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by danielweber 4502 days ago
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?

3 comments

"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