Cold Waters

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Kasey Chang
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

Probably just won the "most miraculous recovery" award...

Had a mission to destroy a reinforcements convoy From China to either Hong Kong or Taipei, I forgot which one. I had to hang around shallow waters in heavy traffic. I disengaged from several groups, fought one group that won't let me hide or disengage, and finally, met the convoy with 3 torpedoes and 4 Tomahawk antiship missiles left, and 2 decoys. The convoy comes, 3 escorts, at least 2-3 ships I need to hit in the convoy, the actual transports. Okay, I need to kill the escorts. Then as they got closer, I realized there's a sub hiding under them. Great, I have to let an escort live. Maybe I can kill it with with my missile instead. Hmmm... Okay, fired the torpedoes on long wires, and was guiding them in, when one of the patrol planes got lucky and dropped a torpedo on top of me! Before I can say pop noisemaker, the torpedo hit, and THREE compartments IMMEDIATELY flooded, and the sub sank like a rock into the sandy bottom. We're still alive, but for how long?

The torpedoes hit, and the sub, and 2 escorts are sunk, but there is another escort, and patrol bomber that dropped the torpedo is still out there. And I hadn't killed the convoy yet. But I can't launch the Tomahawks from the sea floor. I need to be at 20m depth. ARGH!

Okay, let's try emptying the compartment of water... Except... nothing. Every attempt to empty one compartment results in it filling back in?!

And the escort is getting closer... having fled the scene earlier... AND the patrol bomber has dropped additional sonobuoys around me... And the convoy is getting away...

Okay, it's time to emergency blow the ship and try to get away on the surface. We are still beyond the gun range of the escort... I think.

Emergency blow engaged...

The ship didn't budge.

WTF...

I gave it 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds... Not a single shake. I tried powering forward, reverse, planes up, down, combinations... I can scrape along the sea floor slowly, but the ship won't rise. And the sea floor here is flat as a pancake.

Oh, no. And the escort is getting closer. And the patrol bomber is dropping depth charges. But none managed to directly land on me, so far.

Then another set of depth charges landed, and this one somehow bracketed me, but did no damage. Somehow, this caused the pumps to finally work? And the compartments are rapidly emptied of water, and the ship started to rise. I ordered all ahead flank, and ordered the planesman to keep the ship from broaching. I don't want to die by surface gunfire either, and those gunfire WILL poke more holes in the pressure hull if we stay up long enough.

The tailfins did poke through the air, but we managed to stay submerged... barely, but we poked enough above water that we can hear the gun shots landing nearby. Good thing their aim is horrible, and this is at night so they are aimming by radar only.

And besides, Seawolf is faster underwater (35 kts) than on the surface (30 kts). But the escort has closed to within 10 km! (his gun range should be at least 15 if not 20 km). The trim function doesn't work, so planesman is manually driving the ship up/down, and our depth varied from 5m to 55m as we got weird sinusoidal waves as the controls lag and won't center, and being at flank speed doesn't help, but we are still alive, and while the depth is under 20m, I volleyed my 4 Tomahawk anti-ship missiles off toward the convoy's last known direction, and maybe I can still hit them and redeem myself.

We slowly pulled away from the escort, who chased us for several kilometers, and even the patrol bomber eventually gave up.

And we got word through satcom that the antiship missiles did kill the transports and a freighter, so the missile was a success after all.

We managed to escape South China Sea and limped back to Guam for some very necessary repairs and refitting, and a fresh set of torpedoes.

Then it's back to war...
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Kasey Chang
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

Finished Y2K Campaign Against China at Realistic Difficulty, and got the ENTIRE campaign recorded as video, with minimal editing. For the long video. I had to cut it apart so you get to enjoy individual missions, so the videos can be up to 1.5 hours long (that's how long that mission took), or as short as 7 minutes. In fact, I have some missions that lasted even less than that, but I decided to keep them together with other videos.



I also made new thumbnails for all of them, with a template I made in Paint.net.

I can probably ADD some voiceovers to some of the missions. I am figuring out how to use the Free Shotcut video editor.

Would appreciate some feedback from those of you who are into this.
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Blackhawk
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Blackhawk »

Kasey Chang wrote: Sat Oct 22, 2022 12:57 pm Would appreciate some feedback from those of you who are into this.
Minor observation: Release one every day or two. You can upload them all and have YouTube release them on a schedule.

As one of your loyal subscribers, my feed was completely flooded with CCPlays over the last few days. I chuckled, but that volume would make some people unsubscribe.

