Idle Streaming Community: Twitchy, Tasty

[GazpachoDuJour]

Oh hey! I'm Gaz!

 

I've been an avid reader for years but just recently decided to try and get more involved with the community. The streaming community seems like a great place to start, it's super cool and positive and I've been meaning to start streaming again too! I'll be primarily streaming digital card games like Hearthstone and Duelyst, specifically the draft modes in those games because I think those are the most entertaining. Though I may start a blind playthrough of Numenera to stream since I'm a massive fan of the original Planescape: Torment!

 

You can find my stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/dujourgazpacho

 

I think I'll start streaming this morning too, most likely a Gauntlet run in Duelyst. Oh, and if you're interested in these kind of games and would like to join me as a co-host, feel free to ask! I'd love to have someone else on, regardless of prior knowledge or skill level!

[zi11ion]

Hello, I'm zi11ion. I'm somewhat new to streaming on Twitch. I'll be mostly streaming Retro games from original console hardware and also random other things that pique my interest, such as Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

https://www.twitch.tv/zi11ion

 

Nice to be in your company!

[Problem Machine]

Added followed hosted etc. I'm trying to see about getting onto a streaming schedule again, but still trying to figure out what will work for me. I'm probably going to be streaming multiplayer Terraria and Starbound along with Feeona and (maybe?) Badfinger and evilskillit on Fridays and Tuesdays respectively for a while. Currently playing through Ori and the Blind Forest, which I'm trying to do around noonish PST. If I can stick to a schedule for a couple of weeks and feel good doing it then I'll make it formal.

Anyone know any good resources for setting up a channel to look more professional? I'm not exactly sure where to start in terms of overlays or pre/post-stream screens or what have you, but get the feeling they make a big difference when it comes to the presentation of a channel.

 

ALSO: I noticed there are both 'idle_thumbs' and 'thumbs_readers' communities. Which is the preferred community for people to stream to? Which should I be linking to?

[eRonin]

Thumbs_readers is the one more people use, but most folks just stream to other bigger communities with more viewership anyway. I originally made idle_thumbs but decided I didn't want to make it seem like it was affiliated with the actual Idle Thumbs folks, so I made thumbs_readers, and there doesn't seem to be a way to delete a community right now. In general the communities feature seems half-baked. In other twitch news though; they did finally add playlists to stream archives, so that's nice.

[Zeusthecat]

10 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

Added followed hosted etc. I'm trying to see about getting onto a streaming schedule again, but still trying to figure out what will work for me. I'm probably going to be streaming multiplayer Terraria and Starbound along with Feeona and (maybe?) Badfinger and evilskillit on Fridays and Tuesdays respectively for a while. Currently playing through Ori and the Blind Forest, which I'm trying to do around noonish PST. If I can stick to a schedule for a couple of weeks and feel good doing it then I'll make it formal.

Anyone know any good resources for setting up a channel to look more professional? I'm not exactly sure where to start in terms of overlays or pre/post-stream screens or what have you, but get the feeling they make a big difference when it comes to the presentation of a channel.

 

ALSO: I noticed there are both 'idle_thumbs' and 'thumbs_readers' communities. Which is the preferred community for people to stream to? Which should I be linking to?

 

For Twitch panels, I used this website: https://nerdordie.com/free-resources/customizable-twitch-panels/ . It let's you do some basic customization of the colors and size and spits out some really nice, consistent and professional looking panel images. This is a pretty popular resource that a lot of streamers seemingly use and it's much quicker and easier than trying to make your own.

 

For information like follower count, subs, donations, popup alerts, etc. StreamLabs (formerly Twitch Alerts) seems to be the standard: https://streamlabs.com/. It spits out a bunch of .txt files in a location you specify that are constantly being updated with the latest data. You can then set up text with various effects in your streaming software that is linked to these files. In OBS, it is as simple as adding a new text source and linking it to the desired file rather than putting static text in. Then through filters you can add scroll effects and such.

 

I'm not sure I'm the best person to give advice on pre/post/away stream screens since mine is just a dorky looping video of my cats having a boxing match, but I handle it by setting up a few extra scenes in OBS, linking the video file (with the video source volume muted), and layering some images and scrolling text on top. When I need to toggle to one of those scenes I just click the appropriate scene in OBS and it switches from my game feed to one of the alternate scenes with a simple fade effect.

 

I've been constantly tweaking this presentation stuff and trying to make improvements little by little so I'm definitely also curious to hear what others around here recommend.

