(originally from https://web.archive.org/web/20220521094735/http://ajcsystems.com/blog/blog/2015/06/07/progresstwitch/)
In the immortal words of Samuel L. Jackson, hold on to your butts. I’m going to explain, in painful detail, just exactly what it took to get ProgressTwitch off the ground.
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Genesis
This all started when my friend Camarice explained to me what Twitch was and how it worked. I was impressed by the technology, but it all seemed a bit frivolous to me at first. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if there was a Twitch stream that just broadcast some static image, 24/7?” I was wracking my brain trying to think of things that would be appropriate to broadcast, and suddenly I remembered Progress Quest. For those of you who are not old, Progress Quest is a satire of the role-playing game genre. Like any RPG, you roll up a character and set out on your quest; but unlike any other RPG, Progress Quest plays itself for you, randomly generating a variety of quests, encounters, and loot. You just leave it running and check in every now and again to see how powerful your character has become.
This immediately seemed like a perfect fit: set up a system to run Progress Quest and stream it to Twitch 24/7.
What Didn’t Work
Twitch Streaming in Linux
The only computer that I leave on 24/7 is my homemade DVR, running Linux. My first thought was to set up Twitch streaming from Linux directly, to set up a virtual screen and run Progress Quest in WINE, and then to stream the whole shebang to Twitch. That plan disintegrated almost immediately; I was unable to get any Twitch broadcasting software running on my Linux box. It’s not particularly powerful, and it’s running a distribution that’s about three years old, so I wasn’t really surprised; nevertheless, this was definitely a dead end.
Virtualbox Windows VM in Linux
Next, I decided to try setting up a portable virtual machine with a Windows guest, configuring everything in it to start Twitch streaming at boot up, and then run that on my Linux server. Spoiler alert: this was also unsuccessful, although for a long time it seemed like it was going to work out OK.
I started by configuring a Virtualbox VM with a completely legitimate and legal copy of Windows 7. Once that was installed and running, I started installing the Twitch streaming software. It turns out that Open Broadcaster Software requires some DirectX features that are not supported by the DirectX emulation available in Virtualbox, even with the guest extensions and custom drivers installed. I then tried XSplit Gamecaster, with which I was able to get most of the way to a working setup. It took a lot of tweaking to get everything running the way it was supposed to, looking right, and starting up on boot, but eventually I had a working portable VM that would stream Progress Quest to Twitch automatically. I copied that VM to the Linux server and launched it, and lo and behold… a strange graphics corruption bug that put a big black rectangle near the middle of my screen, and also in the stream. I tried to update the drivers on my Linux box, but short of a full distribution upgrade to something more recent, it wasn’t going to happen; and I don’t want to tweak my DVR too hard for fear of blowing it up and having to rebuild it. On to the next option!
What Did Work
Amazon Web Services Windows VM
When that failed, I decided to abandon my plan of running anything on my existing Linux server, and instead set up a Windows VM in Amazon EC2. That actually went relatively smoothly, with one big exception: EC2 virtual machines do not have sound hardware, and OBS requires a sound card be present in order to function. VB-CABLE Virtual Audio Device to the rescue! After installing that virtual device driver and setting it as the default, I was able to leave OBS running even when I wasn’t connected to the Remote Desktop session.
One setup note here: the VPC Amazon made for me did not have a default route out to the internet, as pointed to here. I was unable to access my VM until I went in to the VPC configuration and added one by hand.
Final Setup
For future reference, this is what I’ve got running now:
- Windows Server 2012 (ami-830ee0c7) on a t2.micro EC2 instance
- Open Broadcaster Software 0.651 beta
- Progress Quest 6.2
- VB-CABLE Virtual Audio Device v.42b
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