Poll

What do you like doing most in RA2/RA3/robot combat games?

Building robots
Local single player battles with manually-controlled robots
Local multiplayer battles  with manually-controlled robots (PvP with controllers or a shared keyboard)
AI-only tournament battles
Other?  Please comment below.

Author Topic: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development  (Read 187766 times)

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1940 on: February 27, 2020, 09:16:09 AM »
Sorry for the delay!  I’m trying to get one out today.

I’m not satisfied with spinner imbalancing.  It is creating a really bad teleporting wobble when you knock something off the spinner.  So far my fixes have created more problems than they have solved.  I do have one more thing to try though.

Found a bug.  Now I need to trace it to its core and squash the bug.

I'm really hoping to get this build out today!

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1941 on: February 27, 2020, 12:38:38 PM »
It turns out the mass of the objects broken off are being incorrectly calculated.  Sometimes this results in the mass remaining to be zero even when there is stuff still attached.  I need to rework this.

I'm still hoping to get a build out in the next few hours...

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1942 on: February 27, 2020, 03:57:04 PM »
New build is up! 27February2020:

http://robot-rumble.itch.io/builds

TONS OF NEW COMPONENTS!

[Updates in the February 27th Build]

[Added] Added 3 new arenas.  They were all built using the Arena Modding Tool:

-School Tournament Arena

-Parking Lot

-The Twisted Circus

[Added] First batch of new Weapon's components + modifications to pre existing ones in accordance to new component factors. Many more new weapons + extras to come!​

[Added] New component types and category buttons for weapons (piercing/spinning/swinging/misc) and extras (lighting/decorative/misc).​

[Added] Added the option to copy values from other components in the materials section of the botlab.​

[Added] Now components can be set as scalable, materiable and tintable from the inspector.​

[Added] Hotkeys added:
-Increase/decrease scale factor.
-Toggle local/absolute movement of components.
-Toggle on/off movement of components attached to the selected component when scaling it. Changed the hotkey system a bit:
-By defalue hotkeys don't activate if the mouse left mouse button is held, this is to avoid problematic behaviours that can occur if some hotkeys are activated when dragging stuff. -Even hotkeys that attached to buttons and other interactables now get raycasted to see if they are covered, before they could be activated when the screen was covered by popups creating problems. This check can be deactivated for non problematic functions.

[Added] Added hotkeys for the materials and controls tabs. Fixed the move through tabs hotkeys not activating. Now component/material/brushes lists use an actual scroll rect and have scroll bars.

[Replaced] Replaced existing spinner damage with an entirely new damage model.  Take a look!

[Removed] Removed all other forms of damage.

[Tweaked] Reduced the axle mass of all of the motors to .00001 kg. The axle mass is no longer a useful quantity. Any mass here artificially inflates the mass of the robot without any benefit.  You should notice that the mass of your existing robots has dropped slightly.  Yay!​

[Bug Fix] Fixed the teleporting spinner bug. This was caused by the massOfBrokenOffObject was incorrectly computed, causing a spinner's mass to erroneously be set to 0, even when it had parts remaining.​

 [Bug Fix] The erroneously low MOI and KE values in the telemetry display have been fixed.​

​[Bug Fix] Fixed all (???) instances of components not breaking off all of their children with themselves.​

[Bug Fix] Fixed the problem with the new A40-300 having transmission components attach at 90°.

[Bug Fix] Amended: A40-300 motor's attachment has been fixed to pure 0 to eliminate wobble. Brushless motors attachment points have been enlarged to make them easier to attach to.​​​

[Bug Fix] Amended the A40-300 motor. Now spins in the right direction. I managed to fix where the gearbox attaches aswell, but I should probably mention this is due to the boxes now attaching to the hinge joint NOT the actual attachment point. If you also tilt the motor to an angle non-90 then attach a gearbox, the gearbox attaches at a 90 degree angle.

[Bug Fix] Fixed visibility of "Developer Only" components so that they now only show in the editor instead of in the built game.​​



A FEW CAVEATS ABOUT THIS BUILD

Damage System - The new damage system is in place for SPINNERS ONLY.  Nothing else causes damage right now.
AI - Still mostly broken.  For the most part all the AI does is turn on its weapon at the beginning of the match and keep driving at the nearest opponent.  Once the new damage system has been straightened out we will redesign AI around the new approach to damage.
House Robots - Once the game is mature enough we will be replacing all of the house robots with ones built in the robot workshop.  Any bugs that exist in the current robots will be completely replaced by entirely new bugs at that time.

