we should start discussing what teams we want to include in the game. we obviously cant have a thousand teams, we need to pick maybe 50 teams, depending on how expansive we want it to be. i think 16 would be the absolute minimum even for pre-release versions. we should consider things like:
-the availability of a 3D render of the robot
-a control method that could easily be converted to PC (meaning not my team )
-including unique robots (in order to expand the depth and replay value)
-avoiding having two robots that are extremely similar
So, maybe we have a whole bunch of robots from Inventor/3DS or whatever (which is it?), but how do we read them into our program? I haven’t gotten far, but CS probably doesn’t have an easy function for doing this. Does anyone know of a library? (open source, of course. :D)
Most of the engines I’ve looked at claim support for 3DSMax. As for similarity, how about a ‘default’ color that is filled in at runtime (allowing for the same robot to have different looks).
As for the control mech, that is going to be difficult. I have a couple of ideas.
assign keybord keys and joystick axis to various inputs
allow you to hook up the OI and get the info via dashboard.
make an FRC program for the RC that feeds the computer info. (also allows for programs straight off the RC)
)