than gateway mode), put it in the switch's place and use the same SSID but a different channel (like say for instance if the main router is using channel 6, use channel 1 or 11 for the new router) just to rule out the two possibly interfering with eachother if you put a device between the two.

Also, this makes for a good read on the subject of Steam and indie developers.

And once you recoup the production costs, everything past that point, regardless of Valve's cut, is pure profit, and you stand to make more of it per sale than you would if each sale is divided up amongst multiple middlemen. Plus you don't have to administer the distribution system, Valve (and their many hosting partners) does that for you as part of the deal.

There's nothing stopping you from doing it, except of course that you likely will gain nowhere near the level of product exposure that you would via signing with a well-known and established online distribution system like Steam. You'd have to do all the advertising yourself, basically.

Part of the problem is that in order for the digital distribution-only model to work, you either have to create the system itself or sign with an online publisher (Valve/Steam, Stardock/Impulse, IGN/D2D, etc) and tie your game to that particular service almost exclusively. It's more an antitrust concern than anything else, particularly in the case of Valve's "SteamWorks" API wherein all the functionality of handling things like DLC, game updates, achievements, etc., are provided to game developers for the low price of absolutely free but with the caveat that using it means the game absolutely has to use Steam. So you end up with brick-and-mortars and Steam's direct competitors having to sell licenses and downloads for a game that would still require their competitor's service to install and use it anyway, which leads to the obvious implication that for each license sold in those alternative channels, the developer loses money equivalent to the difference they'd make if they just signed with Steam exclusively.

"Lost profits." I hate that phrase. One game pirated is one sale that likely will never happen so long as the game costs money in the first place, so why bother trying to appease the pirates by dropping the price? Fuck them. Set the price where you want it, drop the copy protection schemes, stop fucking over your paying customers, and ignore the pirates cuz they aren't gonna give you their money anyway. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/03/pc-game-developer-has-radical-message-ignore-the-pirates.ars

There's actually a semi-hidden (at least for anyone who plays through this game "normally") Really Bad ending for someone who plays a psychopath out to kill everyone. That, incidentally, was my first playthrough and I haven't picked up the game since.