Finally doing some work again.

    Ok, so today I am finally doing some work on a few things again. Since I started my website, I had been working on it for two weeks to make it look the way it is right now. This was somewhere in January 2012 or even before that, now it's almost May for fucks sake. Ever since, I have just been too lazy, depressed and not feeling motivated to do anything. It's time to move on and get some work done.
    It's not just the website I should be working on, a lot more is involved in getting things the way I intended. I want to be broadcasting LIVE again on Justin TV this time (used to be on UStream when I still had the poker club). This needs setting up the JTV main page and profile on which I did a lot of work already, but still not quite finished it yet. The broadcast chat on JTV comes with chat next to it and I want a chat bot to help me out moderate the chat and offer extra functionality. So I am using mIRC to accomplish that and set up my Pixy_bot. When broadcasting live, there is a lot of work to do and chat to watch at the same time. It's hard to be able to follow everything that's going on while trying to make the broadcast look good and be busy with that. Many people don't even have a clue how hard it actually can be and how much work is involved to provide a quality cast. All they see is the result, while I am having 3 monitors to watch and multiple windows open at the same time to make it all possible. Having to follow the chat is of course very important. One of the downsides however is the fact that the chat is not shown within the broadcast. All too often I find it a shame that the chat doesn't show in a recording. The chat is usually part of the cast and not being able to see it back when looking at archived material makes me sad.

    To be able to broadcast on Justin TV in this case, it needs software to stream. For that I am using XSplit and that needs setting up things as well. I need to add so called 'scenes' to determine what is being shown in the actual stream output. I will be working on a nice intro and outro and several other scenes that may be used to show in the broadcast. One of those things will be a script which I will use within mIRC to make it possible to show chat overlay in XSplit. Thus solving the problem of not recording the chat with the actual cast. Then there is the music and possible video with it. For this I am using VLC and setting a region for the possible video to show. I have to pick the music I want everyone to hear, looking up links to embed in VLC. This means I am very busy creating a playlist when doing requests, making sure you all see and hear what you like. Of course a lot of work can be done prior to the cast, but I still have to configure VLC some more to make it easier on me to do so. Eventually I would like to create my own skin (looks) for VLC and only create buttons for what I actually use when broadcasting. This is a lot of work however, but that's what I love so much about VLC being open source software.
    I am going to run a server for Minecraft (a sandbox game) again as well, just because I love the game so much and I used to have a server running before having great fun with some friends, but this time it will be much more complicated. The previous server was just plain Vanilla, meaning nothing extra was added to the game. This time the server will use quite a lot of mods and my intention is to add Bukkit plugins and functionality to the game as well. This is quite hard, because some programming is involved setting up permissions and implementations for the Bukkit servers. Mods and plugins seem to bite eachother, so it needs ported versions of the mods to be able to work with Bukkit. I will however eventually try to offer all the best for Minecraft thats out there. Minecraft also has chat within the game and this is why I am using mIRC as well. I am looking for a way to include the chat from JTV in Minecraft chat when broadcasting the game. I have been fooling around with it before and managed to make it possible, but it's not optimal yet. However, I did find a nice mod that should work just fine, although it's still in a beta version and might contain a few bugs. Having the broadcast chat show within the game not only makes it easier to follow everything, but also creates more of a community feeling. At least that's what I hope for.
    So yeah, Minecraft helped me out getting motivated again. Having worked several days on it now also makes me want to work on all those other things again. So today I will be doing more work on setting up XSplit for the broadcast, mIRC for the chat bot and overlay in XSplit and more work on the Minecraft server. Since I want to start broadcasting on May 1st and also do a grand opening of the server, at least all that should work fine. Of course I am by far done with it all, because there is still a lot of work to be done on the website. Creating menus, picture showcases, YouTube menu, info section and whatever else. But now that I got myself going again, I don't need to feel disappointed anymore or shitty about myself for not doing anything, because I know it will all get done eventually :-)