Shouldn't be a problem ! Just prepare that you "might" end up practicing with one of the non-1070 based systems as we only have two of those. Stream itself would offer a gtx1070 of course.

1080p screens, but we have a scaler for capture that should accommodate any common resolution you can throw at it.

EDIT: Not sure about monitors, but I'd assume it would work.

These are separate from DH stuff, just like previous years, we usually find out later.

Specs are getting a bit more clear now overall.. I think we will have enough systems that we won't have to mess around with lower end as much. 10+ systems that should run everything currently in the market and two of them being "high end" Unless something really bad happens, this is our PC list which is more than enough for everyone:

THREE Intel Core i3-7100 CPU GTX 1060 6 GB 8 GB DDR4 RAM 240 GB SSD Windows 10

TWO Intel Core i7 6700HQ ¤laptop¤ GTX 960M 8 GB DDR4 RAM 240 GB SSD Windows 7 & Windows 10 dualboot

FOUR Intel core i5-2400 GTX 1060 6-8GB DDR3 240GB SSD Win 7/10 dualboot

TWO Intel core i7-4770s GTX 1070 6-8GB DDR3 240GB SSD Win 7/10 dualboot

Every system will be freshly installed before the event with same crap to run most stuff (steam, .net framework, dx9 runtimes, etc..)

Ok, if you get any more info then I'd appreciate if you would ping me :)

Also good news: we might be getting some additional systems to play around with in the "better PC" pool.

I've been spending some extra hours at work during the last few days just to clean/frankenstein a few business machines from components, four with a fairly decent i5 and two with an powerful i7. All Sandy or newer. Plan is to turn these in to more serious gaming machines and insert them in to the pool. Just gonna be a bit of work since at least one needs to be reworked due to a broken motherboard :p CPU makes it worth it tho. Still gonna need to figure out cheap transportation to home & sweden for these since I don't have my own car, anyway gonna personally invest time/money (You're welcome ;) ) on these a bit so I hope they will be enough

If these machines end up in the pool, allocation should be MUCH easier ! Hopefully we can have enough 'house systems' that we don't have to think about that stuff.

We'd be looking at additional: i5-2400 (4x) i7-4770s (2x) Base system is good for upgrading but it's gonna be a bit of work. Especially with dumb shit like Lenovo using their own proprietary 14pin power connector for the motherboard.. And that 180w PSU being the first thing I wanted to replace if I wanted any hope of running another GPU besides a matrox card. Anyway, these run should quite many lower end games even as-is, a lot more with a proper GPU. Especially that i7 should match a high-end gaming PC when paired with a good GPU.

There would be more i3 sandy machines but it's gonna cost too much to transport those :/

Chfou: I'll quote myself "2nd stream players will default to #1, lowend is preferred when possible.. This is to allow less clutter in practice as there will be only one #1 machine in the practice area." That is i3 & GTX1060.

Therio: Good thing to point out! Gotta think of something for the layouts then.. This needs to be tested since it might end up sending capture something silly like 1080x1920 instead, which might throw capturing equipment off. While we do have a scaler in between for all sort of input formats,it still might end up with a letterboxed image in a 1920x1080 frame.. being something stupid like 608x1080. I think rotation COULD be possible tho. Question: Does the game allow doing a true 1920x1080 resolution and simply flipping assets 90 degrees ?

KennyMan666: OK! Let's double check this at the venue, but for now, prepare to play with the lower end system.

DrTChops: Should be no problem!

Ectortutu: Laptop might be easier here due to pre-installed programs.. We can probably lug the practice laptop to the streaming area and use it temporarily. Doesn't need booting, just need to plug in some cables. This would be #2 system in this case.

You should be fine, these machines are only for practice & running. Before we really haven't provided any dedicated machines but this year we really prioritised on having some... that work :)

Main idea with these tiers is to avoid everybody taking the "best" system just for the sake of having it. Amount of systems is limited, so any spread that can be done will help.

3rd party systems in this case mean systems that are provided by a 3rd party, not a runner or by ESA. From last year we had our share of unreliable / untested systems with a nice suite of bloat pre-installed. I won't name things here but it shouldn't be hard to guess if you attended ESA2016 :)

This post only concerns streaming / speedrun PCs. Like every year, I don't really know much about DH stuff until the very end.. I'll poke Edenal about this :)

EDIT Good ne-- good news: There will be a batch of PCs from DH this year as well. However these are to be considered as a separate pool from these.

Edited the post, clarified 2nd stream situation, totally forgot to write about it!

TL;DR -- 2nd stream players will default to #1, lowend is preferred when possible.. This is to allow less clutter in practice as there will be only one #1 machine in the practice area.

[centre]http://i.imgur.com/NneENhL.png[/centre]

[center][big]Gaming PCs at ESA 2017[/center][/big]

This is the first year we are going fully in-house regarding practice/stream gaming PCs. Based on feedback, we don’t want to rely on third party systems for gaming. EDIT: That was a lie, we ended up getting 10+ gaming systems in the end for this year. Did a major overhaul to the list here and removed outdated information, posts after this one are related to the old information. Also DH PCs are to be considered separate from these, about 17 of those will be provided as-is.

All of these systems should run pretty much anything 60fps #4 is the most powerful one. and should satisfy all those dirty FPS exploiters

3x #1 Intel Core i3-7100 CPU nVidia GTX 1060 6 GB 8 GB DDR4 RAM 240 GB SSD Windows 10

2x #2 Intel Core i7 6700HQ ¤laptop¤ nVidia GTX 960M 8 GB DDR4 RAM 240 GB SSD Windows 7 & Windows 10 dualboot

4x #3 Intel core i5-2400 nVidia GTX 1060 8GB DDR3 Samsung 850 Evo SSD Win 7/10 dualboot

2x #4 Intel core i7-4770s nVidia GTX 1070 8GB DDR3 Samsung 850 Evo SSD (likely, SSD regardless)) Win 7/10 dualboot

FYI, 2nd stream will have a fixed #1 PC

Bunch of youtube benchmarks exist for i3-6100/7100 & GTX1060 and other systems if you want to get a better idea on what to expect.

Feel free to ask questions!

Slight delay with submissions, crunching out few final bugs.. Should be ready soon !

What Fatzke said, there are improvements being planned to make the venue better, If there is some point that wasn't addressed in the feedback reply then I'd like to hear it because I believe that we did (or at least did our best to) address all points that were brought up.

While I could hear some "more" negative feedback, still need to remember that there are now way more attendees and any opinion is going to likely be multiplied. A random thing 4 guys might have disagreed about two years ago might amplify to 10+. Of course it doesn't scale in a linear fashion like that but I'm just saying that it might help to make it appear like it. This is definitely not the first year that I've heard venue critique overall.

I still stand by what I said before, it is REALLY hard to get a proper venue for this amount of people. You'd have to spend a lot of time looking for one, maybe score a hotel conference room and they'd expect you to fully book the hotel to get any sort of decent deals. Stressing about stuff like that with near zero extra overhead on budget is not fun stuff :)

Change can always be difficult, especially for organizers but this was done to aim for more longer term. ESA15 had multiple "paper cut" issues that took a lot of time resolve, the distant mass housing was just one of them. Being able to resolve these kind of issues locally and even visit / do agreements face to face after work have a huge impact on the end result.

Anyway, table is closing in.. Any last minute questions ? :)

Andy, I'm sure we can discuss it again in more detail but the reasons are pretty well explained in https://www.speedrun.com/esa2016/thread/gh92q

Aaanyway.. I'll try to keep it short: Edenal lives in Växjö, which means saving big time on logistics. Storage and transportation It's a local venue to the main orga, meaning that negotiating stuff / last minute stuff is much easier to handle. Towns are generally more open to supporting local events and any such deals are much easier to make. Venue is big and affordable with a decent infrastructure, this is not an easy point once you reach more attendees. Gotta keep in mind that this is still non-profit and requires a lot of personal investment.. This combo allowed ESA16 to be organised with a more relaxed mind due to less stressing about the budget & venue.

