Hacker News Reader

Comment by trh0awayman | Hacker News Reader

You should add "democratic mode" - every button push counts as a vote for that control. An election is held every X frames.

View on HN

Twitch Plays Pokemon (2014)

That's exactly what inspired me to make this, I wanted to learn about WebRTC and used that idea as a base but also wanted the potential to play more real-time titles as well.

Curious what is the advantage/disadvantage of WebRTC for an application like this vs WebSockets?

Great question my original implementation was actually with WebSockets for this. I ended up going with WebRTC as I'm using AWS APIGateway and streaming data for things like audio and video end up being very chatty or you end up buffering to reduce chattiness (and cost) but introduce lots of latency. I decided to shift to a peer to peer model to try and keep the latency down and use the websockets implementation I'd written as a signalling server instead.

Websockets are way easier to comprehend and implement than WebRTC (learning the connection negotiation process for NAT traversal isn't much fun). But in the end using WebRTC meant I could host a more cost effective demo that could still scale reasonably well.

I can't believe it has been almost 10 years since Twitch Plays Pokémon.

Also “anarchy mode” where it switches to a new random player after every button press.

Would be pretty fun once there’s more than a couple people connected.

Best mode is where decision makers are given power without any accountability. We just finished "The Legend of Gain of Function" and we were all surprised to not finish the game.

Good idea! Adding that to my to-do list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com