Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

What if (and this is totally crazy) they are designing a mobile game that coincides with the actual FRC competition? It would explain the ads, the style of the video, and FIRST's attempt to have a wider appeal. Just a sort of crazy thought... (PLEASE! I hope I am wrong)

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

From the field map:

Lanes up the left side of the field allow a human player to draw back the tent flaps at mid-field that otherwise prevent drivers from seeing the opposing end of the field. Withdrawing both red and blue curtains for the majority of the match raises the yellow flag and increases co-op points. As long as the flaps stay “closed”, the drivers must rely on hand signals from their human player or cameras mounted to their robot when trying to score in goals at the far end of the field.

Three moveable goals start on the driver’s right on the near side of the field. Lines on the field map show where two of the goals have been dragged to the left side of the field for protection. Note that the human player on right side wall loaded game pieces into one of the goals on it’s way by. North/south lines track game pieces being thrown by a human player toward the relocated goals.

From the flags:

Shapes on the red and blue flags represent round balls (or maybe hex balls) being scored in one of three, three-compartment hexagonal floor goals. Game pieces are red, blue and yellow. Most balls in a goal (somehow) raises a flag of that color – red flag counts red balls in the goal for the red alliance; blue flag counts blue balls in the goal for the blue alliance; yellow flag scores total of all balls in the goal (red, blue and yellow) for both alliances.

Re: 2016 Game Hint Discussion?
 

again this is a hard competition, so i think it is capture the flag.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

don't you mean trebuchets:confused: or are we shooting minibots

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

I hope not as that would add yet another technical hurdle too far for less resourced or experienced teams. The stacking plus capping task was too much this year and contributed to a spreading disparity in the ability to teams to contribute to their alliances. Using cameras to drive is similarly difficult.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

By the way, didn't you notice on the field blueprint that there is a tree standing next to a pond in the middle of each zone? Water game!!! ;)

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

The issue with Recycle Rush wasn't that capping was hard, it was. It was that capping was so overvalued that it became the only way to win. If scored recycling containers were worth 6 points plus 1 point per level the matches last year would have looked significantly different.

Which is to say, having a difficult engineering challenge as part of scoring is a great idea, but the harder the challenge is, the less it should impact the score of a match.

The hot goals in 2014 would be an example of a good pairing of technical challenge and scoring. It's a nice bonus, but a good team didn't need it to win.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

Using cameras for tele-operation is not nearly as hard as you're saying it is. I'd wager that a majority of teams already have a camera display on their driver station dashboard. If the cameras are provided in the KoP, almost any team should be able to handle that challenge. That's not to say there won't be teams getting help in the pits (with either software or camera positioning), but it's not really a difficult technical challenge.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

While I'm not the first to say this, it's been a while. The longer I look at those blueprints and how they fit into the video, the more I'm convinced that they are the design for Gripper, not the field.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

Sounds more like golf. The bp on it could also be golf clubs. Wouldn't make a ton of sense for the game name though.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

The day an FRC game requires the use of a camera is the day that a huge number of low-resource teams are completely screwed.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

Or, more to the point: teams that don't have time and programming resources for it. Particularly the programming resources. Think you (reader) don't know any of those teams? You're probably wrong.

As I recall, one of the game design requirements has historically been that ALL resource levels need to be able to play the game.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

They are also in the final logo. They were not accidentally placed there.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...an-axis-camera

http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...smartdashboard

If the camera and appropriate guidance is provided in the kit, it wouldn't be an issue. Will there still be teams that show up to events without it working? Of course, we have teams that show up with robots that can't drive as it is. But this is an issue that can be worked through in the pits on practice day, not some unmountable obstacle.

To be clear, I'm not endorsing any theories that cameras will be required to play this game. But getting video feedback to your driver's station is not difficult or resource intensive.

Re: Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!
 

Getting it to work reliably through competition certainly is.

Last year, we spent more time at competition debugging fritz-y webcams than anything else on the robot. Eventually we had to give up and continue without camera feedback.