Tales from the Danger Zone

 The other night I was playing a game of Competitive mode.  While I don't queue up for Competitive, occasionally I'll accept an invite to join a lower ranked team.  My team was solidly trounced 1:15 as our opponents had several higher skilled players.  On the last round I was the last survivor as I was the only member at the other bombsite - and one of my teammates mocked my crosshair (not the first time it's happened). Unlike the vast majority of "pro" players (and wanna-be pro players), I use the Classic Dynamic crosshair (with a center dot) rather than a static crosshair.  It's also bright pink and thick.  And each of those characteristics is by choice and for a specific reason. For the longest while I was using the default crosshair - why change?  Sure I could copy some pro's settings, but I'm no pro.  But then I started really watching my games (one of the advantages of recording everything) and studying what I was doing.  What I realized is in a

The first community map added to Danger Zone has now been removed from the rotation.  Introduced with the Shattered Web Operation, many players disliked or even hated dz_junglety.  This was made worse because during the Operation the rotation was changed to Jungle, Blacksite, Jungle, Sirocco.  So not only were you twice as likely to play Jungle, but you could get stuck playing Jungle multiple games depending upon the game length. Personally I disliked Jungle because my computer would occasionally lock up when playing the map.  (I had similar problems with Blacksite when Danger Zone was first released, this was later corrected by an update.)  It also took me a long while to "learn" the map so I could quickly navigate and give call-outs.  But once the map was patched and the lock ups stopped occurring, I started to enjoy playing Jungle more. That's not to say Jungle was my favorite map - but I didn't dread having to play it.  In fact, there was much to like about it.  T

On my new computer I use Nvidia's ShadowPlay to record my gameplay - taking advantage of NVENC and getting the full 2560x1440@60 resolution.  Unfortunately it's not perfect - it sometimes refuses to start recording (working with Nvidia support on this) and occasionally it gets the audio inputs mixed up and doesn't record my mic (or the in-game audio).  But I haven't had a corrupt recording yet (knock on wood) and the quality is great. For editing the videos I use ... ffmpeg.  Why ffmpeg instead of a more traditional NLE?  Because it's quick.  Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you editing takes time.  And I'd rather be playing Danger Zone than editing videos. For solo games I need to determine the start and end of the main video then add on the intro & outro.  On the iMac I could do this inside Quicktime Player, but now I needed to find new ways.  The first step is to determine the start & end of the main video, which I do using ffplay via a batch file

I started playing Danger Zone on a Mac, specifically a late 2013 27" iMac with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-4771 (Haswell), an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M and a beautiful 2560x1400 27" screen, or as I referred to it: a 6 year old gaming laptop with a really nice screen.  Unfortunately, it really didn't have the horsepower to drive all 3.6 million pixels - even on lowest quality settings.  But it's what I had, it worked, and so I used it - although I received many comments about how low my fps was. Then AMD announced their Zen 2 processor, which seemed to be like the original Athlon processors - both better and cheaper than mainstream Intel processors.  So I started looking, planning and dreaming.  Ideally I wanted a computer which could play Danger Zone at 1440p @ 144Hz at top quality settings (aka "full pretty") - but I couldn't get good, hard information about the minimum requirements for that goal.  So I fell back on my "thrifty" nature and instead tr

To record my gameplay videos I primarily used the screen recorder built into MacOS QuickTime Player.  Out of the box it will record full screen (2560x1440) to H.264 with AAC audio.  It even has a simple timeline editor built in so I could lop off the pre-game warm-up and the post-game portion or save just a funny moment for the blooper reel. What it couldn't out-of-the-box is record the in-game audio, only my microphone.  For that I needed to install and configure SoundFlower which would intercept the normal default system audio and combine it with my microphone and present it to QuickTime Player as a single audio source.  The disadvantage is when Soundflower was in use it disabled the normal volume controls.  So we had to disable SoundFlower to use the internal speakers and then I'd have to remember to re-enable SoundFlower before recording. Unfortunately, the recording process would occasionally glitch and leave me with a corrupted recording.  I suspect this was due to the re

I originally started playing Danger Zone because my home computer was an iMac.  In the fall of 2018 my son went off to college, taking his Samsung tablet with him - which I was using to play PUBG Mobile, leaving me in Battle Royale withdrawl.  (Un)fortunately, there is no MacOS version of PUBG so I went looking for other options as I couldn't justify spending $$ on a used tablet (much less a new PC) to play PUBG. I tried Fortnite, but I found building to be a very steep learning curve - and you have to be at least a decent builder to have any hope of winning a game.  It wasn't just the ability to press the right keys to create the desired construct, but I couldn't fit "build" into my instinctive "fight or flight" response to an attack - and I wasn't sure I wanted to make the change. Fortunately, Valve decided to both add Danger Zone to CS:GO and make CS:GO free to play - as CS:GO has a MacOS (and Linux) version.  I could get my Battle Royale fix with