Vibe Stealth — Live Sports & Esports Text Relay

Follow the game without leaving your editor. Vibe Stealth turns live sports and esports into a quiet text ticker inside VS Code: no video, no sound, no extra window stealing focus — just short play-by-play lines streaming into an Output Channel, plus a compact score in your status bar. Pick a game from the activity-bar tree, follow it, and keep coding while the relay runs in the background.

Built for people who want to know the score without opening a browser tab, a stream, or a second monitor.

Not yet published to the Visual Studio Marketplace. You can build a .vsix from source with npm run package and install it via Extensions: Install from VSIX….

Features

• Live Games tree in the activity bar — browse leagues, see games in progress, follow with one click or from the Command Palette.
• Text play-by-play relay — followed games stream formatted lines into a dedicated "Vibe Stealth Relay" Output Channel, timestamped and (optionally) emoji-tagged by sport.
• Live game state in the tree — expand a followed live game to see bases/count, lineups, or the champion draft update on every poll, right there in the sidebar (no webview, no popup).
• Two verbosity levels — the default summary stays quiet (one line per at-bat, only the key events); detailed adds pitch-by-pitch baseball, NHL shots/hits, soccer key events, and a League of Legends kill feed.
• Real team & league logos — actual crests on tree rows, downloaded once and cached locally, then reused offline (can be turned off).
• Compact status bar score — the most relevant followed game (live first, then recently finished, then upcoming) shown as AWY 3:2 HOM · Q4 with no color or emoji, so it stays out of the way.
• Korean-first coverage — real KBO 문자중계 (pitch-by-pitch text relay) and K League 1 event relay, straight from Naver Sports, natively in Korean.
• Key-free by default — KBO, K League, LCK/LPL/LEC/MSI/Worlds/First Stand, MLB, NHL, ESPN's soccer/NFL/NBA/WNBA coverage, and the tennis, Formula 1, UFC, cricket and college basketball leagues added in 1.1.0 all work with zero setup.
• Optional esports score ticker — add a free PandaScore API token to also track LoL, Valorant, CS2, and Dota 2 match/map scores.
• Backfill on join — following a game already in progress shows you the last few plays for context, not the entire history.
• Workspace-aware persistence — followed games survive a window reload.

Supported leagues

League ids used in vibeStealth.leagues.enabled are provider:league — for example naver:kbo, lolesports:lck, mlb:mlb, nhl:nhl, espn:eng.1, espn:ufc, espn:cricket, espn-tennis:atp, espn-racing:f1, pandascore:lol.

Turning on College Football

espn:college-football is fully supported but ships off. A single Saturday resolves around 99 games, and the tree draws one row per game with no truncation, so leaving it on would bury every other league.

To switch it on, add the league id to vibeStealth.leagues.enabled in your settings:

"vibeStealth.leagues.enabled": ["espn:college-football"]

That setting is a full allowlist, not an addition: once it is non-empty, only the ids you list appear in the tree. So list the other leagues you want alongside it — for example ["espn:college-football", "mlb:mlb", "naver:kbo"].

Quick start

1. Click the Vibe Stealth icon in the activity bar.
2. Expand a provider and league, and pick a live or upcoming game.
3. Click a game row (or run Follow Game from the Command Palette) — the relay opens automatically and lines start streaming in.
4. Click the status bar score any time to jump back to a followed game or unfollow it.
5. Want LoL/Valorant/CS2/Dota 2 score tracking too? Run Vibe Stealth: Set PandaScore API Token (enables esports) and paste a free token from your PandaScore account. The PandaScore section of the tree stays hidden until a token is set.

How the relay looks

The activity-bar tree lists every league and game; a followed live game (here LAA 1:5 TEX, Bottom 6th) expands to show live state and both lineups, with real team crests on each row.

The followed game's play-by-play streams into the Output Channel:

The same lines in ASCII, for reference:

19:32:05 │ · T7 │ ⚾ J. Soto strikes out swinging.
19:33:41 │ ★ T7 │ ⚾ B. Harper homers (12) to left field. NYY 4, PHI 3.
20:14:57 │ ★ B9 │ ⚾ 최정, 우월 2점 홈런! (SSG 5, LG 3)
21:02:10 │ ★ G3 │ 🎮 Game 3 complete

★ marks a scoring play, · marks a routine play, ⚠ marks a corrected line. The [AWY-HOM] team tag only appears when you're following more than one game at once, so a single followed game stays clean. The sport emoji prefix can be turned off with vibeStealth.relay.showEmoji.