/edit - with the longer videos, I'd actually think every two or three days would be enough. You want people to have time to watch what you post and be ready for the next one. Most people aren't going to sit down and binge watch that many hours of video in a day, and you're getting ahead of them. Short attention spans means that they're more likely to watch what's new in their feed rather than going back and watching stuff from days before.

Of course, posting every two or three days means that 34 videos will take a couple of months to post If you're wanting to be able to post more current stuff (to stay on top of the current 'hotness), then use something like this to keep your channel active - post a video once every four days, perhaps, and post your current game in the middle (IE - post the long campaign on days 1, 5, 9, 13, and post your current stuff on 3, 7, 11, 15, etc.) That gives you a video every two days (your channel is getting regular content), it keeps it varied (so that if some viewers don't like a particular game, they don't get stuck with it and bored for two months), and still keeps you from flooding the feeds.

From what I've read, a lot of Let's Play posters will do exactly that. They'll record a couple of long campaigns before they post anything, slice 'em up, and prepare them, then dole them out interspersed with the content they're currently working on. That also frees up a lot of the time required for the more elaborate edits on the current stuff.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Blackhawk »

Also, you're not putting in any tags on some of your videos. They're pretty vital. I'm not posting much lately (I need to get back to that, but our games weren't conducive to it for a while), but I did some research on tags for this type of video, and this is what I found:

1. Include the title of the video, verbatim: (CCPlays) Cold Waters Dot MOD | Y2K NATO Campaign | Part 31: Interdict Yet Another PLAN Wolfpack
2. Include your name and your channel title, including a few alternate spellings for people with bad memories: Kasey Chang, Casey Chang, CCPlays, (CCPlays)
3. Include a basic set of tags for the kind of content it is: video games, gaming, lets play, gameplay, campaign
4. Include tags specific for the game you're posting about, including:
4a: The name of the game: Cold Waters, Dot Mod, DotMod
4b: The name of the mission if it is a whole mission and isn't in the title:
4c: The type of game/gameplay (looking at the Steam tags can help): single player, simulation, naval combat, submarine, strategy
4d: A word or two on the setting genre: cold war, soviet (this goes double if it's a known IP, like Mech Warrior (and if it were, it would be mech warrior, mechwarrior, battletech)
4e: Imagine that someone wants to see a video like yours would search for, or what someone interesting in similar content would. Add that. underwater, Uboat, U-Boat, fleet combat, Red Storm Rising

Now, this sounds like a lot, but if you make a document with a few standard sets, it's mostly copy-paste:

Standard single player set:
[VID TITLE], Kasey Chang, Casey Chang, CCPlays, (CCPlays),video games, gaming, lets play, gameplay, [vid title], [game title],

Standard single player campaign set:
[VID TITLE], Kasey Chang, Casey Chang, CCPlays, (CCPlays),video games, gaming, lets play, gameplay, campaign, [vid title], [game title],

If you're going to be doing a bunch with a certain game, just make something for that game one time and copy-paste it.

Cold Waters set:
[VID TITLE], Kasey Chang, Casey Chang, CCPlays, (CCPlays),video games, gaming, lets play, gameplay, campaign, Cold Waters, Dot Mod, DotMod, single player, simulation, naval combat, submarine, strategy, cold war, soviet, underwater, Uboat, U-Boat, fleet combat, Red Storm Rising

Then you can just copy-paste it into the window as you upload. Once you get the basic sets in place, it becomes quick and easy.
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Kasey Chang
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

Good advice, thanks. Still new to YT, only started actively uploading last few months.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

Started a new campaign where I will space out the videos to one every two days and they will be about one-hour long. Let's just say my command style is not that suited for ship command and I fear I may soon get another ship blown out from under me. :D But you'll need to watch the channel to find out. I'm using Shotcut more to both cut the video apart for easier consumption and adding voiceovers where I didn't say enough or it felt under-explained. I may soon add intro and ending sequences. :D

EDIT: All 15 parts of the video have either been uploaded or are uploading now. As the release is one chapter every two days, and every chapter is roughly 1 hour (except the Finale, which will be 2 hours long, including a game crash and forced restart of battle, and it's a nail-biter as I ALMOST ran out of ASW munitions. Hahaha!)
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

I am using ShotCut as my editor and I'm getting the hang of things. I can append, trim, voice-over, and so on.

It's also interesting that I can generate VERY compact footage out of my GeForce Experience recordings of Cold Waters if I use Shotcut to re-encode them. The original files are like 5.6 GB at 60 fps for just over 2 hours. I trimmed 30 minutes out of it, re-encode for 30 fps and Youtube optimized 1080p, with encoding set to fast instead of best. I got a file that's only 500MB for 90 minutes. Quality has nearly no difference.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

I figured out what's making my Cold Waters compression so amazing... Audio settings.

