I’m pretty excited for Crescendo as the amplification game mechanic is unique, exciting and could produce some novel strategies. Unfortunately, while watching Week 0 live and re-watching the playoffs, it was nearly impossible to tell if a speaker was amplified or not. One of these speaker scores is worth 2 points while the other is worth 5. Can you tell which one is which?
The best way I found was to take your eye off the action and look to see if the (very little) light near the amp were blinking or not. Circled here in lime green:
I’m sure we can come up with solutions to easily signify to the spectators if a speaker is amplified or not.
Here are some ideas.
Bright blinking, not static, lights. The speakers currently have lights, but unless you’re staring at it when it turns on, it’s nearly impossible to tell if the light is on or not. In the screenshot above, can you tell the Red speaker light is on but Blue isn’t? The blinking lights from 2018 used to signify who was in control of the scale and switches is a really good example of a solution.
The minimalistic scoreboard used for the full field view (and all regional/championship uploads) needs to have amplification. 2018’s scoreboard had little indicators when an alliance played a powerup for extra points or stealing control. I think it needs to be more obvious than 2018, something that you can see from the corner of your eye while watching the robots.
I think the worst part about being a spectator at Week 0 was the fact that the FMS table is on the source side, rather than the amp side. This puts the majority (or at some events, the entire) audience on the back side of the amp, so the view for amp scoring and a lot of the wing is completely obstructed by the solid amp.
I wish FIRST would have put the amp side on the side of the FMS so that audience members could better see robots score in the amp.
I think there is a misunderstanding of the scoreboards or audience displays as there are two different versions. There is the full width one that will indicate amplification and then the minimalistic one that does not. The screen at events use the full width one while the full field webcasts and thus the match videos uploaded to youtube use the small square one.
Last year’s blog showed off the full width one, but the webcasts used the minimalistic one.
The graphics shown in the blog are done, but as @XaulZan11 mentioned there are two separate sets of graphics. The blog/venue screen setups, and the stream setup (with the minimal setup being discussed here).
If the comparison is being made to last year’s “minimal” UI, then I think it’d be reasonable to expect what we saw at week 0 wasn’t the final version of that either.
What we saw last Saturday contained NO game specific information, while last year’s “minimal” UI shown in the above post showed the same game specific info (number of links) as the main UI.
I’m expecting the amplification status and the number of notes scored will be present in webcasts by week 1.
It would have been nice if these EL wires(?) could more clearly indicate when the Speaker is amplified. If they were RGB LEDs, they could also act as another indicator when the field is safe to enter, kind of like the goal lights from 2014 crossed with the steam pipe from 2017.
I’m also surprised the Driver Station LED strings from 2022 and 2023 aren’t making a return. It seems like they would be perfect for this game with 17 “bulbs” and an 18 note RP.
“Safe for Humans”
The Charger Robotics Week 0 has seating on both sides of the field. With how short the robots are it’s basically impossible to see if you are sitting low down
The GDC did this last year too, with the scoring table being on the opposite side of the field from the substations, and thus the single substations significantly blocking spectator view of the field. I really wish they would put a little more effort into the field design overall.
So last year my best guess for the logic here was to limit the size of the cable bump. If you turn the field around you need a cable bump running the whole length across the substation all the way to the charge station. Alternatively you could run the cable along the whole outside edge of the field to where it existed or a new cable bump running from the alliance wall to the charge station but that also creates issues.
This year my best guess is for a few reasons:
They wanted the action “closer” to the stands so putting the Amp and Speaker on the “audience” side makes sense.
The game announcers would have human players and the Amp actively blocking their views unless they stood immediately behind the head ref.
Having the Speaker and Amp on the not scoring table side limits the amount of volunteers who “need” to be next to/near the scoring objective thus allowing for a safer distance to be established.
Having the Speaker and Amp on the not scoring table side limits the chances of someone shooting/launching in the direction of said table thus limits the chances of an errant note causing a field fault.
Now do I think game design could have solved these issues, yes. But we aren’t going to change the field layout so we are stuck with what we have this year. Hopefully we eventually return to diagonally mirrored fields and then some of these issues (as well as having to write twice as many autos) will be solved, though usually that solution is just making half the field harder to observe than the other.
