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 187760 times)

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #540 on: April 26, 2019, 01:54:16 PM »
No not only that. There is also a problem where floor break and oota bots, like in the video

By any chance was the game running slower than normal when you recorded this?  The Warehouse arena shouldn’t be any different than the Test Arena, but if the game was having trouble keeping up with physics, that would explain the rigidbodies penetrating too far, then exploding outward to resolve the collision.
No game is running perfect, it happens off recording too

Hmm... So weird.  I'll take a look to see if I can find anything fishy about the way the arena was put together.

The only thing I can think of off of the top of my head is that the warehouse has a huge semi-transparent area, which tends to make things more difficult for a computer's GPU.  This shouldn't directly affect the physics though.

Offline Badger

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #541 on: April 28, 2019, 01:18:26 PM »
Suggestion, have bots be saved in the game install directory, instead of the AppData folder. Makes the game more portable and makes the files easier to find for sharing purposes.
also lol at most toxic guy around calling others out on this sh**
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Offline UberPyro

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #542 on: April 28, 2019, 04:46:00 PM »
I agree with Badger here. Also if there's ever modding with lots of custom components we might want multiple installs that don't interfere with each other, though there are other ways around that.

Is there anyway I can see what features are planned for future versions? Anyway, I have some suggestions after building in the botlab for some time. A lot of suggestions and a lot of them are complex, so I don't expect you to agree with all of them or try to implement much of what's here in the near future, I know you guys are busy.
I know you guys are not nearly done with the botlab and that given time you guys will make it great, but talking about the botlab right now as it is, it's still pretty clunky in the sense that it takes a very long time to use the controls and the tools given to you to make the botlab do what you want it to do. First of all, I think keyboard shortcuts would improve the building experience 1000%. Things like pressing x to focus the x coordinate, delete for deleting components, arrow keys/wasd + shift + space for moving things around/rotating, basically all the buttons and fields in the interface should have some keyboard mapping because clicking on everything takes forever. Remapping keys would also be great, i.e. i much prefer RMB to MMB for panning. As it is, it's very easy to make mistakes by putting the wrong numbers into the coordinates or into the wrong coordinates, and it's also way too easy to get yourself into a situation where you move something too far away and can only fix it through editing the bot file. An undue button would be a great help for this, and additionally some way to control the max distance from origin of all the components and toggle the room that you are in would all be huge helps. It's also really easy to get objects stuck inside of others, and there's currently a glitch where some small objects won't be able to be selected unless you exit and join the workshop. A lot of these issues could also be helped by having an expandable tree view of all the components like in the bot file and being able to select components like that. Being able to turn off blur from being too close would also be great. When using the moving sliders, they go in increments of .025, and if the component isn't currently at a multiple of .025 then it snaps to a multiple: there should be some way to turn the snapping to a multiple off, because a lot of the more complex builds will not use those multiples very often. This also applies to the rotation and size sliders. There should be a way to control what interval the moving axes move by, either through a field or through several hotkeys which are each set to common values, i.e. .01 and .005 with .025 as the default. It would be great if there was some way to change the directions of the coordinate system so that it doesn't have to be determined by what the object is sitting on, a lot of the times I just want the normal xyz directions. It would be fantastic if there was a way to copy the x, y, or z coordinate of one object and then set the coordinate to another in a streamlined fashion, e.g. hold x while clicking on another object. It would also be great if there was some way to clone mirrors of objects and flip each of the components. It would be nice if we could smooth components along a certain rotational axis. For the chassis and custom object builder it would be great if we could change the numerical values of the xy coordinates via text field of each of the vertices like we can for objects in the rest of the builder.

edit: also deleting objects doesn't need a warning, but deleting an object plus all the things that connect to it should be allowed and with warning.
« Last Edit: April 28, 2019, 07:12:29 PM by UberPyro »

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #543 on: April 28, 2019, 05:07:09 PM »
Suggestion, have bots be saved in the game install directory, instead of the AppData folder. Makes the game more portable and makes the files easier to find for sharing purposes.

