The 10th Defense

[IowaBoyInMN]

Is your team ready for the 10th Defense?

https://youtu.be/pLlRDyqG0Ug

[NinjaMunkeeNao]

This is awesome guys!

I turned my lights off and put on headphones; it was like I was at a movie theater!

[bEdhEd]

I was expecting to see a really low ramp bot that placed itself on top of a defense to let an allied robot to drive over with ease. But I got some cool special effects instead!

[philso]

I heard a rumor that AndyMark will be releasing a kit to build a mechanism that would be useful against The 10th Defense

[NinjaMunkeeNao]

Originally Posted by philso

I heard a rumor that AndyMark will be releasing a kit to build a mechanism that would be useful against The 10th Defense

OOOOOO, GIMMIE!

Wait, so there will actually be dragons? Do they have to wear safety glasses?

[Ryan_Todd]

Originally Posted by NinjaMunkeeNao

Wait, so there will actually be dragons? Do they have to wear safety glasses?

The dragons actually won't appear during most matches, but we might see a few during the first few weeks when teams are still getting lots of penalties for doing stupid stuff. There will be fewer dragons in the weeks that follow, but they might come back with a vengeance for the district championships and/or world championship event.

Why, you ask? Simple! The field health tracking system design went to the lowest bidder, so it only has 28 bits' worth of memory available for tracking the health of the various field elements. It's technically a 32-bit system, but they reserved the rest for a wall-crumbling feature that never panned out; the extra 6 bits aren't actually write-accessible in the production version. Anyways, each defense is allotted its own two-bit state machine, so there are only 4 bits remaining to store an unsigned integer health value for each tower; therefore, the FMS can't actually handle tower health levels above 15 points. The GDC didn't find out about the rollover-to-zero exploit until last week, so they scrambled to find a solution; this was it.

TL;DR:
If a tower's health is ever at 15 points and a technical foul would have pushed it up to 16, the refs have instead been instructed to unleash a dragon upon the offending team's robot.

...And yes, the dragons do have to wear safety glasses.

[GaryVoshol]

OK, who hacked in and found the Week 5 rules update?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

OK, who hacked in and found the Week 5 rules update?

Week 5? Psshh. This is the Week 0 rules update. Competition Week 5's update is replacing the Boulders with actual boulders and filling the Moat with liquid water.

[RoboDawg]

Done! Kevlar robot! I told the design team to expect 'Anything'.

[Dantheman3959]

Originally Posted by EricH

Week 5? Psshh. This is the Week 0 rules update. Competition Week 5's update is replacing the Boulders with actual boulders and filling the Moat with liquid water.

wow........actual week 0 update included this.....

[Retired Starman]

I'm wondering if anyone has signed up in VIMS as the "volunteer" in charge of feeding the dragon and cleaning out its cage.

Not a job I would want.

Finally, Gracious Professionalism has some teeth in it!

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Dantheman3959

wow........actual week 0 update included this.....

OK, I think I need to hide now.

First, I make a Monty Python joke on that duck video, and then the Kickoff video is half a tribute to Monty Python (er, maybe not "tribute", but you know what I mean).

Now I make a comment about this being a Week 0 update, and it lands in there.

Hey, GDC, if you're reading this: How about following Dr. Joe instead?

[The Ginger]

i don't know about you guys but but when my team saw the reveal of the 10th defense we all were like, ah man.

[HolyHacker335]

Originally Posted by IowaBoyInMN

Is your team ready for the 10th Defense?

https://youtu.be/pLlRDyqG0Ug

Ummm....when I tried to open the video I got "Private". wth?