Natural Selection 2 is so much fun. Streaming with OBS is so much better

Hey there people, happy new year! It's been a while since my last gaming-related post. As you may know, I am now playing Natural Selection 2 a whole lot. This means I must have been streaming a lot lately, right?

Well, due to what amounts to extreme laziness, I haven't been streaming too much. :( But this is going to change, as I just found out this new streaming program called OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), which is, simply put, a "free, open source XSplit", except it is much faster and lighter.

For starters, it loads and closes as fast as Notepad. I can easily stream with the screen capture feature without as much as a dent on the frame rate, which I found very impressive. I can play NS2 at over 60 fps most of the time with the aforementioned software screen capture, just as if I wasn't streaming at all.

It has pretty much the same features as XSplit, lacking only a few I never used anyways. Even if it doesn't come with them out of the box, there is a plug-in framework so that people can add the features to OBS. I wouldn't be surprised to see plugins that replicate or perform certain features better than XSplit.

I have one complaint though: the video quality doesn't look as good as XSplit. Maybe I'm trying to push too hard with just 2000 kbps of video bandwidth? Who knows. I'll be tweaking it a bit more...

Back to Natural Selection 2! I did stream some matches, and they're available on my YouTube channel. Here's one of my recent ones - a ridiculous pubstomp (70 kills, 7 deaths!) with those newbies that bought the game on the recent Steam Sale: