THE DUKE DRIVING STREAM

So I finally did another "Special Stream", this time as Duke Nukem trucking, and we raised $4,000 for the PCRF to help kids in Palestine. I really did not intend for it to be like 2 years since the last one with "The Columbo Cooking Stream" (which I will never top) but I've just been busy with lots of stuff. Back around the time of doing The Columbo Cooking Stream I knew I wanted to do something with Duke and I was actually considering something relating to driving since it seems his style, and then I saw folks already read my mind and were suggesting it too, that's when I knew it was a bad idea so I had to do it.

My original idea for this stream was actually for it to be entirely in VR. I was going to tape the sunglasses to the VR headset, I had it all set up for Twitch chat and the donation reads to be present in the passenger seat, everything. You would not believe how many hours I spent troubleshooting various VR issues, I think largely because currently the only headset we have is a Meta Quest 2 and Meta fucking sucks. Ultimately it came down to the issue that there was seemingly no way to capture American Truck Sim in VR without it being choppy as hell, to the point where it WOULD make people sick to watch it.

Every other game worked fine because I could capture the client itself, but American Truck Sim's client in VR mode did the dual-eye thing which couldn't be captured, then the other capture methods didn't work either. Normally you could just capture Steam's VR View window, but it seems the Quest 2 currently has some issue which causes that window to be super choppy. Then there's an OBS plug-in that actually feeds the game right into OBS, but unfortunately it uses the same stuff as Steam's VR View window so it captured just as choppy (with the added bonus of having a memory leak if Steam VR is ever not running). Then there was the desperate hope that Meta's casting stuff could work as capture but that worked even worse and also the casting delay would mean audio sync issues.

So, I went through the possibility of other games that I could drive in VR. I really liked City Car Driving because it had this perfectly funny jank feel for what I was doing, but the Meta Quest 2 struck again as the game just couldn't initialize the VR for it, I spent hours in troubleshooting for this issue but ultimately found out that the headset just wasn't officially supported by the devs and all of the fixes and workarounds to get the VR to initialize I found online just wouldn't work. Plus the missions wanted me to have a clutch anyway and while I actually can drive manual in real life, the cheap steering wheel and pedals I got didn't have a clutch so it wouldn't really have worked anyway. (I later learned the steering wheel DID at least have an L3 button on the back, but, whatever).

I also considered multiple other games in VR, even some kart racers, it seems a lot of driving in VR games revolve around typical racetrack driving like Gran Turismo type stuff, but none of this was the vibe I really wanted, in my mind this was always Duke doing trucking. One possible candidate was Forklift Sim which would be good and funny and still might do someday but it also wouldn't work with the wheel accessory so that was another gear incompatibility issue. You really would not believe how many hours I spent troubleshooting various games to capture in VR and work with the stream, and in pretty much every case, I came EXTREMELY close to having it solved, but it just had one major issue. So I made the difficult decision to scrap VR, which also opened me up to being able to play any game I wanted. (Don't worry, I DO have some VR streams planned for the future which WILL actually work, maybe even Duke will ride again, in the virtual world.)

This meant BeamNG was on the table (which can technically do VR but it seemed too complicated for my small brain for now, too many possible issues with my streaming setup, it's not really officially done yet it seems), which seemed perfect to do the entire stream in because such ridiculous things can happen in BeamNG, but ultimately I found even with mods and stuff I couldn't really find like a clear and simple trucking experience where Duke had a nice clean, steady, simple goal to drive to. I had imagined more actual gameplay happening during the stream, which once again I was wrong about because the outpour of support was so much that we didn't really do much of that at all, which is a good thing that I am of course thankful for. But anyway, I just more than anything really liked the premise of Duke Nukem playing, very specifically, American Truck Sim, it just felt right.

But while playing with BeamNG I discovered the Leap of Death and absolutely knew I had to incorporate that into the stream because it was too funny to me. I liked the idea of being able to suddenly ramp the intensity up to a million versus the rest of the stream being somewhat controlled with the occasional moment of insanity. In my mind the Leap of Death always had "Mad World" playing because of course it did because of course there's gotta be a Gears of War reference somehow. I could have used royalty free sad music but I just knew in my heart, come copyright hell or high water it HAD to be Mad World. I knowingly chose death by copyright.

Thankfully, it seems for the YouTube VOD archive this is only going to result in a copyright CLAIM (they get ad revenue but nothing else changes)! This is great news, because I don't care about ad money or anything on this stream especially, I just was afraid they'd mute the VOD or take the video down or something. This brings us to why I'm uploading the entire stream here to Patreon: Just In Case. Twitch VODs expire after like 60 or 90 days or something, and if they ever destroy the YouTube VOD, the whole stream could be lost to time. Not with me uploading it here in all its original "glory". Truthfully, I should probably do this for every "Special Stream", like Gabriel Gaming and Columbo Cooking.

