[Edward Debler]

Regarding Game Simulator comments:

The 2002 FIRST game simulator as designed was intended to duplicate the movement of robots and goals to various zones on the playing field to give teams a "feel" for the steps they might take during a match. An example of this is, the orange balls can only be added to a goal if it is placed within reasonable proximity to the player station. Once that goal is moved fully out of zone 1 or 5, only the (nearest) yellow balls can again be added to it. Since the most probable scenario for balls to be scored is to have the goal somewhere near a ball location, that is the way the simulator was designed. Moving and controlling balls into and out of robots (that would in reality only hold a few balls) would add considerably more complexity to scoring.

Latching & Rotating:
Although Brian Debler considered robot latching to goals (or other robots), after many hours of development, it proved to be a very difficult task. He also considered rotation of the robots with/without goals attached (or rotating the robots about the goals) and found that the trigonometry involved was immense. Therefore these tasks were not included in the final simulator.

In any case, latching and rotation are not essential to operating the game (simulator). I emphasis the word (simulator) since that is exactly what it was designed to be. It is not an interactive game like something Nintendo might produce. The main objective of the simulator was to provide a visual medium that teams could easily use to assist with developing their game strategy as well as use during a match to track instantaneous match and qualifying scores. Judging by the number of hits on the Chief Delphi website (2136 as of this moment), I believe it has accomplished that objective.

Tether (or whatever):
There have been so many questions, comments and responses (to and from FIRST) that they all seem to be contradictory. I don't even want to go there in responding to any of them. In any case creating a method for the game simulator to account for scoring a robot in two zones would probably not be too difficult however, without firm direction from FIRST this late in the competition, I don't believe it would be that useful.

Simulator Development:
I would point out that Brian Debler worked more than 30 hours in less than 4 days (in his spare time) to solely develop the simulator so it could be available to all teams as soon as possible after the initial kick-off. He also of course accomplished this for no fee.

If you believe a more elaborate (realistic) game simulator would be of great benefit to FIRST teams in the future, then we should urge FIRST to fund development of a game simulator that would be available as part of the game kit and/or available to teams immediately after the 2003 kick-off. Of course, this would mean that FIRST would need to have the simulator development project started about 4-6 weeks before the 2003 kick-off.

I welcome any comments and suggestions regarding the development of a future game simulator for 2003.