Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball (ribbie.tv)

65 points by brownrout an hour ago

29 comments:

by e28eta a few seconds ago

I don’t watch baseball (maybe a couple games a year), but I think it could use some sound / audio, so you can have it running while doing something else.

IDK if there’s an easy way for the average person to get a live audio broadcast feed from games, so maybe your target market would be listening to that instead.

I’m thinking it could use some sound effects, for balls, strikes, hits, etc. I only tuned in for a couple pitches and then it was between innings, so maybe the more significant events already have something, and I just wasn’t patient enough to experience them.

I was looking away when the last out of the inning happened (or maybe changing views?). Is there a display of what caused the out, and maybe an animation of the fielders coming into the dugout, or does it flash up the “between innings” screen pretty quickly?

It might be nice to have a significant event summary available somewhere. It feels hard to believe that this would catch someone’s attention well enough that they’re watching the whole thing, and without audio cues / replays, I know I wouldn’t be interested in watching it for any length of time.

by austinallegro 21 minutes ago

This is brilliant. Can you make a sub-game, Streets of Rage II beat em up that you can play when the benches clear in a real game? Perhaps have Mortal Kombat finishing moves when the managers are fighting the umpires?

by brownrout 14 minutes ago

Ha! And when the batter rushes the mound. Jokes aside, like the idea of some interactive minigames between plays and innings...

by vitorbaptistaa 12 minutes ago

Amazing project! I'd love to see something like this for the football world cup. Maybe a FIFA 97 style?

I wonder if some kind of filter would work or we would need some data source. Looks much harder given the fast-paced nature of the game.

by dylan604 a minute ago

The thing that works for baseball is how slow the game is. There's plenty of time in between pitches to make the animation simple. With sports with constant movement like a WC match would require a lot more resources. Might as well be a game engine at that point.

Watching one of these live just brings home exactly how low activity a baseball match is. You can easily miss a pitch if you're not actively watching it and keep your attention span on it. It also brings to mind how much the commentary during a game keeps the viewer engaged. Live video and a good director cutting to different cameras also helps. Radio with out the color would be insanely boring:

Here's the pitch, low and outside.Ball 1.

30 secs of silence.

Here's the pitch, fast ball down the middle. Swing and a miss. Count is now 1-1.

30 secs of silence.

by mysterydip 11 days ago

Love the look of this! Enjoyed watching a bit, will definitely have it on later.

One comment is, during “in between innings” when it was showing around the league and other stats, the text was really small on my phone. If possible I’d rather have it scrolling or switching between pages of data than trying to fit it on one screen. I get that on a tv or pc it’s probably the right size, so not sure if you’d want to spend the effort to have a separate view for small screens.

by dang an hour ago

(this and Urgo's comments were posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377493 a week ago, but since that thread didn't get much attention, I've moved them hither)

by ecommerceguy 9 minutes ago

This is great! Thank you for coming up with this.

edit- First 2 plays I watched are back to back homers. Go Royals!

by Urgo 11 days ago

I'm not a sports person and other then going to a superbowl party really don't watch anything but this is really cool. I even put a game on the tv and was comparing it to the site. Very well done :) If there was some way to have live audio streaming in to hear what was going on while the screen animated it that'd make this perfect but I imagine that isn't really a thing that can be done.

Either way though, great job on this!

by tiahura 2 minutes ago

Awesome.

do the mlb streams flag a challenge?

by JMiao 41 minutes ago

fun idea and gj execution, but the art looks like bad ai pixel art, at least on my screen. gives it that uncanny youtube music stream look.

by vunderba 36 minutes ago

This is a classic problem for people who didn't grow up making 8-bit pixel art. Typing "pixel art" into Nano-Banana only creates the illusion of pixel art, which quickly breaks down under modest scrutiny, particularly at larger resolutions.

That's why you can see "smeared edges," "fringing," etc.

Even a basic nearest neighbor downscale/upscale would have squashed some of the higher frequency noise.

OP: Look into palette reduction and pixel grids. This is a decent start as a post-processing tool for this stuff.

https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

by JMiao 27 minutes ago

yes. i am more perceptive of bad art vs bad code. seeing so much bad generated art...everywhere...makes me wonder how much bad code is being put out there. art isn't load-bearing, but code can be.

by brownrout 12 minutes ago

Yeah because it is AI pixel art :/ But something also seems off with the AA right now. Going to try to fix. Then, maybe sponsor some artist-made sprites later if there's interest in the project.

by fitsumbelay 28 minutes ago

this f**ng rocks

Something about the way baseball itself is played seems to make recreations really satisfying -- like, more accurate? -- and fun compared to say, soccer hilights of matches on Youtube made with what looks like an EA soccer video game

I also really like the idea of recreating any type of event in this format. It's almost like photogrammetry but with as much creative intention as you have documentary. very awesome, very inspirational really

by cm11 an hour ago

Awesome! Sometimes a thing conveys it was built with some love or intention. It's not restricted to fun/entertaining content, it can be Saas too. I'm talking more from how it looks and feels than necessarily what's going on in the backend, but I'm not really talking about graphics.

by kridsdale3 15 minutes ago

PEDANT ALERT:

This is clearly 16 bit.

by germanrabbit an hour ago

What a joy this is

by fitsumbelay 27 minutes ago

"joy" is the word

by brownrout an hour ago

Thanks! Glad you like.

by ninju 44 minutes ago

When I choose "Full" view it should go to fullscreen view of the browser (hiding address bar, bookmarks, tabs, etc...)

by unstruktured 22 minutes ago

very cool! maybe make a soccer one for world cup?

by brownrout 16 minutes ago

Love this idea. Golf and Tennis, too. I think the main challenge for other sports would be less access to near-realtime game data down to the ball and player position, etc.

by austinallegro 20 minutes ago

Football. Not soccer.

by jayknight 17 minutes ago

Tomato, tomato.

by devrundown an hour ago

This is really cool! Would love a technical breakdown on how you put this together.

by THansenite 13 minutes ago

Agreed. As a developer, I'd love to see how this was done or if you have it out on Github.

by SubiculumCode an hour ago

Do you have a video of past livecasts to gt a feel?

by brownrout 36 minutes ago
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