What’s going on, updates, and Terraria server!

So it’s been a while. Half a year I think since I’ve updated practically anything on this blog. Back then it was all about WoW stuff, hacking it, botting it, and what not. Those days are gone now. I’ve lost interest not only in World of Warcraft itself for nearly a year now, I’ve even lost interest in hacking, botting and cheating in every respect in it. That’s when you know a game is bad. The future of this blog won’t cover any World of Warcraft anymore, sorry folks! We’ll be focusing on coding still, and maybe hacking some other games – so there’s still much fun to be had!

I’ve been getting into these indie games lately, and I must say they’re quite fun to play – and on top of that, you can quit after 15 minutes. That is amazing. One of these games I’ve been playing is called Terraria. It’s been topping the Steam listings for a week or three now, and a few of my friends told me to get it, so I decided it may be worth the 10 quid, and gave it a go.

Now, the problem with these games is that I don’t really like playing solo. When I play these games, I love to do multiplayer with some mates, and have a go at things. Problem is you need a server to do so, because Terraria doesn’t support peer to peer, which is a good thing! However, when the developers launched with that idea, they didn’t figure out they may want to provide server software so third party hosters could host Terraria for us to play on! Instead, you have to run the game twice, sort your port forwarding, or use the ever-so-tedious Hamachi. You can’t run the server on a serverbox, because the game client requires Direct3D, direct 3D requires a graphics card, and server boxes do not have graphics cards. On top of that you need a whole lot of XNA and Visual Studio crap. Luckily for me, I already had those, so it wasn’t too much of a hassle.

There is a bright side to all this misery though; Terraria is written in C# .NET, and exposes its entire API. I think. Well, most of it anyway. That’s why I’ll be focusing the coming week on developing a server client for this which relies solely on the Terraria assembly, and can actually run on my server box. I’ll be posting the progress on here, and I’ll figure out what I do with the release – it may be open source, but I’m not sure what the Terraria devs think about that, so I guess I’ll contact them first. Hey, at least I’m not decompiling their assemblies and ripping their code to make a server (which required Direct3D still, so it still sucked) like the guy on their forums, who got banned by the way.

I’ve given it a spin for an hour or two earlier today, and turns out I can already have the client find the server across the internet, so I don’t think the rest will be a problem. What I do find worrying is that you can apparently connect to any TcpClient across the net with Terraria, and who knows what they stream at you through it? I don’t. If Terraria is to grow, they will most certainly need to step up their security, otherwise it’s going to be really easy for malicious developers to pull tricks with those servers.

See you in a few days when the first few screenshots, and perhaps a few lines of code can be spilled. Who knows!

ps. I’m going to have a good laugh if I beat the Terraria devs to making a properly working server package. Really.
ps 2. Yes, the entire thing will be freeware. Period. I’m not going to charge for something which compliments a successful game like this. Don’t worry!