[robocup-humanoid] Some Suggestions and bug reporting for Game Controller

[Daniel Seifert]

Dear Hafez,

thank you very much for your feedback on the Game Controller.

On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 11:40 PM, Hafez <mefmef at gmail.com> wrote:
> We have some suggestions to improve the game controller functionality:
> 1- according to the rule, game time duration is not 40 minutes.but the new
> game controller shows 40 min duration. (it may fixed if you set your time
> zone to Germany)

This issue happened in timezones with half-hour offsets (e.g. IRST /
UTC+03:30) and was fixed in early April. The binary download is still
the "German Open edition" (end of March). But you can check out the
latest code at https://github.com/bhuman/GameController

> 2- It seems a good idea for a playing soccer robot to ask referee for
> different type of requests like: pickup/service/ or even time out.
> (by returning the status to the Game controller)

Even in human soccer, it is not up to an individual player to ask the
referee directly for any of these things, it is the trainer or the
referee who make these decisions. In robot soccer, at least at this
stage, imho it does not seem feasible to have the robots decide any of
these requests themselves.

> 3- Game controller should broad cast the number of "in field" players for
> each team.

How do you define "in field"? The game controller only knows about the
players that are selected as active in the GUI (which may not all be
playing or even exist) and those that broadcast the
GameControlReturnData package (which may not match the actively
playing robots, either). As I assume that all teams have their own
team communication, it would be easier for the teams to track the
number of players by this means.

> 4- The official game controllers team names are not up to date.

I will update the list of names shortly. I would ask all qualified
teams to send me (directly by email) their team logo for
incorporation.

> 5- uint8_t penalty;              // penalty state of the player --> Not
> working properly (at least for us!) and as the previous game controller
> support uint16 it causes some compatibility issues

In this year, the GameController broadcasts both the new and the old
format. The old one still has an uint16_t for the penalties. What
precisely is not working properly?

> 6- last Game controller was easy to run by Console interface. Please extend
> the program options to set the these options:
> playing team numbers and it colors
> knock out game or normal game
> full screen or not ( Readme.txt claims that this option is used but (may
> be because of lack of documentations) we could not set it)
> auto color change or not
> [note: by options i mean :java -jar GameController.jar {options} ]

java -jar GameController.jar -l hl_kid -w

works for me in regards to window mode (tested on Linux).

Please note that the GameController is primarily maintained by
B-Human. For general bug reports (with reproduction steps) and feature
requests the github repository can be used. For Humanoid League
specific issues you can use the FUmanoids' clone of the repo at
https://github.com/fumanoids/GameController for now. As generally the
rule in open source software, it is possible (and appreciated) if bugs
/ missing features are resolved in code by other teams and provided to
the central repositories by means of pull-requests.

Daniel

-- 
dseifert at fumanoids.de
Phone +49 30 838 75-117 (Office), -125 (Lab)

Freie Universität Berlin
Institut für Informatik
AG Intelligente Systeme und Robotik
Arnimallee 7
14195 Berlin
Germany