Introduction

Currently between games while we wait for A Realm Reborn's beta to surface, I'd like to invite you all to join me in what will hopefully be some fun in an old game everybody played, sometimes for hundreds of hours, but nobody really played together. Lots of people are excited for Starbound, but that's not out yet, so I'd like to invite you all to play Terraria one last time.

But if we're going to play a game everybody already played, we need to switch things up a bit to make them interesting. We shall be playing Hardcore Survival. All participants will play at the same time in a single time-slot, with perma-death hardcore characters. Once you die, you're gone for good. This will hopefully ensure everybody panics at the slightest thing and we'll all be laughing ourselves to death.

The entire game will be live-streamed, recorded and later uploaded to YouTube for our enjoyment. If people help fraps footage, we'll even combine them for the YouTube video so we'll have multiple cameras and don't miss any action.

Rules

• All characters are made fresh, starting equipment only.
• All characters are set to Hardcore mode.
• All players on voice chat, no exceptions. Yes, that includes me.
• All loot is finders keepers. Trading and passing is allowed.
• Upon death, you are out of the game. There will be no respawning.

Goal

• The goal of the game will be to defeat the Wall of Flesh, or die trying.
  
• A time limit will be placed on the game to prevent it dragging on, and make it easier for participants to put aside time for the challenge. Not certain what this time limit will be yet, but possibly around 2-3 hours.
  
• If players are not in a position to summon the Wall of Flesh by this time limit, or if only a single player remains and they are not ready to fight the Wall of Flesh, all bosses will be summoned simultaneously for a hilarious ending.

Supplementary Rules

• Server world will be set to small. This will speed the game up by placing mined resources closer together and reduce travelling time.
  
• All players will be on Red Team so that we can see everybody's location and current HP value.
  
• No grenades, bombs, or dynamite. Yes, it's funny, but forcibly ejecting another player from the game with perma-death is not. These will be banned server-side.
  
• Ownership of the game is not required. I have 4 spare copies of Terraria I will gladly give for free if you agree to join the challenge. If you'd rather not play but would like to watch, the live-stream will also be available.

Hints & Tips

• Don't wander off on your own if you can help it.
  
• Don't be outside at night time until you are adequately geared for it. If you're used to playing Terraria with end-game gear, you'll forget how easy it is to become trapped with a zombie or swarmed with floating eyes you can't get away from when you have crappy weapons and no high/double jump.
  
• Watch out for falling damage. It's pretty easy to one-shot yourself if you fall in a hole or jump off a hill by accident, especially with fresh HP levels.
  
• Use potions sooner rather than later. I'd recommend somebody concentrates on setting up a potion farm with clay pots and seeds. Obsidian Skin potions are going to be pretty important if you want to survive hell without dying.

When?

Right now there isn't a time or date. This thread is to gauge interest before going ahead, and I know there will be some people who won't even see this thread in a timely manner. So we may be talking a week or two before it happens. It will probably be a weekend evening, as that usually makes it easier for most people. Once we know who's interested, we'll see if we can set a time.

If all goes well, I'm hoping we may even want to do it again in future with another game. Or if we all die horribly in the first 15 minutes, perhaps a second attempt would be in order. Anything is possible.

If you're interested, leave a message!

Seriously though, if I'm around, I'd be down for it, sounds like it could be fun.

Ket you should have told me about this sooner, you should have just messaged me on Steam or something.


Im in for sure.

_________________
COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

This sounds fun, I'm in!

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I'll be decorating the home base

Count me in for sure! I like this idea!

I'll make it a point to play Terraria a bit beforehand, so I have an idea what to do.

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Im down for this lol

That's 7 so far! More the merrier!

I've been playing with XSplit to get live-streaming working. I'm hoping my PC will be happy to play the game, live-stream encode it AND fraps it at the same time. Chances are in the next few days I'll grab one or two of you to help me test it out.

For the record, the stream will be unlisted and accessible by link only. It's really just there for anybody not playing if they still wanna see, or for people in the game to use to see what's going on elsewhere. I'm simply using the stream to record the game at the same time, that's what XSplit is designed for.

For the challenge itself I think I intend to try and put together a checklist of tasks that need to be done if we want to stand a chance of winning. Otherwise everyone's gonna just run around aimlessly and we risk wasting too much time.

Something like:

• [ ] Need someone to go find anything that mitigates falling damage so we can start a hellivator.
• [ ] Need a group of people to go mining and try to find an early source of iron so we can get armor sooner rather than later
• [ ] Need someone to build up the house using all the wood.
• [ ] Need someone to try and aquire clay and sand and start a potion farm.
• [ ] Need a brave group of people with many wooden platforms to actually start a hellivator.

I also want to somehow get everyone's HP bars displayed on the video. I might be able to do it with some kind of client-side mod, but Google seems to suggest that such a thing does not exist yet, but the modding tools available should be able to make it possible. Lots of preparation work for this, but it'll save me insane amounts of video editing later.

Looking forward to this, thinking about strategies and things in my head constantly. Sure as hell hope we get lots of Magic Mirrors, I want to have that shit hotkeyed for emergencies. Better to teleport yourself home with half your HP when you didn't really need to, than risk letting it go low and dying from not using it in time.

According to Steam, like 17 people in LS played Terraria, lets hope we get some more people too.

Anybody have any preferences for the time? I'm thinking something like evening Saturday, or maybe Sunday. Something like 11PM GMT / 6PM EST / 3PM PST. With the event running for either 2 or 3 hours.

