Heeey everyone! Did you notice that Xfire has released the beta of version 1.115? Due to technical problems I couldn't post about it a few days ago when it was put to public, but now I did some backup systems for me to make sure I can always remind you of the new releases just after they are put to public.

Well, you can still download and try out the beta version, the real Xfire 1.115 will be activated early next week, so there's the whole weekend to try out all the new things, such as adding friends in-game!:


Other changes in this beta include

• Ability to title live video broadcast
  
• Behind the scenes broadcast optimizations (again)
  
• Tweaks to skins
  
• AIM plugin status and character support changes
  
• In-game for some OpenGL games fixed.

The official notes for this beta build is available at the Beta Testing Team forums.

The actual download to the beta updater is here: http://www.xfire.com/communities/xfbt/news/890418/

Remember that if you want to help Xfire out by testing the beta releases you should join the official Xfire Beta Testing Team: http://www.xfire.com/communities/xfbt/

Joonas

There have been 12 Xfire updates since I started writing these workshop posts (they were called Tips & Tricks back in January, before settling in with the current name, by the way). During these months the workshop posts have focused on many different areas of Xfire, but thanks to the many updates to the program, not all of the older posts are completely correct anymore. That's why I am going to give you a second tour through Xfire, starting today.

Moreover, Xfire has gotten lots of new users who might have only started reading the blog very recently (I do hope they read this blog!), so it makes sense to go back to the basics. So this flashback series starts with Xfire's Options, accessible from the Tools menu:


Today my post will focus on the General tab of the Options dialog. It is also the tab which will open first when you access options. The General Options look like this:


The first section there is Nicknames. In Xfire, each user has a unique username and every user can also set themselves a nickname. If you here select Show nicknames when available (default: ON), your friends list in the client will display the nicknames people have set instead of their usernames. You can also set your nickname there by typing it in to the text field My nickname. With new Xfire accounts the nickname is empty. If no nickname is set, then your username is assumed to be your nickname too.

Stored online as part of Xfire profile.

Hint: even if you have selected to show nicknames, you can still view usernames too by moving your mouse cursor on top of a nickname.


The next category is Offline Friends that has but one option: Show my offline friends (default: ON). This option controls whether you can see offline friends or not. If you have only a few friends, it could be handy to view all of them at all times, but once you have plenty of friends, the people who are not online only take up space and make the friends list cluttered, so you might want to turn this off.

Stored online as part of Xfire...

August 31st - September 6th


01. World of Warcraft
02. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer
03. Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer
04. Counter-Strike: Source
05. Battlefield 2
06. Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne
07. Call of Duty: World at War Multiplayer (+1)
08. Guild Wars (-1)
09. Team Fortress 2 (+1)
10. Silkroad Online (-1)
11. Heroes of newerth (+1)
12. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (-1)
13. Combat Arms (+1)
14. Eve Online (-1)
15. Metin 2
16. Left 4 Dead
17. The Lord of the Rings Online
18. MapleStory
19. Runes of Magic (+4)
20. Counter-Strike 1.6

Hi everyone! I've just moved to a new apartment. Goodbye one bedroom, 27 sqm with a shared shower in the basement, hello three rooms, 60 sqm, real kitchen and shower in the apartment! Also. Hello order. Hello better hygiene. Hello girlfriend friendly environment. Hello dedicated work/game room. Hello balcony. Hello life.

Once I'm done getting all my stuff up, I'll be posting some pics of how I live, so that you can look at it with envy!

Sadly, I moved most of the furniture and stuff by myself, which meant hours of carrying stuff up and down stairs, and bucketloads of sweat. I also hade to drive it some 200 miles one way (have had to go three times so far). So, it's been a real bother. Sadly, that left the charts hanging. But, now here I am with a double dose for 'ya.

The first dose consists of some further Heroes of newerth ownage, with the game closing in on the Top 10. Apart from that, the week offered some FPS ownage, with Call of Duty: World at War Multiplayer, Team Fortress 2 and Combat Arms all doing fairly well.

Runes of Magic also shows up on the charts again, with a pretty cool four position jump.

Now, on to the second dose of the charts!

September 7th - September 13th


01. World of Warcraft
02. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer
03. Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer
04. Counter-Strike: Source
05. Battlefield 2
06. Warcra...

Hello, another Friday and another useful blog post (I hope it will be useful at least). There had been some reports on the forums about encoded Xfire videos having sound track either slow down noticeably or it is not in sync with the video.

Based on the data I gathered from the forums I performed my own tests and found out one cause for this problem: The Shared mode audio settings. This applies to Windows Vista and Windows 7 only. If you are having the problems with Windows XP, then the reason is something else since XP doesn't have Shared mode at all, it was a new feature in Vista.

