- I was in the pub with this man the other week
- Hello!
- And we were talking about moderation.
- Yeah, I've got a friend, Mark. Hello Mark!
Who streams on Mixer,
and I go along and I moderate for him occasionally.
When they ban somebody out of the chat for being offensive,
or dull, or using too many emojis, he calls it:
'the banhammer'!
- Which is a name that has been going for a long, long time.
Like, back in the forum days, 15-20 years ago, moderators
wielded this metaphorical banhammer.
- However, in the pub I say this, and his eyes light up,
and I'm not 100% sure why, but here we are now...
- We've made a banhammer. Do you want to, erm...
- Yeah, alright.
- Agh! There is, in fact, a hammer in here.
- There we go, there's one end of it, there's the other.
There you go, that's it.
- Thank you!
- So what's going to happen is: over here we have Mat, who
actually did the design and build on all the technology here
He's going to be typing in the names of anyone who needs to be banned.
Over here is Dan. Nerd³, you might know him as.
- Hello!
- If you want anyone banned from your chat today, let us know.
- Can do!
- And the harder Chris swings this hammer,
the more time they're going to be banned for.
So Chris, if you're ready, let's take out someone.
- Oh, I like this!
All the pieces move as well!
This is great!
- So we have a server running locally on the computer,
and that has a command line input, so you can type in
the username of the person you want to ban,
and then that tells the game to trigger all of the visual stuff.
Then when the game does the ban with the hammer,
that then pipes it back through the server to Twitch
and then just sends the ban command from that moderator account.
That can just send ban stuff into the chat with the chat commands.
- Line 'em up, knock 'em down!
You can't see what I'm seeing, you'll see it at some point.
But this is a beautiful thing I'm witnessing in the background.
- The avatar stuff was a little bit complicated to work out.
With the Twitch avatars, firstly they're kind of unreliable,
especially a lot of troll users don't actually have an avatar.
But we ended up going with, it just spawns a sort of generic totem,
and then it has your name above it,
but then the colours randomise each time,
so hopefully that's enough to tell it's a different person.
It starts off as just a model of a totem, then as soon as you hit it,
it swaps out for a bunch of chunks that are from the totem,
and they all start simulating away, so you can
actually hit it and then it will react to the hammer
and you can swipe at the chunks afterwards and it will
kind of knock them about.
A huge sort of extra trick, I guess, with this stuff is to
add as many different visual effects as you can,
like having sparkles coming off everything.
A lot of impacts really only make sense when you see dust
and smoke and sparks flying up.
- Someone has just said, "this is so sad, Alexa ban Despacito."
Now, there isn't anyone in your chat called Despacito, but
is that going to stop me asking Mat to type the name Despacito into here
and just banhammer it anyway?
No, of course not.
- There we go! - I'd like to point out, this is a competent...
- And it's gone!
- I meant that one!
- So you can literally just put any name in there?
Wow, 575 seconds.
- Wow, that was a big one!
You really went for that one.
- MrRiddleMan has never played Theme Hospital and is braced for a ban.
Give it to him! That's "MrRiddleMan".
With the green tick.
- We didn't expect it to work at all for the first 10 times.
But the first time Chris was in there and hit it, everyone
just laughed because it just worked so well.
- I wish... you see, you need an option to ban half of the chat.
You need the Infinity Gauntlet in your next one,
that's my patch notes for this.
You need to be able to wield an Infinity Gauntlet
and just ban half the thing.
- We'll try in version 2.0.
- Good, nice, I like it.
- All right, well Dan, thank you for letting us join in here.
- You're welcome.
- We're going to leave you and your chat in peace now.
Chris, I know you can't see me at the minute,
but shall we have one last ban for the road?
- Yeah!
- Give us one last name, please, Dan.
- One last name... ChutneyCubed!
- ChutneyCubed. Mat?
- Dan, it's been a pleasure.
- 365 seconds.
- Yes! 6 minutes!
- Chris, thank you very much. Mat, thank you very much.
Dan, thank you very much. That's been a lot of fun.
That's entirely useless but it's a lot of fun. Bye!
- That's quite a cardio workout!
- Chat says “bye Tom”!
- Get one, it's good.
- Just getting a close up of the sweat.
- Oh lovely, thanks for that(!)