What do you think about how easy theyre making programming?

[galewind]

Personally, I think that people are underestimating the advantage of having more scripts available. Let's draw comparisons to prior years:

1) 2003 - Autonomous code introduced. Could either do line tracking, reflective tape reading, or dead reckoning. Did you see anyone use the reflective tape? Not me! I'd say 85% of the robots that I saw did dead reckoning.

2) 2004 - Introduced infrared ability which contained code that, for many, was godawful to understand and incorporate, and extemely difficult to create without help from sites like kevin.org . Line tracking was back, and a few more teams used it. How did most teams end up coding it? Dead reckoning.

3) 2005 - Cameras, colors, and tetras, oh my!

This year raises the complexity of the routines, but limits the number of options you have for auntonomous mode. To rookies and new programmers, it would be fairly difficult to go from not knowing anything about FIRST coding to go to something this complex, especially where dead reckoning is not nearly as valuable as in past years (IMO). I think that providing scripts can be valuable for competition purposes, as well as "tutorials" to people, making it a tremendous learning experience.

I have a feeling that without these scripts to help facilitate programming, a lot of rookie teams would find their autonomous modes completely useless. And i really think that autonomous mode is going to be THAT much more important this year.

For experienced programmers, I think this provides them a fantastic opportunity to generate their own scripts to share with people, as Dave recommended during the kickoff. Have a unique and effective way to find the vision tetra? program a script! see if it's reproducable!

Anyway, I'm just ranting. My thought is that unless you plan on closing out new team registrations, you're not going to be able to advance the complexity of the game without providing an "out" for other teams to play catch up.

Realistically, you can learn to do the programming for the new routines on your own, and perhaps contriibute to the effort, rather than fight the notion that sharing with others can be a good thing.

[Merv Burger]

Now, this is all my personal opinion, but I think what a lot of the people who are putting this new coding method down, are "forgetting" that they don't have to use this new method. Yeah, I can understand the frustration that can occur knowing that while you're working away at this difficult coding process, someone else can be doing essentially the same thing with very simple commands. But the advantage you have over the "simple" code is that you get to tweak it. That you can ultimately have greater control over the code.

By having this advantage, you can do things better and more efficiently than the person doing it the easy way. I don't know about you guys, but I'd find some satisfaction in that.