Quote:
Originally Posted by BiTurboS4
Towards the future, it will probably work better this year than the previous 5 or 6 years, but in the end, people will find some fault or issue with the system this year. Just give it time.
On a final note, with all that was said last year, nobody had anything to say to the developers at championship. So complaining on here, doesn't do a whole heck of a lot, but have fun with it.
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I wasn't aware there was an open forum for comments from individuals on the scoring system at last year's championship...perhaps I missed that email blast. If I had known, I would have been first in line. Perhaps most people didn't go to them in person because they had bigger problems to deal with? (Like making the system work...) The developers of last year's software had 2 years to get it right, yet last years system still had major issues to work out with it. Having the timers and audio be out of sync but a noticeable amount of time (greater than half a second) is simply unacceptable for a scoring system used at official events.
In the end,
someone (likely more than one person) must have disliked the system, given that that company no longer has the contract for FIRST scoring. The numerous bugs in last year's scoring system and resets needed, combined with a bad real-time counting system (which I am aware was not developed by the provider of the scoring system) left a bad taste in everyone's mouth after last year. If no one complained about it in person - then I don't see why they no longer are the official scoring system, given that it must certainly be cheaper to re-use last year's system than to pay a new company to start from scratch. I can't imagine over the two years which they had the contract that no one ever complained about the numerous bugs in the system.
It would be one thing to argue my comment about this year's system - I truly don't have enough information on it to say if it will be good or not, I'm just saying you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. However, I doubt I am the only one who is happy to see last year's system go away.
As far as BattleCry, no system designed for FIRST is going to be able to manage the complexities that we require, as it isn't a good use of FIRST's limited resources to create their scoring system to be compatible with unofficial events. However, trying to work with the previous system showed me what a mess it really was. We developed very simple software in less than a week that kept the two sides of the field and the overlay timers in sync - something that wasn't true for the entire official season. In fact, the version of TacOps which ran at BattleCry was completely developed from scratch (completely re-written) in a period of less than a month (plus the field interface, real time scoring, overlay, pit display, and web output modules, which are isolated from TacOps itself), and it ran at least as well as the official software did (we had one bug with one of the field controller PLC's going out of sync at one point with our field control software) yet gave us the flexibility to run the event in the way we wanted. With 2 years of time that the official developer had, I'm sure we would have worked out the bugs we ran into.