Okay first off, this is not an official announcement. The point of this thread is to give everyone a heads up about when I plan to "officially" post rules and stuff for BBEANS5. That way, hopefully by the time the date I have in mind rolls around, some of the tourneys going on right now will be close to conclusion, and there won't be an excess of new tourneys popping up.
That said, I'm thinking about
Sunday, March 1st for the official posting of the rules and accepting of entries. The tournament is NOT starting now, so don't send in your entries yet because that puts me in an awkward position!
Again, that's Sunday,
March 1st when registration will probably open. Though that's still tentative at this point.
Plenty of time to plan and get your bots ready! There will be no (well, almost no) excuse for late entries!
Speaking of bots, while BBEANS5 isn't official yet, there are a few things you can count on:
-The game will be Stock. No DSL, no custom.
-The weight class will be Heavyweight.
-The arena will be the BBEANS Tournament Arena V2.
-There will be a lot of HS's and popups.
Wait a minute, BBEANS Tournament Arena V2? What's this?
It's what I've been working on for the past week... version 2 of the arena used for BBEANS4.
Here's a general overview of the new arena:
Ignore those things in the corners for now... I'll get to those later. For now, the main difference here is three things:
1. The arena is slightly bigger. The fighting area is now 24x24 meters, where it used to be 22x22.
2. The fence is slightly higher--1.75 meters where before it was 1.5 meters.
3. The fence is now completely transparent. It doesn't look as cool, but it will be a lot easier to see the bots when I'm filming with Orbit camera. No more hiding in the corners.
As before, the wall around the blade retracts into the floor partway through the match:
This time, though, it happens after 1 minute instead of one and a half minutes. That's 30 seconds more of spinning blade action.
Why the change to a 1 minute activation time? Well because there's something else that happens after 2 minutes
See those red lights in the corners? For the first two minutes they don't mean anything. You can stomp on top of those ominous-looking metal plates all you want and nothing will happen. But at 1:55 they'll turn yellow and a warning buzzer will sound.
When that happens, you know it's time to scram. Because when the clock reaches 2:00 and the lights turn green...
The flippers activate!
As cool as the blade is, after BBEANS4 I felt the arena still needed something... more. There weren't as many good blade hits as I was hoping. So I added these flippers in the corners.
The danger from these flippers is twofold. The obvious danger here is that your bot will be flipped, and if it's not invertible or if it can't self-right, you'll be counted out.
But where's the fun in that? Just being tipped on your back and slowly counted out? No one likes to lose by immobilization.
That's why I tweaked the angle and power on the flippers such that, if you get launched straight from the back of the flipper, you will
usually land...
...near to, if not right on top of the blade! The two hazards work beautifully together. If your bot is unlucky enough to suffer a double whammy like that, don't expect it to come out unscathed.
There is still a bit of tweaking I might need to do with the AI navigation around the flippers, so unfortunately, the arena isn't up for download yet. But it will be before BBEANS5.
Also, you needn't worry about getting stuck under the flippers. I thought of that, and put invisible collision under the flippers so you can't drive under them. That would indeed be a terrible way to lose.
So there's the arena... now you all know what to plan for. There's enough room for spinners to get around, but there are also enough low walls and hazards for wedges to perform well.
My hope is that with the flippers and blade acting together, there will be even less boring matches than in BBEANS4.
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