Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball

(ribbie.tv)

74 points | by brownrout 1 hour ago

18 comments

  • e28eta 4 minutes 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.

  • vitorbaptistaa 16 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.

    • dylan604 5 minutes 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.

  • austinallegro 24 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?
    • brownrout 18 minutes ago
      Ha! And when the batter rushes the mound. Jokes aside, like the idea of some interactive minigames between plays and innings...
  • mysterydip 10 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.

  • Urgo 10 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!

  • ecommerceguy 12 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!

  • JMiao 45 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.
    • vunderba 40 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

      • JMiao 31 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.
    • brownrout 16 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.
  • fitsumbelay 32 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

  • cm11 54 minutes 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.
  • germanrabbit 1 hour ago
    What a joy this is
  • kridsdale3 19 minutes ago
    PEDANT ALERT:

    This is clearly 16 bit.

    • ghostbrainalpha 4 minutes ago
      This is Hacker News where we appreciate these types comments.
  • tiahura 6 minutes ago
    Awesome.

    do the mlb streams flag a challenge?

  • ninju 48 minutes ago
    When I choose "Full" view it should go to fullscreen view of the browser (hiding address bar, bookmarks, tabs, etc...)
  • unstruktured 26 minutes ago
    very cool! maybe make a soccer one for world cup?
    • brownrout 19 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.
    • austinallegro 24 minutes ago
      Football. Not soccer.
      • jayknight 21 minutes ago
        Tomato, tomato.
        • dylan604 1 minute ago
          Depends if you mean Madden or FIFA. Then it's tomato and screwdriver
  • devrundown 1 hour ago
    This is really cool! Would love a technical breakdown on how you put this together.
    • THansenite 17 minutes ago
      Agreed. As a developer, I'd love to see how this was done or if you have it out on Github.
  • SubiculumCode 58 minutes ago
    Do you have a video of past livecasts to gt a feel?
  • vrtnis 33 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • apollo_orbit 55 minutes ago
    [dead]