Quote:
Originally Posted by NinjaMunkeeNao
Wait, so there will actually be dragons? Do they have to wear safety glasses?
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The dragons actually won't appear during most matches, but we might see a few during the first few weeks when teams are still getting lots of penalties for doing stupid stuff. There will be fewer dragons in the weeks that follow, but they might come back with a vengeance for the district championships and/or world championship event.
Why, you ask? Simple! The field health tracking system design went to the lowest bidder, so it only has 28 bits' worth of memory available for tracking the health of the various field elements. It's technically a 32-bit system, but they reserved the rest for a wall-crumbling feature that never panned out; the extra 6 bits aren't actually write-accessible in the production version. Anyways, each defense is allotted its own two-bit state machine, so there are only 4 bits remaining to store an unsigned integer health value for each tower; therefore, the FMS can't actually handle tower health levels above 15 points. The GDC didn't find out about the rollover-to-zero exploit until last week, so they scrambled to find a solution; this was it.
TL;DR:
If a tower's health is ever at 15 points and a technical foul would have pushed it up to 16, the refs have instead been instructed to unleash a dragon upon the offending team's robot.
...And yes, the dragons do have to wear safety glasses.