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Originally Posted by BrendanB
Just for clarification, is that testing software, programming, or a combination of both? I am a little confused.
New score of 29. This simulator is so much fun, thank you so much for making this! 
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First - You are welcome - Mentors never tire of hearing that.
My big picture goal is making the simulator more of a learning/mentoring tool than it is already. The software I want to release will be a lure meant to entice students to do some fun coding on their own.
What I will supply is a a set of classes that can communicate with a 5th Gear server. They will also expose a) (in a list of objects) all the data a 5th Gear client gets about the states of the simulated game objects, the score, and the time left in a match; and b) an API you can use to feed robot-control commands into the server.
Right now I intend for my code (in a single computer) to be able to replace from one to six clients .
I will have some cheesy 2D graphics built in for simple visualization of where the game pieces and robots are on the field.
On your end of things, I am hoping for three sorts of beta testing 1) Can you pull my classes into a main routine you write and successfully interact with them (display/analyze a robot/ball's location, movement, etc.), 2) can you issue orders to a robot (move, turn, grab, kick), and 3) does my simple GUI make sense to you and what shortcuts do I need to build into it for ease-of-use.
I am expecting that the early testers will uncover some bugs and will have some advice for ways to (re)organize the APIs, the simple GUI and/or the instructions for how to use the classes. I have had my head buried in this for so long, some things that seem obvious to me will probably be as clear as mud to you.
Once the code is ready for prime-time, users will be able to use it to write their own clients (AI or 3D graphics practice anyone?) and user interfaces, to develop simulations of sensors, to do some off-season experimenting with driver control hardware, etc. without having to implement the boring guts of client-server communication protocol.
If our physics were better and a library of accurate sensor simulations already existed, I would even suggest doing some autonomous control coding experiments, but I'm going to soft-sell that topic until the physics modeling gets a major refresh.
Blake