Personally as a visitor, I highly disagree with it being a negative location. A huge mall was really close, hotel was close, fast food crap was close, Bus stopped in front of the venue, downtown was around ~15 min walk away. The only real downside to me was the heat and handling of B hall.

Then again, I'm coming from Finland where towns like these are more common. :)

Nice to still see some action and interest !

While I really don't care who ends up hosting, I still have to add that the RTMP that has been used for the past events might have been laggy for some users but it's really up to the overall routing. It's behind a symmetric fast line with a rather powerful dedicated server in a datacenter, 10meters away from the PE router and no caps are being introduced on my end (I have my ways of knowing this). Let's just say that usage has hit 1-2% of the capacity even during peaks :) Although it still doesn't mean that everyone gets it nice and clean, one way is to do a lower bitrate transcode with more latency as it's tweaked to be pretty much as low latency as possible in it's current state. It might show perfectly fine for 3/4 users across the globe but every fourth user can find it unusable even with a beefy line.

Just saying that even if someone restreams RTMP, someone will run in to similar issues at some point. A hitbox re-stream might be for the better since it has content servers around the world, which is really the only way to get around the routing issue. You can always configure a RTMP relay to push to twitch/hitbox simultaneously, which might help to get around some latency issues along with helping with embedding it on layouts as raw rtmp feed.

Anyway, I'll try to watch and stick around during this marathon since I've been away from GTA a bit too much for the past year or two :)

Regarding the wi-fi Issue, I have a theory that it simply ran out of IP addresses, typically you allocate a /24 block for such venues and that gives you a bit over 250 IPs for hosts. Leaving wi-fi open on a phone would keep the IP reserved for a long time, pretty much until you leave the range since there are so many background tasks these days that keep the connection afloat. This theory was further reinforced when I assigned my laptop a manual IP & gateway / etc.. and suddenly I had traffic flowing like no problem at all. I tried this only after loads of waiting / reboot cycle without any luck. This is of course not a solution.

However, the main issue was that the connected system didn't get an IP, wireless worked just fine once you had one.

Having simultaneous +250 users connected in wi-fi is something new to think about. It's simply an oversight. I have a feeling that we could have ran in to this issue with multiple other venues too, often having /25 blocks (128 IPs) or even /26 (64 IPs) due to less expected demand.

IIRC, we had a /24 block allocated for the WIRED along with some spare public IPs but I didn't get any specs for the WIRELESS one so I can't be 100% sure.

I'll likely forget a bunch but I'll try to something something...

Alko Nice seeing you again, sorry for introducing you to ooze! Eidgod Good to meet again, although why didn't you stay to pet the cat? :( Therio This fucking music has been stuck in my head. Makes me want to play it Tyr Thanks for helping out, was awesome to see you again MH/Pitpo/etc.. Fun times with Jones, gave me a laugh when I played against ultima on the boat and Max burger popped in. Pjoxt Montezorro, fun times.. "Would you please fuck off already!" Shrimp The Hoven keeps on going.. Maybe we can find some shit dos game as a challenge. Ultima Ultima! Adam Golfclap, was nice seeing you again! Pipe What a true twitch sellout! Nah, <3 U Spikevegeta For enduring the TRUE rayman for 45min bangerra Awesome time again! Suzy HÖÖKS! Fatzke I should totally visit you in germany some day! flicky Thanks for keeping me sane and for the company, <3 U AMVX #2 I met this AMVX #2 guy who is so much better than AMVX, he actually comes to events and everything! Pac Was awesome seeing you again! LotsofS ES ES ES ES ES ES. Really should've hung around more !

Was awesome seeing #gta again after a long time ! Shoutouts to the rest of the asylum crew that I didn't list here. Swamp was comfy as hell, thanks to Yva/Chucat/Theio/etc.. for setting it up, Ehrgeiz (god bless the ring) is such a shit game. I'm terribly sorry for the asylum night but at least people got to drink free cola. Also hugs to the other tech guys /staff/volunteers who helped out and keeped company. People who joined for town trips/alcohol, etc.. (Tezuro/crippe/nisse etc..) <3 anyone I met and hung around with since I'd be listing for a long time.

Also making this topic sticky..

