Something New – Team Avatars Written by Danny Diaz, FIRST Robotics Competition Systems Engineer.
Avatars have been used in arcade video games since the early-mid 1970’s, and have become a way to represent and identify players and personalities. For the first time ever, *FIRST *Robotics Competition teams will be allowed to create a Team Avatar, or digital image, that will be used to represent their teams on the FIRST POWER UP Audience Displays at the competitions and on their online frc-events.firstinspires.org team pages. In FIRST POWER UP, the Team Avatar will be displayed alongside other identifying information for a team to represent the team in the Alliance – the Avatar will be a third means of identifying the team alongside the team’s number and nickname.
The Team Avatar is completely optional. There is no element of FIRST POWER UP you won’t be able to play if you don’t create a Team Avatar. In fact, teams who do not create and submit a Team Avatar will be assigned a default Team Avatar for use at the event. The default Team Avatar is not custom to each team, it’s the same for all teams who do not submit a Team Avatar.
Full Team Avatar specs are provided here. Once the Team Avatar submission portal is ready, we’ll post another Blog entry notifying teams along with instructions on how to submit their Team Avatars. It’s important to note that unlike your team’s nickname, teams will not be allowed unlimited changes to their Team Avatar. Each time a Team Avatar is submitted, it will be reviewed by a team member on the FIRST Robotics Competition staff – because of this, teams will only be allowed one (1) submission plus one (1) update. Design a Team Avatar that you will be proud of for the entire season!
Please join us in making the 2018 FIRST Robotics Competition season the most exciting ever!
The one question I have for the folks at TBA is will you all import avatars onto TBA as well? That would be helpful for scouting presentations that I make.
A person avatar would make no sense for a team… my guess is it’s some generic game element or the FIRST logo, since all teams that don’t submit one will get the same avatar.
Edit: I realize you may be talking about individual teams… where this seems even less likely, considering there are a number of all-girls teams.
Honestly my first impression on this was that a decent number of teams will probably make a pixelated version of their logos instead of a person-type avatar image.
I’m pretty sure an Animated PNG is an extension to the Portable Network Graphics format, and is not in the base Portable Network Graphics format itself. I would bet it would be rejected, or only the first frame would be accepted. Could you imagine how annoying it would be if everyone used an animated image? I think that’s why Twitter removed the ability to have animated GIFs.
Only 40x40? What kind of potato-quality are they going for?
My only assumption is they’re doing it so it fits the 8-bit theme, because assuming they intend to display these on the scoreboards, there’s no technical reason they couldn’t be a reasonable size/quality.
It’s for the 8-bit theme. Because the theme of the game is retro/8-bit games. Putting a full res photo would make no sense in the context of the theme. By limiting it to 40x40 they are forcing pixel art. I can’t tell if you are serious or not.
I do sincerely hope that the pessimist part of me is incorrect, but that remains to be seen. My assumption that teams would choose humanoid avatars was based on the examples provided by FIRST in the DLC.
