Programming Competition: Autonomous Simulator

[Astronouth7303]

NOTE: I created this thread to move specific discussion away from this thread: Interest in Programming Competition?.

Originally Posted by SilverStar

Point taken well, but if something is to be ready when Nationals are over, I think it would be best to plan ahead.

1. Yes, the simulator would be available to teams ahead of time.
2. Who is writing the simulator? I don't know. Maybe I'll make it a sourceforge project.

And, I think the visual simulator will be a Java/C++ hybrid, not Flash.

OR - the simulator could be a Direct3d application that would download real time data from NRG's server.

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

There's an idea. DirectX covers video, audio, multi-player, and probably some other things. But realtime may be a little excesive (Maybe not- you may just stream position data and sound)

If you go DirectX, can we send virtual models of our bots with an INI describing motor data?

Originally Posted by SilverStar

That is a great idea for motors being describing in an INI. Virtual models would be possible if someone can write a model loader in Visual Basic for DirectX 9.0. I've begun writing the simulator, I'll probably have incremental downloads accessible at the RoboCoder (any ideas for a better name?) site:
http://nrg.chaosnet.org/coder

I would have to precompute each match's results at our computers. Then I would make the simulator download the latest match and play it so that each robot followed the path I precomputed. Then after the match, you could resubmit code to improve. I would then precompute the next match's results, and the cycle continues.

I'm trying to figure out a way to spread the word, how would I go about doing this?