Showdown

Showdown is a simulator of Pokemon battles. It currently supports singles battles in Generations 4-5 (HGSS, BW, BW2).

Installing

Showdown requires Node.js and npm (which is installed by default with Node.js since v0.6.3).

Run npm install to install all necessary dependencies.

Copy config/config-example.js into config/config.js, and edit as you please.

After this, start Node:

cd <location of PS>
node app.js

You can also specify a port:

node app.js 8000

Visit your server at http://play.pokemonshowdown.com/~~SERVER:PORT/

Replace SERVER with your server domain or IP, and PORT with the server's port. You can leave off :PORT if it is 8000 (the default).

Yes, you can test even if you are behind a NAT without port forwarding: http://play.pokemonshowdown.com/~~localhost/ will connect to your local machine. Some browser setups might prevent this sort of connection, however (NoScript, for instance). If you can't get connecting locally to work in Firefox, try Chrome.

The reason your server is visited through play.pokemonshowdown.com is to make it more difficult for servers to see a user's password in any form, by handling logins globally. I realize that you might want your own login server and client hosted outside the pokemonshowdown.com domain, and I'll look more deeply into how to facilitate that when we're closer to leaving beta.

Browser support

Showdown currently supports, in order of preference:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Chrome/Firefox/Safari for various mobile devices
• Opera
• Firefox for Android
• IE9+

IE8 support can technically be added without too much difficulty, but it doesn't run PS fast enough to be usable.

As for older browsers (Firefox 3.6), I won't go out of my way to support them, but if there's a simple fix, you can suggest it to me and I'll implement it.

Credits

Pokemon Showdown was created by Guangcong Luo [Zarel].

Developers

• Guangcong Luo [Zarel]
• Bill Meltsner [bmelts]

Contributors

• [Marty-D]
• Cody Thompson [Rising_Dusk]
• [The Immortal]