This thread is made to show what teams are officially going to be in the game. So far, only MOE is official. Does anybody else have a model of their bot and want to be in the game, or know of another team who they think would like to be? my email is [email protected] if anybody wants to submit a model.
Maybe we can convince FIRST to put that in the next announcement!
Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Maybe Lavery could pull some strings… 
See if we could do that.
Or, you could just email them.
if i can access our teams i could, but its stored on the base (we work in a wharehouse on the local Navy Base) and thats not gonna happen =P earliest i could get to it would be a week or two before RiverRage (first week in september or so)
Question: how do we get our team’s bot into the FVG?? Do we send pictures of it to u guys or do we have to create the 3d model ourselves???
just ask and we’ll put you in. all are welcome.
as far as the model, we would prefer if you guys gave us a model, but if you dont have one, we could make one if you cant. we are modeling a bunch of stuff anyway. :rolleyes:
Well, if you already have one (from inventor or 3dsmax), then send that to the 3D group (HHSJosh leads). If you don’t, talk to them. Mike can supply you with a list of volunteers.
it would be nice to see my old team’s robot in the game, but i can’t give a model for two reasons: i don’t have one, and i’m no longer a team member.
also, getting team hammond to submit a model would be very hard to do, because of privacy issues on our team. we can still try- some of our animators are CD members, albeit not active.
?!?!?!
Yeah, I probably can model from pictures, but that would be really hard and would take a lot of guesswork.
Really, if teams can send either an Inventor or Max (prefered) file, I can use those. If you have any more questions or have a model to send, you can email me at [email protected]
Well, if I can get permission, I’ll be more than happy to submit the 2002 Hammond robot for that game if it is included (sorry, just getting into the whole FVG thing so I don’t quite know what’s going on). I’ll have to lower the polycount quite a bit, but that shouldn’t be too hard. 2001’s model is a bit lacking, but I suppose if that is wanted too, I’ll hand it over.
Kev
Why don’t we create our own placibo bots for the first version while we wait for replies from teams?
because from a coders stand point, its going to be hard to code for each individual bot, because they all have diffrent functions! So making placebo bots using certain movement types of hanging or small ball collection may be completly diffrent from the team’s use each part of the game.
or at least thats how it seems… =/
right now, we are concentrating on the 2004 game. however, once we get that running well, we will start workign on other games, and maybe someday (considering that we should be well able to add each game in less than a year) we will eventually have every game ever made included.
I had assumed that there would be some sort of scripting system or something to define the functions of a robot. Hard coding all robots would be tedious, to say the least. (of course, unless there are dozens of robots, it would be easier to hard code…)
yes, but most robots have an arm or claw that comes out, grasps the ball, and closes… while 121’s bot, it has 2 parts to the big ball… both parts go up and down, and suck in and out… from there the bottom part spins, and the top one sucks in and out… and they are NOTHING like ANY other bot in the game… from what ive seen no bot can grab 2 big balls at the same time (no im not trying to brag about our bot) but its things like that, and things like 45’s rotating arm at the base, so… if there was a way to do basic functions on bots that just hang, or just small balls out be eaiser to do coding for those, and have a script run for certain bots that need extra coding or something… but we gotta hear from the programmers =P
That’s why I said a scripting system, not a list of features a bot does or does not have. A scripting system would let you assing various types of movement to certain parts. You could define speed, acceleration, range of movement, torque to any roational body. conveyor belt type things could be defined. umm… what else… whatever, there would be several types of movement a part would have and various parameters for that movement. This would all be defined by scripts taht accompany every bots files. This would mean you could desing your own robot without modifying the source code. I am not making this up out of the blue, this is how any real game would handle it.
Unless you can write the scripting engine, the current plan is to use DLLs.
Scripting engine: We could do that easily enough by having a “scripting engine” class. The rest of the program would interface with this class when they want to tell the robot to do something. The scripting engine will then look at some sort of file in the robot zip and determine just what the robot does to do this. The scripting interface could also be used to determine if a robot is even capable of a certain action. IE:
#include <string>
#include <map>
using namespace std;
class ScriptingInterface {
public:
ScriptingInterface(string robotZip); // This would read in the robot actions,
// etc from the file, storing them in something like an accociative
// map (the STL has this all ready for us, so it would be easy)
bool grabBall(bool canDo = false); // If canDo was false (which is the
// default here), then it will attempt to grab the ball. If it is true,
// then it will return a true or false depending on whether or not
// this robot is capable of performing this action.
// Similar functions to grabBall...
private:
string robotSciptFile;
map<string, Action> possibleActions;
};
class Actions {
// I don't want to think about it right now, but this class would be able
// to store a sequence of actions (in some sort of vector/array?) and
// play them back on the robot.
};
Yeah, all the said, I was bored, so I thought I’d say it…
On the DLL note: Would the DLL include the AI robot software? I assume so, otherwise it doesn’t do us much good.
i can send you cad drawings of Swampthing when i get my internet at my house back
If the robot supports AI. We feed iRobot class OI info, and iRobot modifies it’s position and posture.