Thousands Play a Single-player Game Simultaneously | Hacker News Reader

Thousands Play a Single-player Game Simultaneously

bbc.co.uk

54 pointstoksaitov18 comments

There are ideas that I see and say to myself "why didn't I think of doing that?" This is one of them. Any of us could have made this in the past several years but no one did so.

It's fascinating how the community must have to work to protect themselves from griefers. It only takes a few commands to release a pokemon (which happened a few days ago).

What's the threshold on parsing commands? Does it send a new command every frame, or is the emulator smart enough to let the old command "finish" before issuing a new one?

"anarchy" mode is, if i understand correctly, in such a way that all commands are passed to the emulator. Then, simulating a real game boy, most of them are discarded (think about pressing left-up-right-down in a gameboy, with a delay of a few milliseconds.. only left would be registered and the other ignored).

democracy seems to be a system in which everyone votes and the command which is more popular is executed (i don't know the timeframe).

to switch from one mode to the other 75% of votes are required in some timespan

Mandatory reading for non-believers.

Anarchy/Democracy Explained!: http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1y8o60/a...

I love this comment: People are going to write dissertations on this. http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1y6drw/l...

Yeah, for anarchy mode to truly work, it would be better to give 1 second or so delays between each queued command. It seems pointless to have it send them all at once, or only a few ms apart.

As for democracy mode, it seems to be sending a command once the top command receives 100+ votes.

There is a huge lag on the stream, around 20-30 seconds meaning if you send a command you are controlling the game 30 seconds later.

When democracy is in effect it takes votes for a time period(5-10 seconds?) and then chooses an action.

http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1y8o60/a...

The german newspaper Spiegel Online claims that the democracy mode waits for 5s to choose the most popular command.

(http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/games/twitch-plays-pokemon-ze... , in German)

For the first couple of days (and, it seems, right now) every command from the chat was sent to the emulator without discrimination (with the exception of 'start', the menu button, which was being spammed by griefers to halt progress) but the game, not the emulator, ignores commands at certain times. For instance, when the player sprite is moving from one tile to another, input is ignored.

Loren Carpenter did pretty much this back in 1991, using an audience and Pong.

http://vimeo.com/78043173

http://kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-b.html

There's a subreddit for discussing the stream: http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon

Of particular note is the live updates and google doc for current party status. Make it way easier to check in on progress than watching the stream itself.

(Praise Helix)

People are really upset about the switch to a vote based input system.

I can sort of understand why. Progress now feels inevitable rather than miraculous. There was places and menus where it is quite possible to dismiss all your pokemon permanently, or use up all the currency in the game and not be able to earn more. So the tension was quite high! Can we really risk going into a building that would let us get rid of all the pokemon?

The main character of Pokemon, the game, is named "Red".

"Ash" is the name of the main character from the anime. I know they're supposed to be the same guy, but serious hardcore players distinguish the two.

Actually, its not "hardcore players" who distinguish them. they are actually are separate characters. Red is the protagonist in the game/manga. Ash only exists in the anime, which is not always parallel to the game/manga.

There is an interesting development. A five-second rule caused a riot (in the Twitch chat and in the game). So the developer decided to add a system that people can vote whether they want to pass commands directly to the emulator (anarchy) or allow the system to select the next most popular command. Now they can select an appropriate strategy based on a situation at hand.

When I read the title, I thought they were writing about Flapmmo [1]!

[1]http://flapmmo.com/

Apparently they discarded their charizard (their starting monster, which is generally the most powerful one throughout the game) pretty early on, and it went downhill from there.

Most amusing. Reddit in general seems to be extracting an enormous amount of fun from this. Makes me wish I was 12 again. Sort of.

All this can turn into a completely new genre of games: turn-based single-player MMOs. The potential is rather interesting.

It's a crowd-sourced fuzzer for Pokemon Red!

.... I was hoping this would be about the olympics ;)

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