TwitchPlaysPokemon

[navamind]

70,000+ people (and rising) playing Red/Blue right now.

Twitch

FAQ:

FAQ
What is this?

TwitchPlaysPokemon is a social experiment, it is a stream of the Gameboy version of Pokemon Red (151 romhack) running on an emulator. An IRC bot translates buttons said in chat into keypresses (simulated in software, no fancy typist robots).

How do I play?

Say the button you want pushed in chat (a, b, start select, up, down, left, right), please be aware that there is considerable input lag (see below) and will take awhile before your inputs are registered.

Only one button per message is accepted, there's no combos or holds.

Why is it so laggy?

Twitch's servers introduce a lot of lag in order to support streaming to many people simultaneously.

The amount of lag is approximately 20~40 seconds depending on connection quality. After watching the stream for awhile the lag may increase a tiny amount (enough for chat spoilers), refreshing may help in this case.

Will you do a stream with [game]?

I'm very interested in creating automated Twitch streams with a strong focus on user interaction.

I would like to do something similar with other games and I have a few in mind already.

The biggest obstacle to overcome is the method of input, while crudely saying the buttons into chat works well enough for Pokemon and its turn-based gameplay it wouldn't work for games that expect a relatively (< 20 seconds) reaction from the player. I don't think this obstacle is insurmountable but it will require further ingenuity.

Why are buttons showing in the input feed not being registered in-game or why buttons that are being pressed not showing up in the input feed?

With the exception of start button throttling this is not intended behavior. The cause of buttons not being pressed in-game is usually because Pokemon doesn't queue button presses, this leads to a lot of button presses technically being registered by the game but ignored (for example: while walking from one space to another no inputs have any effect). Delayed/erroneous button presses are usually due to overload or other bugs with my software, I'm working on it and it has gotten better but it is still not perfect.

Will you make change X or implement feature Y?

While I am interested in hearing your idea(s) I am also very reluctant to mess with the format.

Information
Subscribers

Subscribers do not get to bypass the slow mode restrictions on chat. The reason for this is because unlike most Twitch streams the chat is an critical component of the content. I think it's best if everyone has the same capacity of input.

I've previously considered enabling sub-only mode for short moments to overcome difficult sections but I've cooled off on that idea and doubt I will consider it again.

Please don't subscribe with the expectation of special treatment.

IRC

Twitch Plays Pokemon's chat is hosted on Twitch's event chat server, in order to connect to the chat via IRC you must connect to 199.9.252.26 instead of irc.twitch.tv.

Start button throttle

Spammers pushed this button too much and now it doesn't work all the time. Sometimes it pops back in and works perfectly for awhile.

I dislike this compromise but unsuppressed start spam was annoying and didn't really have any effect on travel gameplay (no position changes).

Fucking hilarious.

 

[7NationalChampionships]

wat?

I read it...but duno what I read...