2015 HINT DISCUSSION

[BenGuy]

There's probably going to be some new HUGE change this year, I highly doubt a water game, a lot of people don't have access to pools and there's not enough stands. However, that's the only huge change I can see coming?

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by BenGuy

There's probably going to be some new HUGE change this year, I highly doubt a water game, a lot of people don't have access to pools and there's not enough stands. However, that's the only huge change I can see coming?

Well, this begs the question: Would you consider all the changes in the hint video "huge"? I wouldn't expect this change to be any bigger than those. Things change every year, it's just a matter of which ones our perception tells us are the most major.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Ekcrbe

Well, this begs the question: Would you consider all the changes in the hint video "huge"? I wouldn't expect this change to be any bigger than those. Things change every year, it's just a matter of which ones our perception tells us are the most major.

I'm not so sure. When has the hint been focused on change happening? They (FIRST) seems to be very clear that SOMETHING we have all grown used to is changing.

[AndyBare]

So I checked out page 2 of the 2014 manual that was flipped to in the game hint. At the bottom of the manual is a "Arial Assist is played by two competing alliances" line as is underlined in red in the attachment 'manual.png.' Note that this is page 2/3 of the Game summary. There are 2 alliances in past years, but this year we are recycling. We have 2/3 but let's make it 3/3 by "Going green." Notice how the recycling symbol in the game hint video on the bin is white, also a triangle of course. How about adding a third alliance that is White? This would triangulate the entire way that districts, regionals, worlds, etc. are run... and well... finish off the colors of the first logo.

[dellagd]

Originally Posted by Navid Shafa

While I am not under the belief that hockey pucks are in our near future, I am willing to agree with the following logic that was proposed to me:

The Mystery Box in the KOP: 3" x 3" x 60", 6lbs

Proposal: Pucks in a long cylindrical tube (minimal weight increase and space reduction)

Individual Puck Size: 2.875" Diameter, 1.25' Thick, Weight 2oz

45 of these pucks would come out to 5.625 lbs and 56.25" when stacked. That would certainly fit the extents and leave a little room and weight for packaging...

Everyone can agree that a 3" x 3" x 60" box is unwieldy, and since FIRST is giving them out (and they have no motivation to make our life unnecessarily hard, I mean, they exist for us student's benefit), I think we can be quite certain that the objects in that box must be in a box of that size for length purposes. That would mean most likely no hockey pucks, and besides, it even looks like they ship from suppliers in much more reasonably sized boxes anyway. I would guess other suppliers would follow suit, I mean, its probably more expensive for shipping companies to handle boxes like that too.


Anyway, I just wanted to put out my thoughts on a few criteria that the GDC uses to create their games (recently):

• The games have to be spectator friendly. One of the main goals of the entire FIRST organization is to expand its reach, to spread STEM to more schools and therefore educate the world's youth about the STEM fields. Many people will have their first exposure to FIRST by attending events as a spectator (or watching online, doesn't really matter), and if someone doesn't understand what's going on or finds it boring, they aren't very likely to peruse i, to create a team. This goal is much bigger than simply "changing things up" for a new game. A corollary of this is that the match will most likely be head to head (i.e. not 4v0, 6v0) because, well, head to head matches are really exciting and just "score as much as possible" in real time is, well, boring for people who aren't way into it like we are. Another would be that it has to be pretty simple on the surface.

• All teams must be able to field a robot that can contribute to an alliance, even boxes on wheels. Just as FIRST wants to have more teams join, they want to retain their new ones. If rookies are able to be good contributes to their alliances even with their likely limited resources, I would guess that they would be more inclined to continue in the competition, even recommend that other schools join.

• The game has to be safe. This means no small hard projectiles. Lacrosse balls are undoubtedly out (I used to play before I sold my soul to Dean and trust me it hurts). Real hockey pucks are most likely out too, even if they tried to limit them to only ground shooting (a la 2010), since one will go flying somehow. There are other alternatives, so I just don't see why it would be worth it.

These criteria along with the pretty explicit AndyMark field hint lead me to believe that 3v3 will be staying. I would also guess that the primary surface for the field will be the same too (or at least not be one that leads to lunacy play).

As for the hint, I generally don't like to look to far into them since, well, you never have really had to (well, 2013 was pretty tough, but anyway). Frank is is recycling the 2014 manual while standing on what looks like a standard field and tells us that "Change is coming". Assuming that he is referring to the manual, I would guess that there will be a major restructuring of the rules, like penalties, or the way teams are ranked and put into eliminations. Things in the Administrative manual have changed in accordance with this too, like Elimination matches now being referred to as Playoff matches.

Honestly I doubt the hint has anything to do with the actual game pieces or the play of the game itself, its just telling us that there will be a major change in the way we go about competing.