True, but it also gets overwritten on app updates, and potentially suffers from permission issues, where only installers have permission to write to the directory, not the applications themselves.  We can look into it a little more, but no promises on this one.

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #544 on: April 28, 2019, 05:12:13 PM »
arrow keys/wasd + shift + space for moving things around/rotating,
I honestly want to see keyboard movement for more precise, movepixel like stuff

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #545 on: April 28, 2019, 05:26:56 PM »
I agree with Badger here. Also if there's ever modding with lots of custom components we might want multiple installs that don't interfere with each other, though there are other ways around that.

Is there anyway I can see what features are planned for future versions? Anyway, I have some suggestions after building in the botlab for some time. A lot of suggestions and a lot of them are complex, so I don't expect you to agree with all of them or try to implement much of what's here in the near future, I know you guys are busy.
I know you guys are not nearly done with the botlab and that given time you guys will make it great, but talking about the botlab right now as it is, it's still pretty clunky in the sense that it takes a very long time to use the controls and the tools given to you to make the botlab do what you want it to do. First of all, I think keyboard shortcuts would improve the building experience 1000%. Things like pressing x to focus the x coordinate, delete for deleting components, arrow keys/wasd + shift + space for moving things around/rotating, basically all the buttons and fields in the interface should have some keyboard mapping because clicking on everything takes forever. Remapping keys would also be great, i.e. i much prefer RMB to MMB for panning. As it is, it's very easy to make mistakes by putting the wrong numbers into the coordinates or into the wrong coordinates, and it's also way too easy to get yourself into a situation where you move something too far away and can only fix it through editing the bot file. An undue button would be a great help for this, and additionally some way to control the max distance from origin of all the components and toggle the room that you are in would all be huge helps. It's also really easy to get objects stuck inside of others, and there's currently a glitch where some small objects won't be able to be selected unless you exit and join the workshop. A lot of these issues could also be helped by having an expandable tree view of all the components like in the bot file and being able to select components like that. Being able to turn off blur from being too close would also be great. When using the moving sliders, they go in increments of .025, and if the component isn't currently at a multiple of .025 then it snaps to a multiple: there should be some way to turn the snapping to a multiple off, because a lot of the more complex builds will not use those multiples very often. This also applies to the rotation and size sliders. There should be a way to control what interval the moving axes move by, either through a field or through several hotkeys which are each set to common values, i.e. .01 and .005 with .025 as the default. It would be great if there was some way to change the directions of the coordinate system so that it doesn't have to be determined by what the object is sitting on, a lot of the times I just want the normal xyz directions. It would be fantastic if there was a way to copy the x, y, or z coordinate of one object and then set the coordinate to another in a streamlined fashion, e.g. hold x while clicking on another object. It would also be great if there was some way to clone mirrors of objects and flip each of the components. It would be nice if we could smooth components along a certain rotational axis. For the chassis and custom object builder it would be great if we could change the numerical values of the xy coordinates via text field of each of the vertices like we can for objects in the rest of the builder.

Thank you so much for taking the time to dig into the bot building process.  There is so much great feedback here, it is going to take a while to parse through all of it.

Right now we have an internal Trello board that is growing a lot faster than it is shrinking, so no promises yet on getting a public-facing version of it going.  We are working as fast as we can, and I’m more than a little afraid of what would happen to our ability to process the feature requests if we opened things up to the general public at this point.

Offline F1Krazy

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #546 on: April 30, 2019, 03:52:07 PM »
After doing some more building recently, I've got a bit more feedback regarding the bot builder. My biggest bugbear at the moment is chassis editing, which at the moment works something like this:

  • Step 1: Draw a ballpark chassis for your robot.
  • Step 2: Start placing the internal components, weapons etc.
  • Step 3: Realise your chassis is too big, go back and resize it/draw a new one.
  • Step 4: The chassis has now moved, and all your components are 15cm out of alignment.