But there's another reason I'm posting this here on Patreon: to also upload Tasch's amazing VO for the GPS system (which you will find in the attachments of this post), because people expressed wanting it and Tasch told me she wanted it somewhere to be accessible for people. Tasch is really amazing. My original idea was for her to do like, literally one clip, something like "New stop added to route. Rerouting...", because I figured spamming that over and over would be kinda funny, in her classic ability to do incredible commercial/AI/robot/TikTok voices. What she sent me was way beyond my wildest expectations.

First of all, she actually sent me a test with three different shades of robotic; "Sterile", "Too Happy", and "TikTok", all of which perfectly nailed their respective vibes. I went with the first option, because in my mind it was funny for there to be some kind of "straight man" (which is ironic because Tasch is not straight and is a woman HA rimshot) to Duke's insane antics. She had proposed doing more lines and I really thought maybe just more stuff that makes your trip worse for the GPS to say, like "U Turn in 30 ft" or "Detour ahead" etc, I dunno, maybe a few lines, again originally I really only meant to get 1 line. She sent me 79.

79, I know the number very well because I had to struggle with StreamElements' alert box system to get them all in. I knew upon hearing them that I needed to do everything in my power to get them heard as much as possible, which the best way I could imagine was just making them all have a random chance of playing upon every donation. This meant one by one setting up 79 variations of the alert in the system. Did I mention I only got the audio from her like a few hours before the stream? This is totally okay of course -- I am thankful she was able to get it to me at all, she had a lot going on too so I'm surprised she managed to do it, Tasch is amazing, but it did make having to do this somewhat lengthy data entry task a little more tense.

I would say discovering I had to do such a lengthy task so late is a Disastrous Setback, but, thankfully, I managed. Then it turned out I had to do it all -- a SECOND TIME!!! It turned out where I was doing the alerts, in the "Charity Alertbox" was actually just for Twitch's integrated charity system, HAHA OOPS! Side note, I wanted to use Twitch's integrated charity system but it didn't seem to have a way to attach a message to the donations which is like the ENTIRE POINT, so had to use another method, and I went with Tiltify so I could integrate it with the already existing stream alerts system. I guess it kinda didn't, because I also thought it would show the donations in my usual activity feed where I see subs and stuff but that didn't work either so I had to use their separate donation tracker which is just a webpage (which did NOT like being docked into OBS). ANYWAY,

So what I actually needed to do, was do this same task again for all 79 clips, but in the separate little widget for the Tiltify integration in the alert box. But it was so worth it, because Tasch's VO was so amazing and absolutely made the stream. I wanted to incorporate it more but just didn't have the time, like maybe turning on follow alerts and making it play a random line for every follow to make it really insane and spammy, or REALLY what I wanted to do was set up a button that lets the audience just play one at random, but there just wasn't time. I might still do that last one just for all my other streams as a normal part of the channel.

Thankfully, I got all the alert stuff and charity stuff all done with just enough time to spare to get in costume and set up the wheel. Just one little problem. I FORGOT THE FUCKING FINGERLESS GLOVES! FUCK! I only realized it this morning. I have a pair of fucked up fingerless gloves I use for my workouts that I was gonna use to add to to the shitty cosplay. I totally forgot. Damn it. It's alright though, because we still raised 4 grand to help out kids over in Palestine, and that's a damn good thing, baby.

Thank you so much to everyone who supported the stream. I had originally set the goal to $1,000 thinking maybe we'd blow through it after like an hour and then I could bump it up to $2k or something. We blew through that and more so I had to scramble to set up new "Milestones" (which I always planned to just be repeating car accidents and Leaps of Death). I am blown away by the support and so proud to have helped bring some good with one of my dumb little streams. I have some more "Special Streams" planned, with hopefully much more frequency than in another 2 FUCKING YEARS, and I want for all of my future Special Streams to be fundraisers for various causes as well, it just feels right. I always wanted to do some charity streams eventually and the idea of pairing it with Special Streams just makes too much sense.

They won't all necessarily be as a character, and they might not all be as elaborate, but just some unique little ideas I have (Marieke has devised some as well) for streams aside from just playing Arena FPS as we do every Friday. Speaking of that, recently I upped my streaming schedule from my usual 1 day a week (Fraggy Fridays) up to 3 days a week, which has been fun and achieved pretty much everything I wanted it to, but is just definitely not going to be sustainable for me with all the other stuff I have going on, too much other work I need to be doing, mainly my actual VO gigs, but also including making videos. So I'm actually bumping it back DOWN to just Fraggy Fridays.

So if you're on this Patreon for my usual shitpost video stuff and going "Ok cool stream but where's the normal memes you do", well, hopefully I'll be able to put out more of that soon, and is part of why I'm cutting the streaming schedule back down to just Fraggy Fridays (with the occasional bonus stream for funsies). Whatever it is you enjoy from me, be it bad streams, bad memes, or decent VO: thank you so much for all your support. I am able to do it all because you enjoy it. Thank you.