I can't even imagine how much fun watching this thread as the GDC is.

[dradel]

Could simply be a new vendor supporting first. Perhaps aluminum of various lengths and types ?

[billbo911]

Anyone mention the encrypted version of the manual is nonexistent. I believe it is usually posted by now. Does that appears to be because they are going to an online viewer version instead? That's a change.

[Joseph Lewis]

I have spent the last four hours reading through all of the discussion on this thread, and found that while most ideas are plausible, some are more so than others. Post #411 was especially helpful, although it received very little attention on this thread.

My thoughts on the ideas that have come throughout the thread:
1) Autonomous being moved to the end of the match: Although this idea does propose a unique challenge both to the drive team and to the programming team, I don't think FIRST will take this direction for a couple of reasons (although, who knows, Frank did say that "Change is Coming"). My initial concern here is safety. Having robots start auto at the end of a match means that autonomous could begin in any multitude of positions for however many robots are on the field. Knowing how finicky robots can be, even being slightly off in the position that a team reaches can lead to drastically different results in the autonomous period. Having robot on robot interaction during autonomous then, is a huge possibility. FIRST has, for safety reasons, tried to minimize this by making rules about not crossing over the middle of the field during Auto. Although FIRST is making big changes this year, I don't think making events less safe is on their list of priority changes. Not only this, but it would be very difficult to regulate the transition between Teleop and Autonomous. As it stands now, players stand behind a line and wait for auto to be over to step forward, making it clear that the robots are acting without driver controls. If auto were at the end however, many people would find themselves in the heat of the moment trying to hang on to the controls for as long as possible. Even if a large penalty were assigned to teams that didn't step back in time for auto (which seems only to promote the foul based victories that we saw in 2014, albeit not at the highest levels of play), many events would have difficulty regulating this transition. The multitude of positions also brings up my second concern. Autonomous programming being as difficult as it is for most (or many, however you say it without offending anyone) teams, it would feel very unsatisfying to have made a great Auto code and line up your robot in the right spot at the end of the match, only to see it not work 90% of the time because another robot sat themselves in your way. Lastly, this auto at the end seems very anti-climatic (as was mentioned previously, sorry I forgot who mentioned it). Only the most competitive of robots would do anything useful during this autonomous period, but even then other robots can get in the way (since auto does the same thing every time, it would be easy to set up and block). This leads to an end game where all or most of the robots are sitting on the field, not scoring, not moving, or anything. How boring.
2) 6v0 or other v0 format: I really caught on to this idea, considering the name change of "Elimination Matches" to "Playoffs" Teams compete in a time limit to earn as many points as possible. These points go towards ranking in qualifications, you pick a permanent alliance for "Playoffs" then each permanent alliance goes 2 or 3 times, you take the sum of their scores, and the highest one wins. No "elimination", because there is no bracket.
3) Hockey or Puck related game: This idea also seems plausible, and could fit in with the v0 or a XvsX(vsX, etc. if you'd like, although anything more than two alliances seems unlikely due to the "Enemy of my enemy is my friend" game-play that results from such formatting) format. I can definitely see the 3"x3"x60" object containing some number of pucks, considering how well the math works with the weight(as worked out previously in the thread). As to how to play such a game, knowing that a hockey puck is the scoring object means nothing. Manipulators are highly dependent on what rules they must abide by in the manual, which we will just have to see on January 3rd, 2015.
4) Recycling 2014's Game: This one upsets me. As much as I liked 2014's game, I do not think it would be interesting for spectators to see the same game being played by basically the same robots. Recycle does not mean repeat.
5) Switchup of Video Footage, no '99 game, 2x '97 game: I saw a summary that said the thread believes that the switch-up was intentional, and that FIRST was incapable of making such a big mistake on accident. Does no one remember last years hint, when they literally released the wrong numbers, giving the birthday for the soccer player who DIDN'T actually hold the top number of assists? That seems like a pretty big mistake to me. This mistake is not huge, its just an editing error by someone who was rushed to put together a hint and accidentally clicked on the wrong file, chose a random spot to include, and didn't recognize that the game was not from '99 because they weren't around in FIRST during the '99 or '97 games. (kudos to everyone that has pointed this out before).

I'm not sure what the game hint means, but I think there are definitely great ideas out there. Although we have to wait until January 3rd to know for sure, nothing says that we can't have fun while we wait. Keep speculating!

TL,DR - Autonomous shouldn't switch to end because of safety concerns. Different alliance format likely, but not more than 2 alliances. Hockey Game is a good idea. 2014 game reuse isn't. Footage switch was not intentional. Have fun speculating while waiting for January 3rd.