Needless to say, this is quite annoying. I'd love to try making a "shrink-wrapped" chassis design like I used to in RA3, but this (and the fact you can't see your internal components while chassis-editing) makes it a bit tedious and difficult.

I've also found that sometimes, a component that's small or mostly-hidden isn't selectable when it should be. I can click on it, and I absolutely am clicking on it, but it selects whatever's next to it instead. Pain in the arse when trying to move or colour the more finicky parts of your robot.
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Offline CodeSilver23

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #547 on: May 09, 2019, 11:05:24 AM »
Personally, one of the more important things I would like to see added (besides pneumatics, custom decals, and destructible parts) is adjustable motor speeds. It would definitely help with making decent lifters among other things. I've been making a Complete Control style robot, and when it lifts, it'll just flip the opponent instead of picking it up. So far, I've been able to work around it a little bit, but it isn't as good as it could be.
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Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #548 on: May 09, 2019, 04:06:40 PM »
Personally, one of the more important things I would like to see added (besides pneumatics, custom decals, and destructible parts) is adjustable motor speeds. It would definitely help with making decent lifters among other things. I've been making a Complete Control style robot, and when it lifts, it'll just flip the opponent instead of picking it up. So far, I've been able to work around it a little bit, but it isn't as good as it could be.

Interesting.  We haven't started on ESCs yet, but this is definitely something that could be programmed into an ESC.

Also, we just added a drill motor with a lot less torque than an Ampflow, which might accomplish the same thing.

Offline F1Krazy

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #549 on: May 11, 2019, 05:13:36 PM »
Personally, one of the more important things I would like to see added (besides pneumatics, custom decals, and destructible parts) is adjustable motor speeds. It would definitely help with making decent lifters among other things. I've been making a Complete Control style robot, and when it lifts, it'll just flip the opponent instead of picking it up. So far, I've been able to work around it a little bit, but it isn't as good as it could be.
Unless you have separate drive motors and weapon motors like in DSL, then I think this will also be needed once the motor buff comes into effect. You want your weapon motor to be going at (say) 3000 RPM, but if your drive motors are going that fast, your robot will be doing 60mph and be completely uncontrollable.

It'd be handy (and realistic) if lowering the RPM also increased the torque. You could make shovebots that drive slowly but have a tonne of pushing power, or electric lifters/crushers with some serious force behind them. RA3 had something similar for spin motors, but you could increase speed and torque separately and there was no incentive to not just crank them both up to 100, so the sliders may as well have not been there at all.
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Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #550 on: May 12, 2019, 07:47:57 AM »
Personally, one of the more important things I would like to see added (besides pneumatics, custom decals, and destructible parts) is adjustable motor speeds. It would definitely help with making decent lifters among other things. I've been making a Complete Control style robot, and when it lifts, it'll just flip the opponent instead of picking it up. So far, I've been able to work around it a little bit, but it isn't as good as it could be.
Unless you have separate drive motors and weapon motors like in DSL, then I think this will also be needed once the motor buff comes into effect. You want your weapon motor to be going at (say) 3000 RPM, but if your drive motors are going that fast, your robot will be doing 60mph and be completely uncontrollable.

It'd be handy (and realistic) if lowering the RPM also increased the torque. You could make shovebots that drive slowly but have a tonne of pushing power, or electric lifters/crushers with some serious force behind them. RA3 had something similar for spin motors, but you could increase speed and torque separately and there was no incentive to not just crank them both up to 100, so the sliders may as well have not been there at all.

The plan right now is as follows:

1. Put as many real-world motors as possible in the game.  This includes geared and non-geared versions as appropriate.  The Ampflows currently in the game are already using real-world numbers.
2. I am planning to use the following specs for each motor.

a. no-load speed at rated voltage (depends on number and voltage of battery bank)
b. stall torque at rated voltage (depends on number and voltage of battery bank)
c. stall current at rated voltage
d. mass in kg
e. dimensions in meters

Pushing power is dependent not only on torque, but also on the available wheel friction.  We don't have a super-accurate friction model, but it seems to be working well enough for now.