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1943 on: February 27, 2020, 04:22:23 PM »
One thing i have noticed that the bots are bigger in size

Maybe thats not a bad thing, maybe the arenas then need to be just upscaled

One thing i did notice that on the new A40 motors, axles with wheels go to centre xyz position in the test area

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1944 on: February 27, 2020, 04:31:38 PM »
Drat!  I missed that!

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1945 on: February 27, 2020, 04:34:24 PM »
How fast can you dish out a fix?

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1946 on: February 27, 2020, 04:34:50 PM »
How fast can you dish out a fix?

12 hours?

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1947 on: February 27, 2020, 04:40:11 PM »
Ok another thing i noticed, The spinner mass is nonexistant, you can make a 25 kilo bar, but the game will calculate only like up to a kilo of the weapon

Footage:

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1948 on: February 27, 2020, 04:45:54 PM »
Hmm.  I swore I had fixed this.

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development (EDIT)
« Reply #1949 on: February 27, 2020, 04:48:06 PM »

Hey its all ok, as long as we can help you by finding this stuff out


After some investigation, the bot scaling is not the same anymore, its seems like a bot may be bigger than it is in the robot selection for battle menu:

In this pic, megabyte isnt as big as Bronco:


In this pic, its not the case at all:


Seems like spinners scale up




Another find is that the flipper piston is much weaker than it used to be
« Last Edit: February 27, 2020, 05:59:24 PM by kix »

Offline UberPyro

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1950 on: February 27, 2020, 07:01:32 PM »

There are two parts to designing a competitive robot in RA2. One part is the actual theory and engineering that goes into designing an effective competitive robot. The other part is using highly convoluted and arcane glitches to construct said robot, allowing you to make designs that would otherwise be impossible. Snapper loading is one of those glitches.

Here's a pretty well-sited 2008 boomer video of Sage (the boomer up above) using snapper loading to place objects:

The tl;dr of this is that snapper loading (particularly snapper loading + eFFe) allows you to create robots with intersecting parts, e.g. cram lots of weapons together or have weapons going through a plow, etc. Afaik RR2 allows everything to intersect, so none of this matters and there is no problem.

Thank you for this!

Just for the record, we do intend to start creating restrictions on part placement at some point.  For example, you shouldn’t be able to place a motor inside another motor.

The sloading question was actually a great question at its core.  Although the word “sloading” is specific to RA2, I foresee a similar issue arising with RR2.  It all comes down to how we handle it though.  Maybe an option in settings to allow components to intersect that is off by default?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff (you know, dreaming about my ideal robot game), and here's my idea.

Clearly motors / batteries / control boards and such cannot intersect with each other in any case. Weapons and extenders / plates / armors should be able to intersect, but only if they are on the same axis as each other. This means that weapons coming off of two different motors should not intersect, neither can they with a weapon coming off the chassis, but 2+ weapons on the same motor can and weapons coming off the chassis can.

Though this seems to make a lot of sense, there are still a lot of more complicated issues from here to solve. For example, suppose a weapon intersects the path of a spinning bar. One way to handle this is to sweep the hitboxes of all items attached to spinners into disks, this way the hitbox is the entire path or where the component could be at any time. This applies both when trying to attach the bar and when trying to place components in the path of the bar, and this way no parts ever intersect. An alternative solution would be to allow things to intersect paths, but allow the robot to have internal physics with itself so that the weapons collide with each other like in real life.

Another thing to consider is that in RA2, we actually allow weapons to cut through armor as long as the plate / chassis is not completely bisected by the path, because theoretically you could cut holes in the parts. I'm thinking this is less of an issue in RR2 though, because we have enough control to mold things to whatever shape we want (e.g. its realistic now).

Edit: Having the ability in-game to allow all intersections would definitely be nice though. The equivalent in RA2 is using the sergepatcher hack. An even more advanced idea would be to make it so that you select the build mode when first creating the robot, and then this sticks with the bot as a certificate for legality in tournaments, or validation could be handled separately by checking for collisions.

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1951 on: February 27, 2020, 08:12:08 PM »
Fixing the following:

1. Restoring the flipper piston to its previous torque value.
2. Fixing the problem with the incorrect mass of spinners in the telemetry screen.
3. Fixing the robot size/scaling problem.

