2009 5th Gear FRC Match Simulator

[Brandon Holley]

Blake,
First of all, a thank you to you and the Lockheed guys for putting this together. I bet it took a lot of work, and I think it could be very useful to A LOT of teams.


I installed it, and got it running. I do not have anyone else to really play with at the moment, so I figured I would give it a go solo. It didn't appear that was any option for me to control a robot. The match did begin, however the moon rocks were just tossed around the field, and I coudl only control a flying camera. Is there a way to just play a match solo?

Thanks again for your effort.

Brando


EDIT: It appears that you need to have 2 instances running of the simulation...1 to host the game, and 1 to control the robot in the game

[lachoneus8]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

EDIT: It appears that you need to have 2 instances running of the simulation...1 to host the game, and 1 to control the robot in the game

You got it. It was designed for running a complete match in a LAN environment. AI Robots are coming down the pipe though...

[JesseK]

Yes, you'll need 1 server instance running. Then, just start another isntance as a client and connect to 127.0.0.1 (which is the default iirc). I did it in sandbox mode last night. It's a good simulation of the drive, I think. Is there a way to make the walls clear, or drive the bot in first person? Even better would be to drive the bot from the driver station's point of view.

If someone set up a dedicated server ... now that would be fantastic! I know we can set one up internally in the school, but porting that out to the internet may be a challenge...

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Yes, you'll need 1 server instance running. Then, just start another isntance as a client and connect to 127.0.0.1 (which is the default iirc). I did it in sandbox mode last night. It's a good simulation of the drive, I think. Is there a way to make the walls clear, or drive the bot in first person? Even better would be to drive the bot from the driver station's point of view.

If someone set up a dedicated server ... now that would be fantastic! I know we can set one up internally in the school, but porting that out to the internet may be a challenge...

I second the request for clear walls.

Sandbox mode...I'm assuming this is referring to driving in somewhat of a sandbox? I did notice the drive to be very different between the 2 modes.


Very awesome tool to have though!

[lachoneus8]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Is there a way to make the walls clear, or drive the bot in first person?

Not yet, though it is on our todo list.

Originally Posted by JesseK

Even better would be to drive the bot from the driver station's point of view.

Try the 'C' key for camera modes. 3 modes: Chase (default), Overhead, and Competition view.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Anyone have any luck installing in Windows 7? I get a BSOD

[Andrew Bates]

Installed it and played around in the sandbox a little. One thing I noticed is that when driving into a pile of balls the robot tends to get stuck but I'm sure on what. For example if I drive along a wall into a pile of balls the robot will get stuck even if there is plenty of space for the balls to get pushed. Is this a bug or just something weird happening.

Anyways this thing is awesome and looks to be a great tool. Thanks for all the hard by the engineers at Lockheed.

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by lachoneus8

Not yet, though it is on our todo list.

Try the 'C' key for camera modes. 3 modes: Chase (default), Overhead, and Competition view.

Minor quibble: why is chase the default camera view? IMO this is the most useless of the 3 views. Driver practice will almost certainly want to use the Competition view and strategy development will likely use the competition or overhead views.

The chase view starts the match with your camera pointing at the back of a wall if you start in one of the corner locations (not sure about the center one)

Overall, a great program from the little I have been able to play around with it. We will hopefully get a lot of useful strategy development and driver training done with the assistance of this program.

[lachoneus8]

Originally Posted by Vikesrock

Minor quibble: why is chase the default camera view? IMO this is the most useless of the 3 views. Driver practice will almost certainly want to use the Competition view and strategy development will likely use the competition or overhead views.

A leftover legacy of the fact this was developed initially as an exhibit. The problem with the other two modes is
1) No easy way to see which robot you're actually controlling... pretty confusing when you've got 6 robots running around the field.
2) The controls are more intuitive when you're behind the robot (up for forward, etc).

Both are essential for drivers to learn of course, drivers need to learn to overcome the confusion (especially this year when there are balls flying around everywhere and human players to contend with) and drive with the robot's axis in mind, but someone first picking up an Xbox controller would find both of these views difficult to start with.

We may just make it a game option what default view you start with in the next patch.

Originally Posted by Vikesrock

Overall, a great program from the little I have been able to play around with it. We will hopefully get a lot of useful strategy development and driver training done with the assistance of this program.

Glad you like it so far! On this first run, we're definitely looking for feedback on how to make this a more effective tool, so make sure to record any thoughts on strengths/weaknesses when you do use it for driver training/strategy development. There will be some surveys coming later in the build season.

[ttldomination]

?

When I'm in Lunacy, the friction too high, I don't know if that's just how it drives or if there is little physics applied...

Also, anyone know how to manipulate the balls???

[lachoneus8]

Originally Posted by ttldomination

?

When I'm in Lunacy, the friction too high, I don't know if that's just how it drives or if there is little physics applied...

Also, anyone know how to manipulate the balls???

Are you running a client? If you're just running the server you're just controlling the camera. You need to create a client to connect to the server to drive a bot. It will then give you prompts of what keys to press to manipulate the balls.

[Josh Goodman]

First off, VERY NICE PROGRAM and thank you for putting the time in to do this!

I do like all of the above suggestions and would like to add a concern. For some reason Overdrive works fine, but Lunacy is very, very laggy for me with the lowest settings. I play some pretty graphics intensive games on my laptop. Anyone else having this issue?

Also (just a cool thing not a requirement, you guys have already done a lot), but a controls setting would be nice.

[lachoneus8]

Originally Posted by Josh Goodman

I do like all of the above suggestions and would like to add a concern. For some reason Overdrive works fine, but Lunacy is very, very laggy for me with the lowest settings. I play some pretty graphics intensive games on my laptop. Anyone else having this issue?

My guess is that its not graphics... the main difference between Lunacy and Overdrive in the game engine are the number of physics objects in play (10 for a full overdrive game vs well over 100 in Lunacy).

If you have an NVidia card, you might want to update your drivers. We are using the NVidia PhysX engine, and some of their more recent cards have hardware to accelerate physics using this engine.

Originally Posted by Josh Goodman

Also (just a cool thing not a requirement, you guys have already done a lot), but a controls setting would be nice.

On the todo list!

Just a point for everyone: The FIRST website forums are the official forums, so any feature requests/bug reports are more likely to be heard and tracked there then here.

http://forums.usfirst.org/forumdisplay.php?f=1091

This is also linked in the original post of this thread.

By the way, David Dobbs, one of the developers, posted a nice picture by picture walkthrough in how to get started using 5th Gear.

[dpeterson3]

Nice job. Is that C#? It looks like it was made with some version of visual studio. Anyway, is there any way to define your own robot to get an idea of how the team bots will drive? If so, I couldn't find it.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by dpeterson3

Nice job. Is that C#? It looks like it was made with some version of visual studio. Anyway, is there any way to define your own robot to get an idea of how the team bots will drive? If so, I couldn't find it.

dp - Did you get an answer for this question? If not, ask it in the FIRST Forum. There is a link in my original post in this thread - Blake