The Metal Hinge Wedge...

[JoeBlo]

lol hardly anyone used to play dsl.

stock was where it was at.

I arrived towards the end of that era... (late 2008 I was lurking, Jan 2009 I joined)

when I joined only BBEANS, Inf's tournament, Ian's Tournament and Elbite were running/ discussing

3 Stock to 1 DSL.... those days were nice..

Its no secret I like stock better... but with everything becoming about DSL. I decided to jump ship for a while (wasnt that bad at it either) Also I guess CC didnt help with Stocks popularity at all.. especially having it and a DSL BBEANS in one year. :P

but that is why Sage and I have been pushing for the 1.4 patch to get out there.. Give stock some more popularity.

[Clickbeetle]

I didn't start playing this game until August 18, 2009.  By then metal hinge being better was already a well known fact.

I mean, nobody seemed to pay attention to component HP either until after I joined.  People were still talking about protecting the motors and all that.  You will think people will notice the difference between 400 HP and 12000 HP.  Chassis were HUGE back then too, most of the time filled with empty space.  I guess DSL gotten more competitive since then.

When a community expected things to work a certain way, and nobody looks, then conventional wisdom takes over.  Everybody will try to fit their observation into the existing paradigm.  Only until the old fails hard or by accident do new ideas come up, the latter being much more common than the former.

^ This.


No one used to care much about how good their wedge was, they'd just slap on a skirt hinge and some skirts and call it good.


The lack of AI packs was probably also a factor.  None of the stock DSL AI bots have really good wedges, so it wasn't hard to make a good bot without a good wedge.


BUT...


The skirt hinge may not be as useless as people think.  Look at Flux from BBEANS6--skirt hinge wedge and it outwedged Terrible Sight and Hredder.  That got me thinking, and I did some testing and I think it's possible to make a good wedge with the skirt hinge.  The magic is all in the actual wedge, not the hinge, or so it seems...

[JoeBlo]

40707 has been known to be really good with making Burst wedges (which is basically what the skirt hinge is)

also wedges change on the BBEANS Plane.. it could come down to what wedge handles bumps better,,

[Naryar]

No one used to care much about how good their wedge was, they'd just slap on a skirt hinge and some skirts and call it good.

The lesser builders maybe, not some of us... I only started to not truly care about how good my wedges when I got tired of building !

[123savethewhales]

I stop caring when I realize there are no rational way of making the wedge better then other people doing pretty much the same thing.

You put on that metal hinge, you put on that angled skirt or small wedge, you optimize the length of the bot, you move the drive back, and that's that.  There's nothing else you can do to make the wedge better.  If it AGOD or simply fails, then you just wasted some hours building the silly thing.

Put in another way, when it comes to wedge, any proven factor will be copied and widespread.  It's not so much different when every bot has skirt hinge to every bot metal hinge, you still end up with every wedge about the same.  The only way you can make your wedge better than others is through all the random factors that nobody knows of.

[Scorpion]

Does this mean I can fit in with the cool kids by not liking wedges aswell?
TBH though, what 123 says sums it up for me, can't be arsed with wedges because they're too unpredictable.
Maybe if there were proper, proven steps to making a good wedge, and some kind of decent payoff involved (like having to eat up more weight) then I would start to care more about them.
Just a related question, why is it then that the specific wedges and/or sheets seem to be so effective compared to other components with similair wedge shaped collision meshes?

[G.K.]

some kind of decent payoff involved (like having to eat up more weight) then I would start to care more about them.

BALLASTS

[Scorpion]

some kind of decent payoff involved (like having to eat up more weight) then I would start to care more about them.

BALLASTS

Looking past the trollishness of that post, you did actually kinda bring up a decent point about the weight distribution thing :P

Although, as far as I'm aware, that whole weight distribution thing hasn't really been proven, even the few things I've done with wedges seem to go against that theory anyway, but you never know.

[martymidget]

I use wedges mainly for jugglers and FS and some Drums, because they cant function well (or at all) without them (with the exception of Arctic Fox, WIIDE LOAD, Skesis and others). Otherwise I barely use them. HS and VS don't require them to be successful, but unfortunately popups and the like with heavyish armour will always eat them unless they are protected well. On the other hand, there are those bots that need wedges to work, like flippers, popups (ergh), jugglers, and often hammers. Its a 2 way thing, really.

tl;dr : Wedges generally make spinners redundant. :P

[MikeNCR]

As far as I can remember, this was the first bot that I saw using the metal hinge wedge:

Truthfully, I don't know why it took until 2008 to discover the hinge's proficiency, but when I was building Enfilad3 I just didn't think of using anything other than the skirt hinge for wedges.

Keep in mind that DSL really didn't become as competitive or as popular as it is until Naryar won BBEANS 4 (which is also when we began taking Nary seriously. IIRC he was pretty easily jaded as a noob). Until the community moved here from the Atari forums, the DSL crowd was small and pretty quiet. The official forums were almost exclusively Stock, so none of the big innovations liked the emergence of flails and wedges in DSL happened until years after it was concieved and released, when DSL really became popular.

It was somewhat known before then. Here's the earliest showcase bot I had using metal hinges, from all the way back in July of 2007-

Smashed show's Techno Destructo who the real flipper is.
(Image removed from quote.)

[NFX]

some kind of decent payoff involved (like having to eat up more weight) then I would start to care more about them.

BALLASTS

Looking past the trollishness of that post, you did actually kinda bring up a decent point about the weight distribution thing :P

Although, as far as I'm aware, that whole weight distribution thing hasn't really been proven, even the few things I've done with wedges seem to go against that theory anyway, but you never know.

I'm almost certain I disproved the theory on weight distribution when I did my study on them. Wedges, to me, just seem far too much of a random thing for me to actually bother making effectively.

[Urjak]

Ehhh... there is a difference between proving weight distribution is more complicated than we thought and disproving that it has anything to do with wedges all together.

I am personally one to believe weight distribution does have some effect on a bot's wedge.

[Naryar]

Weight distro AND wheel placement certainly have some effect on a bot's wedge !

[NFX]

Well, it would do if you put the weight behind the wheels. I'm not wanting to get into an argument about wedges, though, The limit of my knowledge is roughly "METAL HINGE GOOD."

[123savethewhales]

There is certainly an optimum length between wheel to wedge and length of wedge.  Just alternating those two easily affects wedge power.

As for weight distribution, the thing is everyone put all their weight in front of the wheels as is.  Moving those batteries further forward seems to make virtually no difference on controlled studies.  Even if they make a difference they are vastly overshadowed by all the other unknown factors that makes a wedge work.

Worst part is, almost every wedge that claims to be a lot better has so far been tested to turn out average with further testing.  Most people simply conclude their wedge is good after running about 5 to 10 trials.  But when it comes to probabilistic stuff you don't really get an accurate answer until you do like 50+ runs.  Like flipping a coin getting 5 heads in a row happens all the time.