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #551 on: May 12, 2019, 09:17:59 AM »
Honestly, for this game i dont have many requests atm, only ones i kinda have:
-Transparency scale for polycarb components, as current ones are kinda meh, and barely transparent when component is thin
-Smooth texture option for materials, because current ones look like pavement honestly, and look out of place when component is stretched
-Overvolting. But i would kinda avoid that until battery consumption works
-Smaler batts, maybe like Pulsar/Magnetar had?

Offline F1Krazy

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #552 on: May 12, 2019, 12:10:20 PM »
-Smaler batts, maybe like Pulsar/Magnetar had?
I would imagine that smaller batteries are planned, as the current ones are basically SLA car batteries, and modern combat robots all use LiPos.

Geared and non-geared seems like a sensible compromise regarding motor speeds.
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Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #553 on: May 12, 2019, 05:11:28 PM »
Sorry - I forgot to mention that we are using a basic DC motor torque-speed curve as well.

Maximum torque occurs at zero speed.  Torque drops linearly with speed.  At maximum speed, there is zero torque.

In theory this should give a nice, realistic speed buildup over time.

In practice, I'm having a little bit of trouble at the moment figuring out why speed is only building up to 1600 RPM on a motor that is supposed to top out at 4000 RPM.  Speed is pretty erratic too, jumping up to 1600 RPM, then suddenly down to 100, then back up again.  I will have to do some work to stabilize spinners and make them nice and consistent like their real-life counterparts.

Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #554 on: May 12, 2019, 05:12:36 PM »
-Smaler batts, maybe like Pulsar/Magnetar had?
I would imagine that smaller batteries are planned, as the current ones are basically SLA car batteries, and modern combat robots all use LiPos.

Geared and non-geared seems like a sensible compromise regarding motor speeds.

Agreed.  The existing ones are the 12V 7 Amp-Hour batteries that my students use in their competition.  I have LiPos and LiFePos on the list of things to model.

Offline CodeSilver23

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #555 on: May 12, 2019, 08:19:38 PM »
One other thing I'd like to see added is custom wheels.
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Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #556 on: May 12, 2019, 08:23:55 PM »
One other thing I'd like to see added is custom wheels.

The RR2 Component Modding Tool is on to-do list, and should handle this quite nicely.  I'm hoping people come up with all sorts of crazy things for wheels. :)

Offline kix

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #557 on: May 17, 2019, 04:40:35 PM »
There has been a new update and i have some feedback
First and most importantly, damage. Damage is currently pretty good, only gripes i have with it is that it is unfair to small components. Like if a component is tiny but it has 50 mm steel, it will fall off easier than it should. Also motors fall off too easy, like self-destruct easy. I cant flip a bot without breaking the motor off.
Oh yeah flipping. Linear actuators are working. Hinged ones are added for flippers. And boy they are powerful! Issues im having are the fact that it falls off too easy, and the fact that it clips thru other stuff sometimes.
Also for some reason, bots are kind of bouncy
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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #558 on: May 17, 2019, 04:47:19 PM »
2 wheel drive bots just seem to straight up not work this update. The chassis seems to have a ton of friction with the floor which makes bots unable to turn, and motors seem to have less torque too which doubles this issue.

Will report further after I play the update more
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Offline cjbruce

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Re: Robot Rumble 2.0 - Robot Combat Simulator - Under Development
« Reply #559 on: May 17, 2019, 05:34:48 PM »
2 wheel drive bots just seem to straight up not work this update. The chassis seems to have a ton of friction with the floor which makes bots unable to turn, and motors seem to have less torque too which doubles this issue.

Will report further after I play the update more

For new robots, or existing ones?  I set motors to their IRL torque-speed curves for this build.  They should be a little different than before.  Balance is really important in general.  Does shifting the weight distribution help?