The Shared mode allows you to have multiple applications using sound at the same time and still you can manipulate the application's volume individually. For the Shared mode one can select what the output format is, and this also has an effect on Xfire video recording.

The notable thing is that if you have selected a frequency other than 44100 Hz for the Shared mode sound, any video recorded with Xfire will have the sound recorded with that frequency too. This itself is not a big problem, but when the video is encoded before uploading to the site, the sound track is converted to 44100 Hz. The problem is that the encoder doesn't resample the sound to the new speed but uses the original sound data.

So if you had the Shared mode setting at 88200 Hz, the AVI video recorded with Xfire has sound at 88200 Hz, but after encoding the same sound is said to be 44100 Hz. If you didn't know the Hz number means how many samples of data there is per second. 44100 Hz means that the sound data was recorded 44100 times in a second. Now when the encoded video is played back, the media player will play the sound data with that speed. So the sound will be as if it is played in half speed.


So in case you are suffering from sound getting slowed down or doesn't stay in sync with the video after encoding, the issue might be this Shared mode setting. To fix it, you need to go change the output device settings. Probably the easiest way is...

Or rather, it won't be that hard to figure out what I've been playing for the last week.

You see, in last weeks Xfire Charts, I discovered a "new" game. Heroes of Newerth.

And, since I really didn't know what I was, I had to go do some research. As it turns out, HoN is a new game, heavily inspired by WC3 mod DotA, and the cool thing is that it provides better graphics as well as other new features that people have wanted for a while. So all is fine and dandy with that.

But, I felt that it was my mission to really check this game out, so I scoured the earth searching for a key. And guess what, I found one (or rather, it's complicated. I've been able to play the game, and that's what counts).

And to tell you the truth, it's really quite a good game! If you, like me, quite like/liked DotA, it's not impossible that you'll really like HoN.

This video that I'm about to post is a little bit lame, it's taken from the practice mode in the game, but at least it shows you that the game is quite a lot better looking than WC3.


Xfire video of the week -
Heroes of Newerth practice mode by wempa



If you get a chance, you should really try the game. It's currently in closed beta, but I bet an open beta will come sooner or later. And, if you like this video, or any other videos on Xfire, you should really head over and join The Official Xfire Video Community now!


Hans

Hello everybody! The special date today is 09/09/09. The special thing today is that I am writing a blog post about Xfire release number 114. Normally the Xfire updates are activated between Monday and Tuesday, but this Monday there was Labor Day in the US, so the update was moved to Tuesday (Wednesday for users behind UTC+2 time zone).

The Release notes for this version seems technical. There has been a lot of work done on Live Video broadcasting feature. Now it uses lesser bandwidth requirement by default and has more available settings for bandwidth usage. Also the CPU usage has been decreased among with other little problems.

As I mentioned in the beta post, problems with logging in to @msn.com accounts in the alpha feature of using other IM networks, is now fixed. According to the Technical Support forums, though, there are still many problems with the multiple messenger support.

Multiple users had complained how their screenshot gallery had disappeared from the Xfire client. Now it appears that there was a bug that caused the list to be empty in case the user had more than 5000 screenshots uploaded. That is a huge amount! I hope other improvements will be done with this in the future, such as dividing it to pages. It would be pain to open the screenshot page of one of those users and wait for the web browser to load thousands of thumbnails.

For some people the most significant change in this release is the fix to incompatibility with Internet Explorer 8 combined with certain system settings that would make Xfire completely unusable. A big thanks for this goes to Xfire users who handed out great amount of information of their systems and that helped Xfire team to find out what is going wrong in those computers.


Known issues

Unfortunately this release couldn't get off with clean papers. I found out a problem with Xfire's video encoder right before the beta testing ended. Of course this issue couldn't get fixed for the release, but the release confirmed it to be a problem for more...

Hello and welcome back to the wonderful technical world of Xfire with your (I hope) favorite guide Joonas aka GODJonez! This time I'll show you how to manage your game collection in Xfire.

As with most Xfire management functions, this one can also be accessed from the Options dialog. You can get there from the Tools menu:


To get to manage the games on Xfire, naturally next step would be entering the Games tab in the Options window. When you enter that tab, Xfire will run through the game detection process:


During this process Xfire checks if any of the games with "Automatically Detect" are installed on your computer to mark them as installed, and it also checks if you have uninstalled any of the games that were previously found installed. (as an advanced detail Xfire also reloads the xfire_games.ini file for this process)

Once the detection is done you can see the list of games that are currently found installed on your computer. This is where you can manage the game detection and settings for the games. I have highlighted three different areas with colored borders here, I'll be referring to the colors later when going through the parts in detail:


The violet part is the actual game list. It's divided in two categories: Installed and Not Installed. Initially the "Installed" category is expanded (arrow down) and the "Not Installed" is closed (arrow right, as in the screenshot above). You can open and close them by double clicking.

