So you’ll be aware that things have fallen by the wayside again. There is a number of reasons behind this, but mostly this is down to not being able to be happy with the plans and future of my stream upgrades that I want to carry out. My health has had a few ups and downs lately with Fibromyalgia kicking my ass in the motivation department. Like I wake up with plans at the weekend and I have a massive fight with myself to get out of bed. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced. I want to get up and be motivated, but my body just refuses to listen. I’ve heard people talk like this in the past, and my ignorance told me that was just laziness, now I get it.
The upgrades to my stream aren’t so much ‘upgrades’ as more… ripping things apart and starting over. I’ve been thinking about this for so long now, but I keep thinking that I’ve put a lot of effort into my overlays, my bots and everything that I can’t bring myself to start tearing it down. But, it needs to be done. I have no real reason for doing it, other than, the stream has bugs in it, which I can live with, and I like the overall layout of my stream. Introducing a second PC at the start of February is something I’ve wanted for a while. Yesterday I built a few special effects which incorporated the use of the second computer, and it confirmed just how unique and powerful my future set-up can and will be. Having a moving camera that tracks my face, and then moves when controlled by the bot, was a game-changer too. So, now all I have to do is bite the bullet, rip it apart, format the PC and start to rebuild.
So the plan is simple. between now, and the end of February, I want to have the basics of the redesigned overlay. I’m still torn between a few ideas, so I guess I need them all done by the end of the month so I can test them out. Then I want to Back up as many resource files I have on my main drive onto storage drives, backing up as much as I can. Then I’ll go through all of the files I have for the current stream layout, and special effects. I’ll need to decide what stays complete and what goes. As well all this, I still need to go through streamer.bot and clean up what I don’t use anymore, or just start afresh. I’ll be introducing Aitum and upgrading to the newest stable OBS available.
So you can maybe appreciate the amount of effort and work required to do what I want to do, it’s a lot of work, but the rewards at the end of it should outweigh the hassles and effort ahead. I plan to take a few days off in early March to just get it done. The idea of a blank canvas is very much appealing. I dreaded the thought of losing everything to some freak accident, a system failure or something of that nature, but recently I’ve been enjoying the idea of that. Forced to start from scratch. Maybe that’s what I need to do. I should look at all the channel point rewards I have, what’s used a lot and what’s not. Remove the bulk that doesn’t get used remove the rest but rebuild the better ideas I’ve had from scratch.
For example, I knew the Matrix thing would be received well. It was a cool thing, but it’s rarely used these days as once you’ve seen it, that’s it. At a push, you may want to see it twice, but no one will keep redeeming it for any reason past one or two times to check out what it is. The Polaroid photo action is one I like and want to keep. It posts to my discord and gives me something to look back on and share. It is as much useful as it is fun.
I’m going to have some difficult decisions to make, but I’ll get there. I think once I get to the point of needing to make the decision, I should just make a snap decision and live with the consequences. Nothing seems too drastic to lose or make a bad call on. I just wish I had a new PC and I could keep what I have as a reference and start all over without having to lose anything. That would be the ideal situation. But it’s not my situation.
I’m going to start using Twitter much more, then, once the new system is in place, I’ll be able to create stories way easier. So there is a lot of work ahead, but a lot of benefit from the hard work too. Keep an eye on twitter for the upgrade progress and other random tweets too.
