Sudden Death

Super Smash Bros Melee, commonly referred to as "Smash," is cross-over fighting game known for its large following in the eSport community. It was released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2001, and is the Gamecube's best selling game, having sold over 7 million copies by early 2008. With tens of thousands competitors and hundreds of thousands spectators, it has an enormous cult following and an ever growing fan-base. There is an increasing desire to see the sport take the next level, and that means introducing statistics to the playing field. Despite this need, Nintendo has no desire to patch a game that is operated on a console that is 15 years old--almost three generations old.

Project: SD is a play on several phrases, one of them being "senior design." But the most appropriate translation for the acronym SD is "sudden death."

Sudden death is a term used to describe a tie-breaking event in any competitive activity or event. Also known as "next score wins," it is a form of competition where the play ends when one competitor is immediately ahead of another.

We felt that sudden death was an appropriate name for our team for a number of reasons. (For one, we certainly felt like death at one point or another during this course.) But in particular, a match in Smash will end in a round of sudden death if the competitors are just at the edge of clearing a victory. It felt fitting to be named for something that culminates in excitement and high stakes.

Still not convinced of eSports and its legitimacy? Take a look at our side bar for links to some of the major fighting game tournaments. You can also check out Twitch, a major streaming platform for online gamers of all genres. Let your mind expand just a bit.

Super Smash Bros Melee currently has no in-client method for tracking statistics. Since there is no means to see statistics as the match happens, viewers do not have a good method for digesting the match in front of them through relevant statistics, and commentators cannot offer the highest quality of analysis possible. Despite this need, Nintendo has no desire to patch a game that is operated on a console that is 15 years old--almost three generations old.

We wanted to solve the problem that current Smash players and viewers face when they play or watch a game, which is the lack of in-depth analytics and measurements during a given match. We achieved this with three overarching subsystems: We first acquired the data of interest, by tapping into a Nintendo Wii using breakout pins that were inserted into the memory card slot. These pins allowed a PIC32 microcontroller to receive the Wii’s SPI bus data as a slave. This microcontroller then calculated the statistics we chose to compute, and sent them along with key match data to an ESP as a master in a different SPI bus. The ESP served as our second overarching subsystem. It took the data sent by the PIC32 and sorted each piece of information into MQTT topics that were transmitted via WiFi. The final subsystem was our Raspberry Pi, which was set up as a server and received data from the ESP as an MQTT broker. The Raspberry Pi then organized the topics in SQL tables that a user could see.

This model can be applied to any system the requires data to be captured and transmitted quickly. Think of an intensive care unit at the ER, or runners in a race. Any system that has large amounts of data that should be published on a server can use this model.