There's probably no reason it can't be this weekend, unless people want to hold out for more volunteers.

I'm in! Sat 6PM EST sounds good to me. Gotta admit, I got a little excited when I read this.

If I'm back home by 6pm I'll totally join up.

To summarise above; As of this post, current survivors are: (9)

Ket
Krellis
Yarr
Soul
Kio
Kluya
Bailey
Spyder
Corwin

Is that old Mumble server still around? Or are we gonna be stuck trying to make steam's crappy voice chat work.

I can't this or next Sat. I could this or next Sunday. Don't change anything for me though. Might be hard to cater to everybody's schedules. The general times you are picking are very good.

The mumble server is still around!

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So I spent this morning setting things up.

I'm going to have to drop the live-stream idea. XSplit seems to be crashing Terraria if I use it to make a local high bitrate recording. I'm gonna have to stick to Fraps and just upload a video once we're done, the old fashioned way. I was trying to use XSplit mainly because it meant there'd be no editing, encoding, or uploading, and the video would have been ready to go onto YouTube within minutes.

I have a special TShock server set up which should allow me to enforce a few things. For example it won't let anybody connect if their character is not set to hardcore mode.

I'd move it to Sunday if it meant getting everyone but I imagine moving it means someone else would need to drop instead, such is the life of trying to organise any event ever.

I need to work on getting voice-chat recorded now. I don't know if Fraps will automatically pick up audio from two-three different sources, including myself. Not to mention I usually use VC on a computer other than the one I'll be doing the recording on. Apparently Mumble itself supports multi-channel recording, but only if your server is version 1.2.3 or above, anybody know?

Exactly lol, no worries. I'll watch the video if I can't make it

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This sounds like a lot of fun. I've never played terraria but I look forward to seeing some videos/SSs or reading anecdotes of the goings on after the fact.

Been working on an overlay to put on the video.

It's required a lot of work, I've had to create a custom server plugin AND a custom web page to process the data, I'll have to record the window separately on another computer, and I'll have to use chroma-key and stuff to actually overlay it on the image later, but it should be pretty cool.

It shows the names and HP of all of the players, along with their current weapon/tool. This one here's using dummy data for screenshot purposes, but it does actually work.

Also, I'm probably gonna need a few guys with Fraps to help me record.

In the event that I die early, the recording is somewhat botched up. Will need a few other people playing in an exact 1280x720 window with fraps running also recording it at exactly 30 FPS (not 29.97), steam and mumble overlays disabled, and no voice being picked up by fraps (because i'll have the voice recordings separately). If I die, we can just switch recordings, but before then we can use them as multiple camera angles too.

If you're used to Fraps-ing stuff and encoding it let me know, it'll help a lot.

Hopefully people will be around tomorrow (Saturday) at 11PM GMT / 5PM EST / 3PM PST. I want to round people up onto voice chat probably 10-15 minutes early to make sure everything is working.

I'll also need to round everybody up onto the server before we actually start recording to make sure everyone can get in, but that means you guys need to not cheat and start before we're allowed to. I'll use the server to make sure it stays day-time and we're not suddenly swarmed with zombies while trying to set up.

Something shitty came up this weekend and I may not be around Saturday. Sorry.

I'll be on at 6PM

_________________
COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

All over, thoughts:

2-3 hours is nowhere near enough time to fight Wall of Flesh. We never even made it to Eye of Cthulu. Oops.

We ended up breaking the hardcore rule a lot, everyone was just having fun playing and messing around that we didn't really want to stop. In future I think we'll just stick to the softcore characters and just play the game normally.

3 hours of video isn't going to be fun to watch, there's too many low points for it to be entertaining. I might make a highlight video instead if I can find some decent bits, but it's gonna take me quite a while to shift through it all. The biggest issue here is that we were always split up. Even though something funny was going on somewhere, it wasn't on camera.

I think people were a little too spread out and unfocussed for us to make decent progress. Within the first few minutes everybody had dug off in their own direction, with slow as hell copper pickaxes. If we stuck together we'd have gotten around a lot quicker.

Don't let that put anybody off, I'm pretty sure everyone had a blast. Had a lot of people call this "the practice run", so I'm pretty sure there'll be more to come.

The leaderboard:

Player - Died At
1) Yarr - 34 Minutes
2) Krellis - 1:17 Hours
3) Spy - 1:25 Hours
4) Soul - 2:15 Hours
5) Ket & Kio - Died together in a horrible stationary boulder accident at 2:18 Hours.

Sounds like everyone had fun regardless. Maybe we'll do it again next week with a few rule tweaks.

Im totally down for doing that again. I think Mediumcore is a better idea, then we can have a death count and the lowest wins.

_________________
COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

I'm down for doing it again, I had fun. We definitely need to stick together next time, or at least split into 2 groups and aim for different goals. It didn't take long before people started splitting up and dying horrible horrible deaths.

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Taken approximately 9 hours (all day) to edit the video. It's rendering now which should take an hour or so, then a few minutes to upload to YouTube and process it. I'll have it up shortly. Hope everyone enjoys it.

Here it is! CKD plays Terraria Hardcore! [January 19th 2013]



Took me all day to edit over 3 hours (117GB) of video. I probably won't be doing this for everything we do, it's a heck of a lot of work. Hopefully it's all worth it.

Sorry that there's a lot of footage I didn't get of what were probably pretty funny moments. It's kind of hard to be everywhere at once.