Since I wasn't really /that/ much involved with core/organizing this year apart from some pre-event tech stuff and doing senior shifts I'll just leave feedback more from an attender's perspective.

I never found the location of the venue to be a problem, it wasn't as close as HoC or Nyeport but the distance never seemed that bad. I guess I'm just used to walking 15-20min (+train trip) to work every morning :p

Infrastructure of the venue, I was happy to see proper electricity / ethernet, however I feel that the poor air conditioning hurt the atmosphere a bit in the same way it did with ESA14 where all the energy gets drained. I doubt I'm the only one who gets at least a bit grumpier due to just excess heat.

Venue itself, I was afriad that a huge hall is not going to work, fortunately it actually did work pretty well. However I still believe that there needs to be more side-room activities and better use/dividing stuff. As much as the "mainstream" LAN-like area works conveniently, with a longer 10d period, creating more swamp-like mancaves where some groups can stick for the duration of the event is something I miss. HoC/NP embraced more variety in the layouts instead of looking just like a boring grid plotted city layout. Needs more visual blocks or just better use of side areas & planning.

Tech was very taxing this year, I won't go in to details since I'm sure there will be a debrief on this with more details. Idea was right this time with the ease of use but it fell apart due to multiple reasons. A solid plan with testing more scenarios and way more setup time with this scale is needed and blablabla.. It might be hard to believe but I think that the recovery after the first day hiccups were handled about as well as they can be. A lot of the setup was actively working against tech this year and I really thank for the patience of anyone who helped around. Terribly sorry on my part for not having enough time or energy to teach the setup more when possible, especially sorry for the runners (esp. Bloodborne, looking at you!) for having to endure the hiccups during that time, thanks for the patience! Anyway.. enough of that :)

PC / Monitor / etc.. arrived way too late, stuff like this might have been solved with more setup days and gettings things ordered earlier but this hurt the setup overall and due to this a lot of computers ended up not being used efficiently. I see this as one of the bigger reasons why there weren't enough practice PCs

More PCs, while I can understand that not having LAN corners are done to encourage more practice, it's just that people will do it anyway. As the event grows, I feel we need more and more PC spots for practice and whatnot. Proper numbers on inventory and specs so that people will plan better in advance

PCs need to be setup way before the stream kicks on, I can however understand why it didn't really happen this year due to busybusy.

Lack of second stream was kind of a bummer, there are technical reasons for sure but I strongly believe that this idea should be revisited in some ways. Ghetto setup and whatnot, would at least make a nice comfy side-stream if nothing more.

Next year there should always be a guy on the venue who is able to call shots. It never became a real issue but say something stupid happens like something valuable gets broken/stolen/etc.. Just stuff that needs quick reaction from ESA's side.

More setup time, let's be fair, stream quality could have been improved quite a bit with an additional setup day or two.

Last days & Bonus, I'd really want these to come back in full force. Needs way better planning in advance and communication.

Other than those, as an attendee I didn't have any huge issues. Any bigger points that appeared can be fixed with more attention and care & planning. I still hope that more of the comfy "magic" from past ESAs can be brought back with better venue organization and getting setup done. I'll blame growing pains.

I think this ESA introcuced a lot of cool aspects but took a step backwards in some. If ESA17 can stop for a moment and improve on this, the direction should be good. Thanks to everyone involved !

@Nord & etc... DH PCs either had a lower end (nehalem tier) i5 or a 3770K(?) i7, i5 had a GTX260 and i7 had a powerful AMD card. Unfortunately during TLaD it was discovered that this card had a broken fan so I swapped in a GTX260 in place due to it being more CPU bound. i7 was actually pretty powerful enough to handle games and stuff but in the end we only had one of them (PC3?, 2nd from left). In other words, two i7 systems, but one had a slower gtx260 swapped in to run TLaD at all as a last measure (Plan H at that point? Maybe Noz kept count) MSI laptops both had a skylake & powerful GTX9xx series from what I remember. Anyway, this is a serious point that I already brought up as an issue for tech to consider next year so We're on the same page there :)

Maxie: There is a NEED LIST tab where people can make requests. I guess I'll rename that since it's a bit confusing :)