I'm heading to bed, but should be able to push a new build in the morning.

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1952 on: February 28, 2020, 03:11:25 AM »
New build is up! 28February2020:

http://robot-rumble.itch.io/builds

This build mostly just fixes the scaling bugs introduced in the 27February2020 build and pointed out by kix.  The scaling factor was based on weight of the robot and was designed to address some physics issues we were seeing that were more severe at the lower weight classes.  The physics issues were caused by improper COM calculation.  COM was fixed, but the scaling factor was not completely removed until this build.

​[Added] Added sorting options for the list of components: - A-Z and Z-A : should be self explanatory, it uses natural sorting (numbers are compared by their value not alphabetically). -Weight: also self explanatory, for components that can change their material the default material is used. -Size: it calculates the bounding box of the entire component (based on colliders), then the dimensions of the bounding box are added and that is the value that is used to sort the list.​

[Bug Fix] Restored the flipper piston to its previous torque value.

[Bug Fix] Fixed the problem with the incorrect mass of spinners in the telemetry screen.

[Bug Fix] Fixed the robot size/scaling problem.​

Offline WhamettNuht

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1953 on: February 28, 2020, 03:28:59 AM »
I forgot to mention it (and I can't check if it's made the final build) but I also added a new material to armours which will 'Remove' a panel.

So now if you have a robot with a cut out section / space for weaponry, ect., you can now 'remove' that armour panel on the chassis. This hugely saves on weight and looks a lot more realistic.

I also wanna hear from y'all - I'm working on a bunch of new 'Extra' components; mainly the kind of tat you'd use to decorate a robot. (Bulbous eyeballs, googly eyes, plastic skulls & spiders, foil windmills, rainbow feather dusters, ect).

I have a large number of items already done, but is there anything you would like to see added? Taking suggestions! (And before anyone suggests 'Text/Lettering' or 'Decals', I already have some ideas in work for this ;) ).
Damn I should probably put something fancy in this bit huh?

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1954 on: February 28, 2020, 03:41:49 AM »
Another thing to consider is that in RA2, we actually allow weapons to cut through armor as long as the plate / chassis is not completely bisected by the path, because theoretically you could cut holes in the parts. I'm thinking this is less of an issue in RR2 though, because we have enough control to mold things to whatever shape we want (e.g. its realistic now).

Well for my tournaments im pretty much requiring from people to actually have holes in designs, or even fake ones. Maybe if we had a component that allows intersection of a component that reduces weight as it is scaled?


Oh i also made RG arena but thats another can of worms

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1955 on: February 28, 2020, 04:00:22 AM »
Chris you forgot to fix the A40-300 Axle issue


Okay, you said that a bot with many parts on a spinner will oulast a bot with one part for a spinner health wise

I find that hard to believe as small parts that act as spinner teeth that weight about 2 kilos on 50 steel shear off after a hit. Again, cant you just fuse all parts together with combined HP when in a match? Because atm i cant use these last 2 builds for tournament
« Last Edit: February 28, 2020, 07:01:48 AM by kix »

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1956 on: February 28, 2020, 07:45:07 AM »
kix,

I’m at our real-life robotics competition today and tomorrow, so I won’t be able to do much fixing.  I can re-enable an older build on itch.io though. Is there a particular build that I should enable for your tournament?

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1957 on: February 28, 2020, 07:58:19 AM »
kix,

I’m at our real-life robotics competition today and tomorrow, so I won’t be able to do much fixing.  I can re-enable an older build on itch.io though. Is there a particular build that I should enable for your tournament?

Well i do have 16th feb build as i keep backups, but yeah atm thats the best option

Good luck at the tournament btw

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1958 on: February 28, 2020, 08:29:39 AM »
I just enabled downloads on the 16February build.

Offline BATTLEMASTER

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #1959 on: February 28, 2020, 07:39:47 PM »
I noticed with the latest build that the blade-to-gear axle connection on my custom bar spinner is very weak.  Then again, it is also capable of spinning up to 200 kJ in less than 20 seconds.  Is there something I'm missing durability-wise?  It's actually a 67 kg bar  :confused:

Actually in general, I noticed that all components seem much weaker, even the internal ones like the motors and batteries.  They seem like they break off a lot more easily, which is awesome!  But I'd think the weapons would be a little more robust.
« Last Edit: February 28, 2020, 08:20:51 PM by BATTLEMASTER »