[Official 2007 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions

[Donut]

As has already been suggested, I would like to see the return of multiple autonomous tracking methods. To keep from having too many tracking things for a single target, there could be "easier" tracking objects for less points and "harder" tracking objects for more points (for example, a line to follow only leads to a 1 point goal, while a light to track leads to a 2 point goal).

If an autonomous bonus is awarded again next year, it should be cut down some (probably 5 points instead), especially if there is a tactical advantage like this year. The 10 point bonus could often be overcome in the playoff type matches, but in matches where teams were struggling to end the score 17-12 the one alliance who got lucky and happened to get one ball in the corner goal pretty much instantly won.

I actually thought the software support was far above anything in the past this year, and more than enough for our team at least (we were lucky enough to have 2 programming mentors and a 7 man programming team though). The only thing that could be made better for next year is to have a sensor version of the default code which contains all of the sensor code written by Kevin in one project where they are already integrated to work together. Having done all of the combining of projects and files for our team, I know that teams with only one or two programmers would have a heck of a time trying to get all that sensor code to work in one project.

I do love the support we get though. Nothing beats being able to change the camera search parameters, especially when a year ago we were using default search patterns that we had trouble understanding what it was doing.