Shivoa

@rorie: So this seems related - the next video in that series (Clue Crew: Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge - Part 2) is broken in the RSS feed. It has added itself twice (although reading the live feed, the first one may have now deleted itself so is only visible in RSS readers which have cached the previous entry) and both times it just links to https://www.giantbomb.com/chat/ (where the stream was) rather than to the archive video (which people looking for the video after the fact will want to be directed).

I think there's some funky behaviour in the RSS feed (I'm subscribed to Premium > All videos > HD but browsing some others I'm also seeing duplicate/bad links in the other feeds) around putting up live videos & their archives that could do with both:

- thinking about what should happen (do people who follow the RSS feed want a "live" notification of when new shows are going live with the chat link? When most RSS reader apps only check once an hour, if that, for new items and so will not notify until the show is already well in progress; are the premium feeds also listing duplicate videos because there's a free variant because the RSS isn't aware of the new system that merges all that stuff into a single page)?

- looking at if what is decided as the right way to handle stuff is actually working as intended (there are two identical links to the Bombcast video each week, some of these live shows post twice and, as has happened with the latest Clue Crew, sometimes they just completely fail to post a link to the archive of a stream).

Getting unable to load video (endless spinner), only for the HTML5 player, & only when the video file is on the GB rather than Gamespot CDN.

gamespot-vh.akamaihd.net returns an index_0_av.m3u8 file fine (and goes on to grab the segments, plays the video etc, exactly as expected) but giantbomb-vh.akamaihd.net is returning 403 Forbidden so stalling.

eg It's 403ing for file https://giantbomb-vh.akamaihd.net/i/2019/06/08/tr_starwars_20190608_,8000,.mp4.csmil/index_0_av.m3u8?null=0 (endlessly looping the request) after returning a https://giantbomb-vh.akamaihd.net/i/2019/06/08/tr_starwars_20190608_,8000,.mp4.csmil/master.m3u8?hdnts=st=1560020506~exp=1560106906~acl=**~id=3006~hmac=046c3274cc7a75ada32d6f53cb87fe9f3559288a549927b17861bf1bd5b250cd just fine (200). Was working yesterday, not working today. Maybe a config issue on my end but also I have no idea why I'm getting 403s.

Have tried logging out & back in to try and clear my cookies, flushing site data etc. Not sure what I should try next.

Edit: Yep, my end [Firefox Developer Edition on Windows 10 - the 68.0b8 patch happened about the same time as this issue started but also my FF crashed so could have corrupted some local data?] but I'm not sure what. Tried with no Extensions & still getting the same 403s. Tried from a different browser & it worked fine so seems like something is misconfigured with my browser somewhere.

Huh! I have to assume that a lot of this is popular clubs are ranked higher so people looking to join any club fill up slots on popular clubs, right? With 250 players active right now and almost 1600 showing as active in the last day, it at least seems like everyone who got in is busy enjoying the game.

So much for increasing the limits from 1000 to 2000 players this Horizon, seems to not really do that much to let everyone find each other based on being fans of a community (I saw a popular Forza streamer set up four clubs from the very start and before even the Tuesday wide release, I think they were all basically full).

Can't believe none of you pick the stock Peel P50. Such a great car for completing all those speed traps and driving between events!

Every TV has a different max luminance (how bright white is) and not only is it different per model but also different depending on the picture fed in (so some TVs can sustain a static high brightness, others can only do lots of white in a burst that rapidly dims, some can do small areas of extreme brightness but a full white screen is far less bright per pixel). The game has to tweak the curves (the input linear value vs the output value on the gamma curve) to best fit the brightness level your TV can manage for HDR content.

Some HDR TVs can make things look significantly brighter than what we consider normal white (what we would expect the brightness of a piece of paper to look like) and so they need to be tweaked to make things look right where something that's moderately lit and white looks right but also uses the full range of the display and so looking at something extremely bright uses as much brightness as the display can manage. But the cheapest HDR10-compatible TVs are basically no brighter than older TVs so you wouldn't want to use the same settings there as it would mean moderately lit stuff would look very dark (as there is no headroom for extremely bright things - the backlight is incapable of getting that bright). The VESA standards for various displays makes this pretty clear: the bottom rung of "HDR" displays are basically no brighter than good old screens (barely better than "average" old screens as sustaining that brightness full-screen) and so a game on those screens should actually basically look like SDR (because there's no potential for showing significantly brighter stuff). Configuration inside the game has to do that and you do it via some tweaks that are subtly different to the contrast setting classically used to tweak the gamma curve in games (which doesn't significantly move the gamma white-point).

I know the demo had a weird thing where only the movie file audio would play. So the demo started with dev logo audio, then no music for the start menu (as that plays from the soundtrack file), then the demo starts with some of the sounds but not the voice over welcoming you and explaining Horizon (as the intro video has some sounds baked in but the voice over isn't baked, presumably as they've got multi-lingual recordings for different versions), and cuts to in-engine for the actual game and it's totally silent (as there's no video file playing). Playground said it was fixed almost as soon as the bug was discussed on the forums (something about changing the "disable all enhancements" setting in Windows - I had the bug and that setting did nothing to fix it).

What I find really interesting is that the same bug seemed to happen for a small percentage of Xbox users. Like, this is something really weird and glitchy deep inside the game that they can't even guarantee it doesn't happen on totally fixed hardware where they know exactly what drivers are running etc. On top of the audio stutter and static issues reported (which also got reported on some Xboxes so not a PC issue). It's such a strange issue to have considering this is presumably an evolution of the same engine that ran FM7 (and was fixed over a year of patching FH3).

[At least my understanding from poking at the interface; not joined a Team yet myself as I'm not really into competitive racing in open world course layouts.] So Horizon Teams are part of the (competitive) multiplayer mode. Basically the PvP leagues are done on 6vs6 races and you can roster from these small 25-player teams for that.

The Club is the big group you join to get more than your friends list onto the leaderboards and rivals stuff (and also maybe for doing the co-op/online stuff together but it hardly seems to push that vs the lobby of randoms you auto-join). Each Team is a small group that want to do PvP races together in the Horizon 4 ranked online stuff.

As mentioned in the video review: You're looking for the Horizon Club called [BOMB] Giant Bomb. This is not a Horizon Team. The cap is 2000 members. Yes, both clubs and teams turn up in the Xbox Club interface, it's the one with the big limit and the shield (club) icon, not the H icon.

They're tied to the cross-Xbox Club system now (while the FH3 ones were in-game clubs which were slightly different to the Xbox Club platform that you can look at anywhere, not just inside the game) so probably aren't porting over the previous clubs from FH3. If you can't find the current club from the Xbox dash (or Windows 10 app) then it's not a FH4 club and someone will need to start a new one.

This "waiting for the non-$100/non-streamer/non-review release" is such a weird idle game. After the FH3 bugs only popped up a few days after reviews went up (some reviews saying that early stuttering on PC was completely fixed by a late driver update - one that didn't actually fix it for the majority of PC players), I'm extremely happy to wait for this to be properly tested by the $100 crew before thinking about playing it (Hello Game Pass!)