[cgmv123]

Originally Posted by billbo911

I believe it is usually posted by now.

Last year, the encrypted manual wasn't posted until the Thursday before kickoff. There's still time.

[IronicDeadBird]

Anyone else considering a forced role game. That being a siege style game or attack defense. Think most video games call it assault or whatever where you take turns defending an objective or pushing it. The popular one that comes to mind is CS:GO or counter strike where you have one team trying to stop a bomb from being planted and the other team trying to plant it. The concept we steal from here is that you have red alliance and blue alliance and one alliance is forced to play defensively and one side is forced to play offense. Going in line with "Kit bots can contribute" just having a body blocker on offense or defense is viable, and current field constraints work. I'd like to believe that some game in the future or even this coming game is done in an assault style.
Also wouldn't FIRST be shooting a few companies in the foot by going Lunacy and forcing certain design choices like wheels?

[Orthofort]

Originally Posted by Joseph Lewis

5) Switchup of Video Footage, no '99 game, 2x '97 game: I saw a summary that said the thread believes that the switch-up was intentional, and that FIRST was incapable of making such a big mistake on accident. Does no one remember last years hint, when they literally released the wrong numbers, giving the birthday for the soccer player who DIDN'T actually hold the top number of assists? That seems like a pretty big mistake to me. This mistake is not huge, its just an editing error by someone who was rushed to put together a hint and accidentally clicked on the wrong file, chose a random spot to include, and didn't recognize that the game was not from '99 because they weren't around in FIRST during the '99 or '97 games. (kudos to everyone that has pointed this out before).

Blog post about last year's hint for reference: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ame-Hint-Redux

Recall that last year, when they made a mistake that wasn't even a complete mistake as they admitted, Frank wrote a whole new blog post and re-released the hint fixed to avoid confusion or possible misdirection, and even said that "So maybe we should have spent a little more time on this one! Sorry about that." If they truly did just accidentally click on the wrong video clip, I would have expected more of a response like last year's, rather than a nonchalant "Whoops".

Also, I highly doubt they picked they videos and set it to automatically pick a random spot in the video. They specifically chose, even if they didn't spend much time on it, clips from the video that had a bit of action. I could see this being a mistake far more if the two clips were the same, but considering they are from two completely different spots in the same video, I just can't envision any process of editing this video that would result in this as an accident.

Now whether this switcheroo was accidental or not, I don't think it'll provide a whole lot of insight into the game. So while I don't think we should look too far into this part of the hint, I would have to respectfully disagree that this was not intentional.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by fb39ca4

It was possible to drive over the hump (in Rebound Rumble) using 8" wheels.

The RR KOP wheels were 6", so you would have had to buy another set (and boy, were we strapped for cash our rookie year). Even with 8" wheels, that would be a trick. The hump was 4" high, so an 8" wheel would hit it with a vertical surface. I wouldn't try to drive over it with a wheel anywhere near the carpet unless it was at least 12" in diameter. At 8", the bumper would also have had to be located fully above the axles, which really isn't a normal thing if you're building the KOP chassis. The only robots I saw "drive over" the hump had some sort of articulated chassis which raised the "front" wheels at least two inches off the floor (or possibly they were accelerating so fast that they were rolling only on the rear wheels, which seems even less likely). All in all, this goes past a kit bot with some static pieces added on top

[hardcopi]

Haven't heard this idea mentioned, but if they really want to change things up... no wheels. Never been done ASFAIK in FRC.

Forget Water Game... Walking Game. Would certainly level the playing field a bit. Anyone ever had a walking bot?

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

I'm not so sure. When has the hint been focused on change happening? They (FIRST) seems to be very clear that SOMETHING we have all grown used to is changing.

Well, never that I know of, but when has the hint ever been similar to a previous year's? They're always pretty different. If they gave this hint before the release of Ultimate Ascent and then we found out that the robot sizing rules were changing, I would have been pretty well satisfied. I think that would have been enough because it was such a mainstay over the previous several years, but it didn't fundamentally change the way we approached that game or Aerial Assist. I think this year will see something of that magnitude again--not really earth-shattering, but something that hasn't changed in a while.

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by hardcopi

Haven't heard this idea mentioned, but if they really want to change things up... no wheels. Never been done ASFAIK in FRC.

Forget Water Game... Walking Game. Would certainly level the playing field a bit. Anyone ever had a walking bot?

Well, yes. Team 71 did it in 2002 (they're the robot coming in from the left), and that robot became one of the most famous in FRC history.

And, in addition to leveling the playing field, it could also rip it up, literally. With the huge requirement on traction that year, many teams (especially 71) ended up tearing the carpet pretty badly. FIRST changed the rules on what could be used for traction devices the following year.