[jman1783]

While Catalyst lets you see an artist's interpretation of a few different launcher and climber styles, I have found that this program is riddled with bugs and doesn't really get you anywhere. In addition to an infuriating control scheme, I tried a few different robot configurations and was able to do little more than fling a frisbee (poorly) at the targets, and smack into the tower a few times, with the climbing mechanism doing very little. This is no substitute for the visualizations provided by a good CAD model or the benchtop testing provided by traditional hardware prototyping, which is unfortunate.

I would love to see a well implemented simulator that lets teams control their robot with an onboard camera view, where the physics worked somewhat reliably, and where you could design a bit more of your own machine that might work more to your liking. Last year's Catalyst worked about the same as this year, and I was hoping for an improvement which may have to wait until next season.