I changed my audio codec AAC / 48 Khz / 384kbps bitrate to AAC / 22 Khz / 128 kbps and the file size shrank by a TON. I doubt changing the frame rate to 30 fps would have made that much difference.

Anyway, my files used to be multi-gigabytes in size for even simple 30 minute recordings. But with a bit of re-encoding, and adding more commentary, I'm generating video files of less than 1 GB consistently, often in the few hundred MB range.

For example, I recorded a 42 minute gameplay which NVENC / GeForce Experience dumped to disk as a 2.1 GB file.

I loaded that file into ShotCut and added some more audio commentary, and re-exported it, with the above options, but also added a few video options to increase encoding speed by sacrificing quality. The end result is a 200MB file that uploads in a flash even with my bad DSL upload bandwidth, and once converted by Youtube, really shows every little difference.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

I've apparently made enough content to release one item daily until Thanksgiving, and I'm adding more. :D At this rate I'll be adding enough content through Christmas. :D
Last edited by Kasey Chang on Mon Nov 07, 2022 1:42 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

My "new" campaign where I play as a Permit-class sub in 1984 NATO campaign has reached chapter 18, and we may yet finish by chapter 20.

Even at 1 chapter every two days, this will take us through New Year's day. :D

I've tried editing to keep each chapter to about 30 minutes or less. I didn't always succeed, but there are no more 1.5 hour long episodes, at least. Basically, I speed up the boring parts where I wait a lot by making it go 10x speed.

I think I need to kill one more set of cruise missile subs, then it's off to boomer bastion to hunt the Delta IV.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

The Cruiser campaign is set to conclude on November 23rd, with a 1.5 hour finale, with a true nail-biter finish.

The new Permit-class sub campaign will start the next day, November 24th, with one episode every 2 days.

Final episodes of the new campaign are currently scheduled for... January 3rd, 2023.

Unlike previous efforts, I've taken care to limit the length of each episode in the "new" campaign to a more reasonable "roughly 30 minutes", with occasional exceptions. There was one that went to 41 minutes, but that episode has a special achievement, so it's sorta excusable.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

Looking at this game reminded me I own all those Sonalyst games, like 688(i) H/K, Sub Command, and Dangerous Waters, and I remember writing a guide for 688(i) way back when.

And it came out in 1997, 25 years ago. And my guide came out over 20 years ago.

*sigh*
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by AWS260 »

My first sub game was 688 Attack Sub. 1989!
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Hrothgar »

AWS260 wrote: Wed Nov 09, 2022 9:36 pm My first sub game was 688 Attack Sub. 1989!
I played that. I'm pretty sure I played Red Storm Rising before that. I played both on monochrome monitors which may or may not have added to the experience. Unfortunately, there were no Kasey Chang walkthroughs easily available back then.

I'm glad you're making these videos Kasey. I may be too old fashioned to enjoy watching other people play games, but I'm glad yet another generation get to enjoy the KC experience. :dance:
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

Most videos have been uploaded. One every two days all the way through... March, and the Soviet campaign is barely half way. I had to lower the difficulty on the Soviet campaign but I may raise it back up now that I got some decent gear (Victor II with proper dual-purpose ASW/ASuW torpedoes)
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

All Soviet Campaign Video had been uploaded, and a Cold Waters video is scheduled every other day until April 9th.

I'm starting a UK campaign on "casual" (one step above easy, one step below "realistic") and first video has been uploaded.

On non-Cold Waters video days you'll get my other gameplay videos instead: Ace Combat 7, "new games I tried" (various), and Starfleet Command.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by jztemple2 »

Kasey Chang wrote: Sun Jan 08, 2023 3:20 pm All Soviet Campaign Video had been uploaded, and a Cold Waters video is scheduled every other day until April 9th.
Just asking, but why don't you post links to your videos? Is there some rule that I am wildly breaking with my recent videos I've posted?
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
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Kasey Chang
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

Oh, it's because we haven't gotten to the schedule yet. :)

If you want to get to my channel, I'm at

https://www.youtube.com/@CaptChang/videos
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

I got so frustrated with the UK campaign (it's unsurvivable if you're in an Oberon) that I've started and finished a Y2K campaign (13 episodes).

I'll probably go play Starfleet Command for a while.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by em2nought »

Cold Waters is on sale for $7.99 right now at GOG https://www.gog.com/game/cold_waters?pp ... 04e20f680c
Technically, he shouldn't be here.
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Re: Cold Waters

Post by Kasey Chang »

Nice, that's lower than Steam sale price of $9.99 during the Summer sale.
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