Finally, An Alternative (Day 3737 - 2/17/20)

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Chaz is a wizard. Stephen says that Chaz is one of his best friends that he's known for many years. He is also a programmer. Stephen says that Chaz has helped him and Mallory make their work a lot easier.

He talks about how the vlog descriptions contain a "Time Machina" part which has links to all the vlogs from previous years that had the same date. One day, Chaz asked him about the process he uses to get those links. Stephen told him that he had just been manually searching up all those links. Chaz wrote a programming script in 15 minutes that would pull those links for him. Chaz has also designed a lot of things for Extra Life like the overlay and the game roulette. He also made the Patreon ticker and the overlay for Breakfast Stream. Additionally, he wrote some script for Discord which make their names appear whenever someone is talking in Stephen & Friends videos.

Stephen then talks about how he is not a programmer, but he is able to read code and get a general idea of what it's doing. He says that they are lucky to have Chaz in their lives who is enthusiastic about what the work they're doing. Chaz has probably saved them thousands of hours of work time over the years.

Stephen says that all of this was context to talk about how Chaz made a new Streamlabs. Chaz has talked about programming it from scratch for a long time, but Stephen never thought that he would actually do it. It also only took him 3-4 days to code it. Stephen explains that the Streamlabs Chaz coded is private as it is still in the testing phase. He says that if it goes well, then Chaz will continue working on it and may decide release it to the public some day.

They have used alerts ever since they started doing Twitch 18 months ago. Streamlabs is one of the biggest sites for uploading alerts on Twitch, so most Twitch streamers use it. Stephen had noticed that there were constant problems with alerts disappearing from Streamlabs. Some alerts disappear after a week or even after 30 minutes. This is not good because sometimes they pause alerts while recording an episode on stream which can last for over 30 minutes. Chaz poked around the Streamlabs website and found some code that could explain why alerts are disappearing. Ever since they noticed these issues, Chaz had always said that he should just program a new Streamlabs himself. On Friday, Chaz sent Stephen a link to the new Streamlabs he coded from scratch. It properly shows all the alerts and they were able to use it for the Yoshi's Island finale stream on that same day. It didn't control the alerts on screen, but it showed them all the alerts that were appearing in chat. Stephen says that he believed that it would work since Chaz coded it with more simplistic code.

Afterwards, Stephen had asked Chaz if he was going to add the option to add new alerts on the new Streamlabs. He says that the whole purpose of Streamlabs is that you're able to upload animated gifs and add audio to them for alerts. Yesterday, Chaz sent him a link to the alert settings that he programmed. So, Stephen can now upload new alerts, choose the bit value or subscription tier for the alerts, and add audio to the alerts. Chaz also finished the overlay today, so he finished programming all of this in 4 days. Stephen thinks it's crazy that Chaz was able to make an entire alternative website to Streamlabs in such a short amount of time. But, he says that Chaz doesn't really think that it's crazy that he finished all of that in 4 days. Stephen talks about how this new Streamlabs is great because Chaz can program it to fit their exact needs.

Then, he talks about how they usually have the alerts appear in a tiny box in the corner on stream. Stephen told Chaz that it would cool if he could make it so that for special alerts the image could move around the screen. It is possible to do it in Streamlabs, but it is difficult to code by hand. Stephen talks about how he had to code a lot of things on Streamlabs because some things didn't work properly and then Chaz would fix his code afterwards. For example, text wrap didn't work for some of the alerts even though it was a default tool.

Tomorrow is their first live run of the new overlay that allows the alerts to move around the screen. He is excited, but nervous since he has been using Streamlabs ever since they started doing Twitch regularly. But, he trusts Chaz since Chaz has proven that he knows what he's doing. Chaz also knows their specific needs well, so he will be able to program it in a way that works for them. Stephen mentions that the overlay looks identical to how it was before, so people might not even notice the change. He says that he will give an update about how well this new Streamlabs works and whether or not Chaz will eventually open it up to the public. Stephen is going to bed now as he stayed up to get everything set up and working.