Good evening, everyone. We hope your regionals are going well.
I wanted to announce that we discovered two bugs in our software today - nothing too critical - and have released a new version for them if you’re using our scouting package. You can download a fresh copy by connecting to the internet and using the ‘launch online’ option through Web Start, or by going to http://71.206.53.237/webstart/FRCScout.jnlp.
Fixed:
Bug in region filtering
Due to how this was implemented, adding a match did not cause it to be included on the filtered list. This has been fixed.
Bug in graphical scoring
(Aside from the size of the window.) The logic to determine what match to associate the graphical scoring did not work right for a new match, and has been rewritten and tested.
We know that we’re finding it a vast improvement over our prior paper-based system, and we hope that some of you (based on the number of downloads) are finding it useful too. If you could take a second and let us know what your thoughts are, it would be appreciated. Thanks!
I’d like to thank lukevanoort for bringing a problem to my attention. It’s not so much a bug fix as a new feature to get around an issue that he and his team encountered with their install.
In addition, I took the time to add a “neat” new feature to the mix.
New Features:
Users can select the file save directory
The prior versions all assumed that the C: drive was available. Obviously, this isn’t going to work on a machine without a C: drive. I’ve added a tab on the Options panel to let you specify another directory for saving (and yes, this will store the value from restart to restart). IF you change the storage directory after having already been using the application, it will copy all of your data to the new directory and load/save there from now on.
Windows now remember their position and size
I know that during testing and then at Chesapeake, windows needed to be different sizes on the desktop system where I did my testing and the laptop where I was really running it. If you resize a window or move it on your screen, the next time you open it, it will be restored to the same position and size.
There’s another bug-fix out on our site for anyone using the app.
Penaties and Final Scores
It seems kind of silly, but we had been coping with the minor little bug that if an alliance had more penalties than they had points scored, the software let their final score go negative. (We simply coped with it, ourselves.) This is now fixed.
There may be one more release before Atlanta, over the weekend, assuming some features get finished. Otherwise, they’ll wait for the post-season matches.
From what little I’ve seen, you’ve got a great system. I wonder what other people think of the alternate paradigm? A little late in the game to change anything this year, but something to bear in mind for next year…
Consider: a scouting app where the server with all the data is in one place, and six client computers each ask for a match-bot assignment from the server. On bot per person, the form gets filled out as the match finishes.
Another computer stays with the drivers, and is used to see what bot best fits certain criteria, specified by the user (Best at scoring, most reliable ramp, most defensive). If necessary, backups can be done by a scheduled task on the server.
My Opinion:
Ignoring “cost”, the biggest difference is probably the approach that the interface dictates; do you enter the data into the computer later, have one person scout a whole match, or have six people on six computers for any one given match?
Strike that. MERGING. With one server, and only one place where information is actually kept, merging is handled automatically.
We gave some thought when coming up with our system to something along the lines of what you proposed - a system where we could have everything entered and then merged. There is the biggest issue - cost - but there’s also some other issues with the server-client paradigm that just not addressable in the time we had for designing the app. Issues such as how to handle the networking, installation by other teams, where to position folks, how to bring the pit scouting into the mix, all of these were issues that factored into this year’s system of a centralized app with paper scouting feeding into it.
There are, I believe, scouting systems out (or that have been out in the past) that involve server-client. What we were going for, primarily, was a system that was flexible, easy to use and easy to install/upgrade. I think we accomplished that.
And, there will be an update this weekend before the Championship Event.
I’d tease and say that’s a secret. We’re integrating changes that Team 8 had made to their version of the code, and I’ll be working on a common interchange format as is being discussed in the other thread, and a few items on the views themselves.
