Re: Varied color light trick...
 

Oh the possibilities :rolleyes:

Now the question is...
What will Dean do next!?!?

Tune in next kickoff to find out... until then we can only speculate :p

I'm so excited for next season now! Who needs post- and pre-seasons? Let's start the new one now! :p

I'm definately noticing mixed signals now, rethinking that light trick (( which I will admittingly say I fell for ))... Is he hinting at different light colors? or a game that gets progressively more difficult as you move towards finals? [both which have been speculated but I am restating for that fact that it's got me curious]

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

It could turn into a technical nightmare (of snafus), but:

I think it would be great to challenge the autonomous programmers, the drive teams, and the scouts by publishing match lists for qualifying without indicating which teams are on which alliance. You'd find out who your allies and opponents are only on the field after the start of the match, when you see the colored lights come on.

Of course this would also challenge the GDC, since they'd have to design a field with drive team positions that work equally well for either alliance.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

I suggested the idea somewhere else about rotating alliances. Meaning, the alliances would be randomly re-assigned half-way through the match. (The number of teams per alliance would always remain constant throughout the match). Scoring might be a large pain in the neck though.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

The downside to all this; if you score 10000 points while you are on blue alliance, but are then switched to green, you now have hurt yourself by scoring 10000 points for your opponents. If I were competing I simply wouldn't score until I was assigned to what I knew would be the alliance I ended on (for example, wait until the last 30 seconds or something).

The random starting alliance might work better, but you would still be forced to fix the alliances for the elimination rounds, or completely overhaul the playoff system.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

When I saw Dave announce this change to the rules, I thought to myself one thing: "This can't be right--it's that other Dave that's supposed to do odd things with the game design!"

Then he announced it was a joke. I was relieved--and I was teamless there!

I'm sure FIRST will concoct some interesting way to handle that sort of thing next year. What exactly they do is about as impossible to predict as the game itself.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

My thoughts, in order, as I watched this segment on teevee was:

1. He's kidding.
2. Do they make jokes at Championship Finals?
3. He has to be kidding.
4. What if he's not kidding?
5. He's kidding.
6. There are 12 really nervous FIRST programmers out there today, and about 1,000 who are laughing until Mountain Dew comes out of their noses.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

Lol, Dave pulled that on us at West Michigan this year, except for instead of it being every 2 seconds, it was every .67 seconds... I think we figured it out a little quicker... ;)

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

My thoughts on hearing the trick was, "If we were down there, we'd probably have about 10 minutes to fix the code. They're probably telling the teams the exact color values the lights are shining at right now. Either that or the values are the perfect RGB values."

I know that changing my team's program to be able to lock on to any of the lights wouldn't be all that difficult. The whole changing colors thing could easily work next year.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

I thought they were actually going to do that for the final round, until of course he said just kidding :ahh: .

I already have a way of doing this with this year's camera. :cool:

Can't wait to see what next year's game is... sounds like it will have multiple goals/objects/scoring modes.

Only, what, 9 months or so till kickoff (putting countdown in my phone) :D

-Q

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

This one gave me a little bit of a scare at the time.

I think we can be pretty sure that there will be multiple and or changing colors, the question is what will they be used for? FIRST doesn't just provide us with fluke hints with no meaning.

*mark different game elements
*signal things that can be done with certian game elements at certian times
*game elements with different context at different times.
*provide fixed refrence which robot position can be triangulated off of
*one the fly alliance partitioning
*robot to robot communication

I think we will also be seeing an updated robot controller. From what i have pried out of various IFI guys, they are going to re-evaluate it and the general feeling is that it had outlived its usefullness. I am wondering if we will see an updated vision system as well. Looking for multiple colors simultaneously is not possible with a single CMU Cam. It requires changing the color window and looking for each color individually. In my mind, this is already getting into the territory of hackage. We could of course use multiple cameras.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

This is true--but they don't always mean they will pan out that way. (Look at the footage of Kickoff 2004.)

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

Are you referring to the IR beacon thing? I seem to remember something about FIRST claiming they would come back in 2005.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

How about this? One goal, three colors. Green for 1st, and 4th period. Blue and red based on who wins auton. hmmmm

cool?

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

I will say yes as a possibility, but not nessicarily Cold cathode tubes. There would be (based on what was said) 3 colors, which means 8 tubes each, so 24 tubes total...that's one pretty large thing if they place them all in one box like this year. However, they could use LEDs or something a little brighter.

Re: Varied color light trick...
 

Just FYI: Dave originally told that to us at the West Michigan Regional as an April Fools joke. He didn't, however, say it was something to think about for next year.