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Originally Posted by Uki
I was trying not to get into specifics or hurt anyones feelings but I guess i've gotta let the real truth out.
TacOps was a great program, but there are many reasons why it wasn't continued. First of all, as you said it was, "TacOps has been used for years at competitions, mostly in the off-season which is why it worked so well last year. It never had the problems we have now it just didn't have all the features which were not necessary to run a competition."
That wasn't true, he was working on it 3 months after championship fixing things, we didn't even have live scoring till late in the season. And this big problem you seem to think we have, was not caused by the scoring system. It was caused by the game design commity changing the rules of the rankings before last week's regionals. I'm sure most of you got the latest update that states that.
The other reason why TacOps was not used was because Alan Bradly donated a enough PLC's to be used for this years competition. And at the time, there were NO unix or linux drivers for Alan Bradly PLC's. There would have had to been drivers written, which would have cost FIRST even more money to do, along with the fact they would not retain ownership of the code written specificly for there use.
They also wanted to get to a more commonly used operating system, the reason for that is they did not want to ship the large crates used for the scoring system last year. All this years off season competitions will get is disc, as of now FIRST will not be providing laptops.
One of the other big contributing factors is that Hatch only had a month to design and test there software. I will tell you right now, TacOps had far longer then Hatch did for this, as people who said in this thread before, the software had been developed for years, why did it have so many issues last year then? If it was such a great and wonderful program, why was there so many updates and glitches last year?
So we don't have another thread about this next year, can we all just encourage FIRST to continue its development of the software we have now, so we aren't fighting about this the same time next year? Lets not go 4 for 4, 3rd time is a charm.
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The number of half-truths, mistakes, and just plain wrong statements in this post is staggering. To touch on just a few of the issues:
"the reason for that is they did not want to ship the large crates used for the scoring system last year." The shipping of large crates had absolutely nothing to do with the reasons for the change in the field control system. In fact, the new field control system is almost exactly the same total volume as the previous system. There is no change in the number or size of the crates involved, and the shipping volume was not a consideration in the change.
The statement "It was caused by the game design commity [sic] changing the rules of the rankings before last week's regionals" is complete farce. The errors in the scoring/ranking software have been there since the beginning of the season. They were masked by the other errors in the system, so they just were not as obvious to the audience and teams (e.g. Richmond Regional; it is hard to concentrate on the rankings when the field is running two hours behind schedule). The changes to the ranking structure were made in response to the errors discovered during the first week regionals, not the other way around.
The statement "Hatch only had a month to design and test there [sic] software" is garbage. Hatch Technology has been developing the new control system since last August (and for the record, Hatch Technology is represented on the Game Design Committee, and Hatch has known the tournament structure and scoring rules since they were developed last summer/fall; if anyone says that the GDC did not let Hatch know about the game/scoring structure until too late, then they are demonstrating their ignorance of the subject).
These are just a few of the errors in the referenced post, but I think you get the idea. This NOT the "real truth," it is "real fiction."
As an aside, one might be well served to take the advice of
this post.
-dave