[Official 2007 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by Andrew Blair

The beautiful thing about autonomous this year, and in years prior, is that you didn't *have* to use the camera, or other sensor if you didn't want to or didn't have the resources.
You could always dead-reckon it if you had to, and I think that needs to stay. I love the advanced sytem autonomous points, but we should keep an easy couple of points in there for the rest of the teams.

In Triple Play, you could use dead reckoning to get the hanging tetra and/or use the one tetra the alliance was given to cap a goal. Yes, getting the vision tetra involved, well, vision.

The problem with auton in Triple Play was that the rewards were not enough. 26 points were theoretically possible - drop both hanging tetras, get the vision tetra on the goal in the middle of the field, and cap the center home-row goal to generate a row. But how many vision tetra cappings were there all season? In reality, your alliance was doing good to get 5 points in auton, a rather insignificant number in the whole game.

Aim High had a very meaningful auton reward - not only the 10 point bonus, but playing defense first. Winning auton put you in a very good position to win the match. Maybe the pendulum swung too far this year, but it certainly made auton an important feature in the game. And there were multiple things to do - high goal via either camera or dead reckoning, low goal, play defense.

We need an autonomous mode with real rewards for the teams that master it. There also has to be something for those with lesser programming skills to do. IMO, this year's game provided more of those kinds of options than Triple Play did. Hopefully future games will continue the trend.