The games on Installed category are those that Xfire currently sees as being installed on your computer. If you want to change the settings of any of them, select one by clicking on the name with your mouse. If a game you have installed is not listed there, you can try changing its detection settings by selecting it from Not Installed list after opening it.

The green area holds the detection options for the selected game. Normally all games are set to "Automatically Detect". This setting makes Xfire rely on the...

That's right. The Video of the Week is returning after a summer break, and I thought we'd start on a bang! (You usually go out on a bang, but here, we do things differently)

I can actually go ahead and admit that I've been playing some Xbox 360 over the last few weeks, and in particular the new Wolfenstein game. But, as a real FPS lover on PC, I absolutely hate the way you maneuver. You really need a keyboard and mouse to be able to play well. One thing that is definitely easier to do while using a keyboard and mouse is a really cool headshot. You know, the kind where you just go by reflexes.

And, I thought I'd show you one of those right now.


Xfire video of the week -
n 1 c k `,' by ► Ď Ø Ľ Ķ Ý ◄



Huh? How about that for a cool headshot! It might just have been luck, but none the less, it's awesome.

And, if you like this video and want to get tips of other ones, or if you are just plain curious to see what's going on with videos, video broadcast and video recording on Xfire, become a member of the The Official Xfire Video Community now!

Hans

August 24th - August 30th


01. World of Warcraft
02. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer
03. Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer
04. Counter-Strike: Source
05. Battlefield 2
06. Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne
07. Guild Wars
08. Call of Duty: World at War Multiplayer
09. Silkroad Online
10. Team Fortress 2 (+1)
11. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (-1)
12. Heroes of newerth (+2)
13. Eve Online (+1)
14. Combat Arms (-2)
15. Metin 2 (+3)
16. Left 4 Dead (-1)
17. The Lord of the Rings Online
18. MapleStory (-2)
19. Diablo II: Lord of destruction (+5)
20. Counter-Strike 1.6 (+2)

We haven't had an edition of the Xfire charts for a couple of weeks and that's due to some late summer vacations, a lot of other stuff going on, and some considerable drunkenness. Or rather, let's forget about the last one. There was no alcohol involved.

Still, here we are, and the charts are back!
I think we can start by concluding that not that much has happened from where we left off. No new games to talk about, and no other major stuff going on.

It's like it usually is, with the Top 15 being basically unchanged, and the bottom having its share of the ruckus. Or wait.

What's this? Heroes of newerth at place 12? I guess it's a typo of some sort. I haven't even heard of a game called Heroes of Newerth.

*Goes to check stats*

Hmm. That's wierd. I guess I have to go google a bit. Aha, it's some sort of DotA inspired strategy. That explains a thing or two. It's still in closed beta, it seems. But hold on a sec. A game in closed beta is this near the Top 10 on the Xfire charts? Jikes!

I need to try and get myself an account or key, and check it out. This could be something epic in the happening. I'm guessing a lot of the action that Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne is getting on the charts is thanks to DotA. What if that were to be replaced with Heroes of Newerth?

I guess we have a couple of really interesting weeks ahead....

Hello, it's Joonas with some Xfire related news. This is kind of embarrassing, though. The previous time I said that I could be posting workshop posts weekly and what happened? I didn't post one last week. I do have a good reason for that though, or at least a good excuse... a big birthday party.

But let's not think of the past. Even if I have been away for a bit it doesn't seem like the Xfire developers have been inactive, for there is a new beta available of the next Xfire version. As always the beta can be downloaded from Xfire Beta Testing Team page.

As one could imagine, the changes this time are mostly improvements over to the new features from previous version. This means lots of work done to the live broadcasting system that was completely reworked for previous version. The system has been optimized in many ways and the broadcast quality settings have been revised.

As you can see, the quality options now have more detailed information about which kind of connections they are designed for. I don't see why they put DSL so down since at least around here you can get much better speeds with DSL connections than with cable. Of course I will try the highest setting because my ADSL upload speed is 2 Mbit/s.


On other fronts, the MSN support has been improved. On the initial 1.113 launch there were some problems with some Live accounts unable to be used in Xfire. Now those should work.

The previous releases also included favorite community servers displaying. This caused potential crashes for some people, though, but should also now be fixed. Another bug causing Xfire to become unusable was freezing on startup caused by Internet Explorer 8 on some systems. The 1.114 Beta Notes claim that this has now also been fixed.


If any of the improvements listed here applied to you, please go ahead and try the new beta version and provide feedback at the beta testing forum. Especially if you had problems with the broadcast feature or logging in to MSN accounts before, you are encouraged to try if the...