[Salacious Snake]

Is it just me, or is twitch.tv a confusing and awkward website to navigate? I think it's awful! 

[TychoCelchuuu]

Everything's a fucking inscrutable icon on the left, or an inscrutable icon buried in a menu that you open by clicking an inscrutable icon.

[eRonin]

I basically only ever go to my following page, which is what I have bookmarked in my browser, not the home page. 

[coughlinjon]

Hey all 

 

I stream game development almost daily here: www.twitch.tv/jonmakesgames

 

and I stream games on occasion from www.twitch.tv/wilburnosebury

 

 

[BillTheCat]

I'm trying to put together a multiplayer Heroes of Might and Magic 3 stream.  Planning on doing it this weekend or the next.

 

If you want to join in please fill out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/iOdzs75btzsz68wl1

 

We're going to be playing the classic version of the game which you can pick up from gog if you don't already have it. There's an HD mod which will let you run the game at resolutions above 800x600 as well. 

[jonbjohns]

my stream is https://www.twitch.tv/jonbjohns

I'm only guaranteed to do Extra Life. I rarely stream otherwise, but there are a few games I'm supposed to stream due to requests for friends that I'll stream irregularly for. That list includes MGS4 and Dead Space.

[Jutranjo]

I got a game working with my 1 Mbit upload speed! It's Morrowind with a few mods

 

https://www.twitch.tv/jutranjo

 

I'm prob only going to be streaming that, I thought I got Tamriel Rebuilt to work but it turns out it just crashes when I try to go there. I'll get that working eventually, maybe I'll play some of the main/side quest lines too. Schedule is "the stream will be online whenever it's online".

[Problem Machine]

On 4/28/2017 at 2:42 PM, jonbjohns said:

my stream is https://www.twitch.tv/jonbjohns

 

6 hours ago, Jutranjo said:

https://www.twitch.tv/jutranjo

Added, followed, hosted

[Reyturner]

hey, how ya doin' 

 

long time viewer, first time streamer. 

 

my stream is at https://www.twitch.tv/reyturner

 

I'll be playing Dota 2, PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUND!!!!!!!!11!1!!! and probably some other stuff like Solium Infernum or random Itch.io games (I got like 100 of them from the ACLU so I might as well put them to use ) 

[Zeusthecat]

So I found out last night that someone who had followed me on Twitch a while back and watches my streams is not only from my same hometown of Tucson Arizona, but even went to the exact same tiny Seventh Day Adventist grade school as me at the exact same time and was in my class of <15 people (3rd through 6th grade all in one class with one teacher). She had already shared her name with me previously so as soon as she name dropped the school I realized I knew exactly who she was because there was only one person in our class with that name.

 

What's even stranger is that we had spent a fair amount of time reminiscing about Tucson previously and joked that we had probably run into each other at one point when we lived there. Turns out that we actually knew each other for years up through the beginning of high school.

 

My mind is still reeling from that revelation and just figured I'd share. The odds of her randomly running into my dumb Minecraft streams and actually following me and sticking around have to be so astronomically low, especially considering our Seventh Day Adventist school literally had like 35-40 people from kindergarten through 8th grade.

 

Edit: Oh, and having that revelation while streaming and playing with my other long time friend from Tucson was especially weird. It was very hard to keep my composure.

[TychoCelchuuu]

If anyone's interested, in this upcoming week (starting Monday) at 5:00 PM each evening I'll be playing through BioShock Infinite on my stream (kind of a long story). If you're interested in watching, more details are here. I doubt I will meet someone from 3rd grade but maybe I'll meet an alternate reality version of myself who went to a different 3rd grade school.

[BillTheCat]

I made a simple counter using AutoHotKey to track how many times I've gotten spooped while playing SOMA. I figured I'd post it here in case other people want a simple counter and it can be easily modified to display other manual counts.

 

It uses the + and - keys on the numpad to increment/decrement the counter.

 

Setup:

1. Download and install autohotkey https://autohotkey.com/
2. Copy this code https://pastebin.com/5MBcxjUj into a text editor
3. Change line 2 to where you want the counter text file to live
4. Change line 5 if you want to count something other than spoops
5. Save the file as a .ahk and double-click the file to start the script running
6. Hit numpad + and - a few times and open the counter text file to make sure it's working
7. In OBS make a new Text source and set it to read from the counter text file like this: 

 

That's it