Live game state

Follow a game that's currently in progress and its tree row becomes expandable — under it you'll find live "current state" rows that refresh on every poll, right in the sidebar tree (not a separate panel or webview):

• ⚾ Baseball (MLB, KBO) — balls-strikes-outs, which runners are on base (by name), the current batter and pitcher, and both teams' full batting orders as a collapsible lineup node.
• ⚽ Soccer (ESPN leagues) — each team's formation, starting XI, and bench, sourced from ESPN. This appears once lineups are officially posted, which is usually shortly before kickoff — it won't show for a game that hasn't reached that point yet.
• 🎮 League of Legends (LoL Esports) — the champion draft for both teams (role, champion, player) and the patch version, plus live gold and kill totals once the match data reports them.

Honest limits:

• State only appears for a game you're following that is currently live. Pre-game and finished games show the normal game row with no state rows.
• Only baseball, soccer and LoL have state rows. Tennis, motorsport, UFC, cricket, American football and basketball games do not expand — there is nothing under them. What a tennis or a motorsport row can say, it says on the row itself: the per-set games (6-2, 7-5) in a tennis row's status text, and the current leader (P1 VER) in a motorsport row's label, both re-rendered on every poll.
• These are plain text rows, not a graphical bases diagram or pitch tracker — Vibe Stealth stays a text relay.
• LoL's draft only shows once that game's picks are locked in; there's nothing to show during champion select itself.
• Controlled by vibeStealth.gameState.enabled (default on). Turning it off also stops the one extra network request LoL Esports otherwise makes per poll to fetch draft/gold data. Baseball and soccer state come for free from data already fetched for the relay, so only the on/off switch — not that request saving — affects them.

Detail level

vibeStealth.detail controls how much play-by-play you get. It defaults to summary; set it to detailed for the full firehose. Detailed produces several times more lines per game, and costs one extra request per poll for a live LoL game (3 instead of 2).

⚾ MLB — summary emits one line per completed at-bat. detailed adds one line per pitch (type, speed, strike-zone number, call, and the count before the pitch) ahead of the at-bat result:

summary                                              detailed
─────────────────────────────────────────           ───────────────────────────────────
Ernie Clement singles on a line drive to             Sinker 90.8 · zone 6 · Called Strike (0-0)
left fielder Heliot Ramos.                           Sweeper 84.0 · zone 14 · Swinging Strike (0-1)
                                                     … one line per pitch …
                                                     Ernie Clement singles on a line drive to
                                                     left fielder Heliot Ramos.

🏒 NHL — summary is goals, penalties, period boundaries and game end. detailed adds shots, hits, takeaways and giveaways (still not faceoffs or stoppages — pure noise):

summary                                              detailed adds
─────────────────────────────────────────           ───────────────────────────────────
snap goal — Mavrik Bourque (season goal [#20](https://github.com/Toragonite/vibe-stealth/issues/20))         hit — offensive zone
(assists: Esa Lindell, Ilya Lyubushkin)              takeaway — offensive zone
                                                     shot on goal — wrist · neutral zone

⚽ Soccer (ESPN) — detailed adds structured key events (goals, cards, substitutions) alongside the prose commentary, so you get both the narrative line and a compact tagged event.

🎮 League of Legends — detailed turns on a live kill feed: every kill with the killer, victim and assisters, plus towers, inhibitors, barons and dragons by drake type:

🎮 JarvanIV(BLG Xun) → Naafiri  [assists: Akali, Shen]
🎮 Ziggs(HLE Gumayusi) → Akali  [assists: Rumble, Naafiri, Yone, Rell]
🎮 BLG took Chemtech Drake

Note this is also what makes a live LoL game relay anything play-by-play at all — see Honest limits.

🎾 Tennis, 🏎 motorsport, 🥊 UFC and 🏏 cricket ignore the setting. None of them has an upstream play-by-play feed to turn up, so detailed produces exactly the same lines as summary: completed sets and a match result for tennis, session boundaries and a podium for motorsport, one result line per bout for a UFC card, and nothing at all for cricket.

Logos

With vibeStealth.logos.enabled on (the default), tree rows show real team and league crests. Each logo is downloaded once, then cached locally under the extension's global storage and reused offline; toggling the setting off downloads nothing and falls back to plain icons.

The downloader is the only part of the extension that fetches binary content, and it is deliberately strict: https-only, an exact host allowlist, no redirects to other hosts, a 512 KiB size cap, a 10-second timeout, and image-format decided by magic bytes rather than the server's content-type header (which a server can get wrong in either direction). SVGs are additionally screened for embedded scripts.

Tennis and motorsport rows carry no image. Where a team game shows a crest, these rows fall back to a plain icon — singles, doubles and race sessions alike. The upstream does have player headshots and driver portraits, but they are served from hosts that are not on the allowlist above, so the extension does not fetch them.

A game row shows the home team's crest. VS Code gives a tree item a single 16 px icon slot, so composing two crests into it rendered each at roughly 7–10 px — unreadable. Sharpness won: the away team is already in the row's label (AWY 0:0 HOM) and tooltip.

