As this wonderful, delicious year winds down to an end, we are all put under the pressure of completing finals. Having to churn out long essays, answer mindless multiple choice questions, or code a robotic machine of pure and unadulterated death, we have to do something. Speaking of coding a violent, rolling block of imaginary metal, that's what we're doing for our ACP final! It doesn't seem to be too difficult of a challenge, other than the fact that my robot can barely beat the samples and once it tracks the enemy, it just charges towards it without thinking. Thats an issue from me trying to introduce the
Ramfire strategy into my robot, where it rams the enemy and gets extra points from this. I would like to make my robot always move forward to where it is scanning the opponent, but I don't want to have to dig through the API to figure out how to do that. Regardless, I have high hopes for the final competition, because I can still beat most sample robots.
Most. Most is an exaggeration, I can beat a few, and even then it's not always a 10/0 win loss ratio. I'm tempted to stop typing this
shitty exciting blog post, and instead attempt (in vain) to increase the logic behind my custom AI, but I don't have any grades for this class still this six weeks so I don't know which would be better to do. Nope, I have no clue how to make my robot actively track the enemy robot instead of track, move forward, track, move forward, because I don't know which part of the code is tracking! -intermission-
I learned that to keep my robot scanning I just have to call
scan(), but I still can't figure out how to make my robot scan while it's moving forward. I know there's some code somewhere that I found last week that makes the turret and scanner move separately, but I don't remember where I saw that code. Even if I find how to separate their actions, I still can't think of a way to make the robot constantly scanning the robot... nevermind I got an idea.
I'm looking forward to this final, because competition is fun and a healthy activity that gets students more accustomed to the challenges of the real world, outside of our LASA fish tank.
