Now a lot of people in the Singapore FGC know I’ve been using this software for nearly a year at this point to do Fighting Game streams. And it has been fully my intention to release it for free from the start. However I put it off for a long time because I wanted it to be “ready for release.”
Some time in the middle of last year I decided I really needed to get going on that. I put in some time and indeed the Software has more or less been ready to be released for something like 4 months. My reasoning for putting it off this time was because when I put it out I wanted to have some tutorials ready when I released it. And I’ve successfully managed to put it off until now since one of my New Year’s resolutions was to get this out the door ASAP. Well mission accomplished I guess.
In any case I started work on it pretty early on when I found out that XSplit allowed you to put SWF objects on the stage. Being a Flash developer I quickly realised the number of possibilities with Flash. I then went to work seeing how I could get external data loaded into an SWF in XSplit. I didn’t want to develop a pure XSplit plugin. Because I found the interface for managing data with XSplit (and indeed most of the interface of XSplit) kinda clunky.
I made a rough prototype in Qt which happened to work. And since it worked I didn’t really need to work on it much more particularly since most of the heavy lifting was done in Flash. Hence me putting off releasing it until I felt it was ready.
Now that it’s out, hopefully I’ll be better about updating it. As it stands it’s actually not that much more functional than the initial prototype. And there are a bunch of things I’d like to do with it.
Also oddly enough I started developing this system before Jaxel released his XSplit Panel Writer program on 8WayRun. I even have proof. This is from an event where I believe I first used my software to stream an event. Oddly enough on the same date that I believe the XSplit Panel Writer software was released. I do remember being mildly bemused that we’d essentially done the same thing except went about it in different ways when he did release it.
That said, I don’t think we’re necessarily in competition. Flash does take more CPU power to render and it does to a certain extent reduce the amount of sheer CPU power you can pump into your making your video quality better. That said, if you happen to be already using any of the built in XSplit SWF plugins it won’t take much more CPU if at all. Images are quicker to render and that is what Jaxel’s software does. However, I am slightly lazy and I do like the fact I don’t have to switch scenes to update my scoreboards. Creating SWF files is also considerably more effort.
Furthermore, Jaxel is welcome to implement support for my SWF overlays in his software as well. It wouldn’t be too hard I would think.
Now in case you’re not here to hear me ramble about how my software came into being, here is where you can download it!
