Game Simulator

[Joe Johnson]

Just saw it myself. It is really great.

Hats off to team 217 for a great tool.

If anyone from 217 is out there listening, I have a few small (okay not so small...) improvements:

There should be a central ball queue.

Balls should be able to go to and from the queue to the following places:
Out of bounds
Each human station (10 balls at reset)
Each side of the field (20 balls at reset)
Each robot
Each goal

This would make it a 2 step process to get balls off the ground and in a robot and from a robot to a goal, but it would make all the features of the game doable -- at present, robots do not have balls, balls in human stations are not usable, etc.

Robots should able to "attach" to goals afterwhich moving one moves both. This is probably pretty tricky to do since there is a lot of geometery required and currently the robots and goals do not rotate. This feature would be nice but is not really a huge deal if it is too hard to do.

If you took the "attach" feature to extremes you may be able to attach two or more robots to eachother. You may let robots attach to ball locations so that a single click would take a ball from one place and put it in another (without going through the queue). Another example would be that if a robot & a goal were attached, one click would let balls go directly to/from the robot from/to the goal.

Finally, it don't recall if it displays the qualifying points as well as the match score, but it would be nice if it did that as well. (I suppose it does, but I was not looking at the time).

Bottom line, it is a VERY cool and useful tool. I hope they make it better.

Joe J.


From the central ball queue, balls should be able to