Language

Vibe Stealth speaks English and Korean. vibeStealth.locale (auto | en | ko, default auto) sets the relay language; auto follows the VS Code display language.

The relay is bilingual by design, and honestly so. Some upstream feeds cannot produce Korean prose no matter what — MLB StatsAPI accepts ?language=es but falls back to English for ko, and ESPN accepts lang=es but returns an empty commentary for ko. So Vibe Stealth splits the difference:

• Text the extension composes from structured fields is localized. Pitch lines, NHL events, the LoL kill feed, all tree state rows, and every system line render in your chosen language. Tennis, motorsport and UFC fall entirely on this side of the split: those upstreams carry no prose at all, so every relay line for them is composed here from the structured score and therefore localized — set lines, match results, session boundaries, podiums and bout results alike.
• Prose the API supplies is passed through verbatim, never machine-translated. MLB at-bat descriptions and ESPN soccer commentary stay in English.
• Naver's KBO / K League relay is natively Korean to begin with.
• Names stay as the feed spells them. A tournament, race or team name from ESPN is not translated, and the session suffix on a motorsport row's name (— Practice 1) is pinned to English so the row reads the same in both languages. The relay's own session lines are localized (연습주행 1 시작).

In practice a Korean user reading a live MLB game sees Korean pitch lines above an English at-bat result. This is intentional — keeping the API's own rich prose beats a worse machine translation of it.

Menus and settings are a separate switch. The command palette entries, context menus, view title and setting descriptions are also localized (package.nls.ko.json), but VS Code resolves those by the IDE display language, not by vibeStealth.locale. If you want the menus in Korean, run Configure Display Language from the Command Palette and choose Korean.

Settings

Commands

All commands are listed under the Vibe Stealth category in the Command Palette.

Honest limits

• Unofficial endpoints can break without notice. ESPN, Naver Sports, and the LoL Esports gateway are undocumented and unofficial — they can change shape, rate-limit, or go away at any time. MLB StatsAPI and the NHL API are official but still unauthenticated public endpoints, offered as-is.
• The LoL Esports gateway key is Riot's public web key, taken from the lolesports.com frontend. It is not a secret, but Riot may rotate it at any time, which would break LoL/LCK/LPL/LEC/MSI/Worlds relay until an update ships.
• Follows are per-workspace. Two VS Code windows open on the same folder run independent pollers and double the request rate against upstream APIs. Shared follows across windows are a future candidate.
• PandaScore is a score ticker, not commentary. Its free/public endpoints don't expose play-by-play, so you'll see map/game results (e.g. "Map 3: T1") rather than kill-by-kill or round-by-round events.
• Cricket is a score ticker too. Its upstream summary endpoint answers, but the response carries no plays and no commentary, so a followed cricket match keeps refreshing its score and status in the tree and status bar while its relay stays empty. Nothing is being dropped — there is nothing there to relay.
• A UFC row is a whole fight card, not one bout. The upstream models a fight night as a single event, so the row is named after the card's main event while the relay covers every bout on the card, one result line each.
• Tennis has no point-by-point. The upstream carries no play-by-play, so the relay is one line per completed set plus the match result — not games, not points. The per-set games live in the row's status text.
• Motorsport does not report position changes. You will never see "Hamilton up to P3". Providers here never compare one poll against the previous one, and a single response carries only the current running order, so a change line could not be derived honestly. What you get instead is the leader on the row, refreshed each poll, plus session-start, session-end and a top-three result line in the relay.
• College Football ships off. espn:college-football is fully supported but not enabled by default — around 99 games resolve on a single Saturday and the tree draws one row per game, which would bury every other league. See Turning on College Football.
• A tennis tournament shows at most 12 matches. One tournament has returned 124 of them across its draws, so the tree keeps the 12 most relevant per tournament — live first, then recently finished, then upcoming — and logs how many it dropped. The 12 slots are spread round-robin across the tournament's draws, singles first, so a Grand Slam cannot fill them all with doubles.
• Joining a live game backfills at most vibeStealth.backfillLimit plays, not the full history, so very early events from before you followed won't appear.
• A live LoL Esports game emits no relay lines until its first map completes — unless vibeStealth.detail is detailed, which turns on the per-kill/objective feed. In summary, LoL is a one-line-per-completed-map ticker.
• Polling intervals are rate-limited by design (10–120 s live, 30–600 s scoreboard). Please don't route around them — aggressive polling risks getting the underlying endpoints blocked for everyone.

Disclaimer & license

Vibe Stealth is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by MLB, the NHL, ESPN, Naver, Riot Games / LoL Esports, PandaScore, the ATP, the WTA, Formula 1, the UFC, the NCAA, or any league or team. All team and league names and logos belong to their respective owners.

MIT — see LICENSE.