Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

I assume they are having field issues/field isn't ready yet?

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

streaming it with windows media player i don't have any audio...

so i've been streaming it with VLC media player...

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

I've been streaming with WMP and it seems to be working fine. Did you check the audio settings within WMP?

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

Nice! Just saw a 101. Seems that 30 points is about as low as scores go (for one alliance).

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

I just got home to watch the last 30 seconds of the final match. Congrats to 1124, 126 and 195. I wasn't surprised that the webcast was on this late, given the new control system and it being a "shakedown". Could someone who watched the whole event post their observations.

A highlight reel on tomorrow on Youtube would be nice as well. *hint hint*

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

The shakedown was fun, 558 had a great time. It was our first time there and boy! was it an experience!

Thanks Aces!

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

I watched most of it and two things that stood out/surprised me. First, a good human player can make a huge difference. And secondly, super cells were much more prevelent and important than I expected them to be at this scrimmage.

For those at the event, how did the orbit balls hold up? Were a lot of them broken at the end?

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

I didn't watch the whole thing either, as we still had a robot to build, but I watched probably half a dozen.

1. Robots that are not moving are death. You MUST keep moving. When someone stopped near a HP they'd get filled up with balls. When someone stopped, a robot of the opposite alliance would go and dump their load. I saw a robot not move in autonomous once. That was bad, real bad. You do not want to start 26 points in the hole.

2. Super Cells are important. While a scrimmage is not a regional, the huge point swings that Super Cells provide, are well, huge. I'd bet a snickers bar that at least 75% of qualifying matches during week 1 could've been one with 2 scored super cells (2 Super Cells per alliance seemed pretty typical).

3. HPs have a tendency to miss Super Cells. Perhaps it was the added pressure, but they'd make orbit balls in from across the field and miss Super Cells that were going into a robot right in front of them.

4. Humans score A LOT of the points. It seemed that at least 20 points per alliance were scored in autonomous. It seemed to me that most alliances scored between 30 and 50 points, so Humans are making big contributions. Obviously, this is a scrimmage so robots may not be in tip top shape, but it's something to look out for.

5. There is a tendency to overshoot. I saw a bunch of robots go for an easy score and miss because their power dumper/shooter gave the balls too much "oomph."

6. It's really hard to dump in the middle of the field. It seemed that if a robot was along the edge of the field, it was pretty easy to pin them long enough to score a hopper full. It was not so easy to pin a robot in the middle of the field.

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

What type of maneuvers were performed during autonomous? Was there there any target tracking by the camera?

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

I recall Andy announcing that 1124 was scoring with the camera, right at the autonomous/teleop switch, so I'm not sure if it was done in autonomous or teleop.

Mostly, teams just drove straight forward, and there was a big cluster of 5 or 6 robots in the center of the field, as the sitting human players pumped the trailers full of balls. From the webcast I would guess that the majority drove some distance and stopped, while a few just kept moving throughout the entire autonomous.


A couple of teams would drive out 10 feet or so and spin in circles. It didn't seem to work too well at keeping balls out though. I know GUS did it, and I watched a HP sink every ball he/she shot as GUS was spinning, although that may have just been an exceptional human.

At the end of the day, it seemed that the clustering wasn't quite as bad. A couple of robots would get caught up, then they'd get whacked by a newcomer and sort of seperate.

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

Thoughts and observations:

• This is going to be a fun game once the majority of scoring drifts away from the human players and towards the robots later in the season. But without much scoring going on from the robots, the game is kind of boring.
• The empty and super cells were important, but I think their relative worth will diminish as the average scores go up this season, which is as the number of scoring robots goes up. Assuming you can use them well, and that you have a good human player, they can make a big impact.
• They were experimenting with various things during the elimination rounds where if the field had a glitch, they'd add some time onto the clock and then re-continue the match.
  PLEASE NEVER DO THIS AGAIN.
  I'm serious. As soon as there's a field glitch this year and one or more robots die on the playing field, a good shooter/power dumper can load up their trailer in a matter of seconds. This can irreversbily change the winning alliance of the match. Adding fifteen seconds back onto the clock does not un-score balls in your trailer that would not have been there had the field not broken. If the field breaks down and one alliance stops moving, the other alliance should not benefit from having three stationary opposing robots. The only fair way to fix a field problem is to replay the match.
• There were some really cool driving maneuvers, but most are hard to explain without a video to show it off. All I can say is that everything you thought you knew about driving on a FRC playing field now has to be relearned. Also, experiment with purposely losing traction and then regaining it; some very cool maneuvers can be accomplished with this.
• Like every other FIRST game, those who can score fast and score well will win. Power dumpers were having better chances of scoring than shooting robots, but hopefully three more days of code development will bring some of the shooter robots up to snuff.
• There were no propeller robots at the scrimmage.
• Both of the Anonymous Teaser robots were at the scrimmage, and both had team numbers only four apart.

Do you remember which match that was? :confused:

I was at the event and watched almost all of our matches from about twenty feet away from our robot on the sidelines, and we never had the opposing human player sink every shot in autonomous. Granted this could have been one of the matches I missed, but the average human player accuracy I witnessed with throwing balls into our full-speed spinning trailer was about 30-50%, whereas on stationary or linear moving targets this number often approached 70-90%.

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

My observations:

1. When I closed my eyes, the sounds of the competition robots were incredibly reminiscent of a bumper car ride at an amusement park.

2. Scoring was virtually impossible to determine from the stands. I know some veteran numerologists who have amazed me in previous years with their ability to tell the score during a complicated game and even they were baffled.

3. A subtle rule penalty was assessed in at least one game which, to me, was questionable based on the rules. If a empty cell is placed in exchange for a super cell by a payload specialist, only that specific super cell which is adjacent to the empty cell can be placed into play.

4. As expected, it is almost guaranteed that alliances with a no-show robot will lose the match.

5. Unless penalties were being discussed, field reset occurred immediately after a match was over. I never saw an official count the cells in any trailer. As such, I did wonder about the accuracy of the scores in many matches.

Regards,

Mike

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

If you remember before they added time and restarted the match the MC said "you will probably never see this again we are going add time and continue the match". or something close to that.

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

There were people in the area of the players stations keep score on some electronic device. That was hooked the scorers table. That way the reset could happen very quick. I would hate to see how long it would take to reset field if you had to count the balls (rocks) at the end of every match.

Re: Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage Pre-Season Event
 

Even with your eyes opened, it was reminiscent of a bumper car ride. Especially in autonomous.


Even when the field issues caused 10 minutes of non-action, I couldn't tell the score after a walk around the field and trying to count the balls. The stack up of balls inside the goals are too random so 9 balls could look nearly the same as 15 balls.

Definitely an odd rule to me. It seems the empty cell/super cell count is 100% obvious since you have to hang an empty cell.

Additionally, I don't understand why they would assess the "double the points, subtract a ball" rule in the Elimination Rounds??? This would suggest that if we beat the Number 3 Alliance 100-50 in our semis that we would have to give up a ball in the Finals against the Number 1 Alliance??? That would be ridiculous. I would have expected any of those rules to be gone for the Elimination Rounds.

Definitely a challenge, but I'm thinking that if it was your team and our team as the duo, we might have had a better than even chance. ;)

Did they have manual scorers in the end?

Fred <~~~ good to see you guys again, Mike