First off, I owe you all a massive apology for being completely AFK these past few weeks. I’ve been ghosting harder than a bad Tinder date, and I haven’t replied to any of your DMs. :confused:  Work has been an absolute beast, gobbling up my time like a Pac-Man on a power pellet. I’m clocking 10-12 hours at the office every day, and even when I drag myself home, I’m still glued to my laptop, working into the wee hours. Send help. Or caffeine pills. Or both.

On a more serious note, I want to share that my mother passed away three months ago. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought I was ready for it—spoiler alert: I was not. Grief is a sneaky little gremlin, and it’s taken me on quite the emotional roller-coaster. But, as they say, time heals, and things are finally starting to feel a bit more normal. I’m getting there, one day at a time, and your support means the world to me. 

Now, for the good stuff—today, June 14th, is my 4-year Twitch anniversary!  Can you believe we’ve been vibing together for four whole years? That’s like, 48 months of memes, chaos, and questionable life choices in The Chamber. To celebrate, we’re throwing a big ol’ stream party!  I’m still stuck at the office as I type this (someone save me from spreadsheets), but I’m hoping to escape in a couple of hours. Once I’m home, I’ll need a hot minute to set up—gotta make sure the beers are ready, and that my sweaty odor doesn't make The Chamber unbearable for you guys . So, rough estimate: I’ll be live in about 3-5 hours from now! Keep an eye on your notifications, and let’s make this anniversary one for the books.

I’ll see you in The Chamber (or not - quote @martino_edwardo) Let’s make today epic, fam. See you soon!

New mixtape up on SoundCloud: here

You all are amazing, and I truly appreciate the energy and positivity that you bring to this lively corner of Twitch. I hope that Christmas brings you and your loved ones all possible happiness and joy this holiday season. I will be celebrating with my family tonight, including my parents, siblings, children, and even their own kids. While there is a chance that I may manage to stream for a bit after the celebrations have wrapped up, I want to remind everyone that today is especially dedicated to our youngest humans when choosing your dinner celebration beverages. 

From the bottom of my heart, I wish you all a Merry Christmas!

- Kenta -

New camera selections:

1. See the Chamber 
2. Follow your dancer

I’ve worked on making it easier to keep track of what’s happening with visuals, dancers, and camera feeds. Don’t forget to check the status section in the bottom-right corner of the stream feed for updates.

While it might not look like much has changed on the surface, the backend is now partially multi-threading capable. This improvement will gradually boost performance as I continue rewriting modules.

@kntA_I is back with more shenanigans—now running locally! He might not always behave, so there’s a chance I’ll turn him off during the stream. We’ll see how it goes. :)

Dancers: I've been working extensively to refine "the dancers." During the last stream, we couldn’t use redeemables like 'Dance HYPER: Make your dancer hyper,' 'Dance SPIN: Make your dancer spin,' 'Dancer: Name change,' or 'Dance BIG: Make your dancer BIG.' This was because I reworked and changed to a new set of variable storage. The internal code still pointed to the old dataset (I had to load a backup just before going online, where these parameters hadn’t been updated), which is now inoperative and queued for deletion. The old dataset has since been cleaned out, and all parameters are corrected.

I'm currently developing a more reliable way to display information on screen about the dancers' availability. For example, it will include info on available slots (if any) and a timer showing wait times for open spots. This integration should roll out in the next couple of weeks.

BTW: If your request to join the dancer ranks fails for any reason, your used channel points for that redeem will automatically be returned. This also applies to redeems related to visuals and camera requests.

However, there is one scenario where channel points won’t be returned. If you use the redeemable 'START Dancing: Get your spot on the floor' and then enter the dancer queue and subsequently use the command !undance, no fallback code currently handles this event. The code now automatically marks your redeem/request as complete once you enter the dancer queue. I’ll look into handling this differently at a later stage.

The dancers are also a huge resource drain, which I’m working to resolve with alternative code and/or operator adjustments in TouchDesigner. Currently, each dancer uses seven noise operators for movement on the dance floor(s). With sixteen dancers, that means a total of 112 noise generators, each sending 30 instructions per second. My computer had to manage 3,360 tasks per second on top of all the other processing. I set the dancers to 30 cooks per second to keep their movement fluid with no noticeable stutter. However, with some tinkering with filter and delay operators, I’ve managed to reduce the cooks to 4 per second without degrading dancer performance—a significant WIN! For now, I’ll keep the max dancer count at 16 as I work on optimizing other resource-heavy processes.

Emote Wall: I had to disable emotes for the tall screens at the front and back of the Chamber. Kappagen events caused significant FPS drops, sometimes from a steady 30 FPS down to under 20. I need to investigate this to understand why it’s happening. I suspect few emote wall scripts have been used the way I’m using them, rendering emotes on "screens" with a resolution of 774 x 3330, which still baffles me given that my visuals are far more demanding than a few emotes on a screen. Until I sort out this issue, we still have six smaller screens with functioning emote walls.

Visuals: I added a new visual called 'SpaceX,' which is a video I made about some of the company’s major accomplishments.

Web Access: I’m working on a website that my mods can use to access the Chamber’s internals. It will allow them to control and maintain several subsystems in the Chamber. They’ll log in using Twitch’s OAuth authentication system. Down the line, this may also be available to regular viewers for interaction with the Chamber ;)

Hugs,
- kenta -

Kenta's merch shop is finally back with new merch!