[simspark-devel] Countdown for Atlanta

[Joschka B. <jbo...@un...>]

Dear maintenance committee members,

as you know, the RoboCup 2007 competitions are advancing fast, and we 
have a lot of work left to do. As I pointed out in my mail to the 
mailing lists earlier, the time frame we have for getting new features 
into the simulator is only two weeks from now. Therefore, I'd like to 
confirm the task assignments and the progress that has been made (and/or 
problems encountered).

Things that need to be addressed:

Timer

=====

Yuan has done great work on that, but we face several difficulties. The separation of the runloop of the SimulationServer into several threads has not resulted in the additional performance and flexibility that we had hoped for. In addition, there is the problem that Yuan hinted at in his email to the list on 05/14, namely, that we should have a high frequency loop for the control and a lower frequency loop for things like vision and other sensor information. 

The question is now, how we should proceed. We could use different timers for the effectors and perceptors (something Yuan proposed in the beginning when he started working on these things), and just do a single loop, or use the threaded version. Since the threaded version is more complicated and doesn't seem to bring too much performance gain, it seems more feasible to use a single runloop in the server. However, I'm not sure about this. Yuan, could you please let us know what you think about these issues?

Rules
=====

We have to revise the soccerruleaspect and the soccerbase code (and potentially other things in the soccer plugin bundle) to be compatible with the new agents. We should have support for counting goals, and different playmodes.

I believe that Siavash and Amin have worked on that, but I'm actually not sure since I didn't get any updates on the status for some time. Could you please let us know how far you got with this, or in case there are problems, what they are?

Collision issues
================

We now have support for ODE collision spaces. Different configurations have to be tested and the problems arising when robots are very close to each other will have to be addressed.

I can work on these things.

Monitor
=======

We need a decent auto-cam mode, improved log playing capabilities, display of game statistics (team names, goals, etc), and some way to discriminate different players (e.g. textures with player numbers)

I think we might be able to re-use some code from the old rcssmonitor3D-lite for the auto-cam mode (maybe also a 2D overlay?). Jan, do you think you can take a look at this?

Concerning the logplayer, Hesham already implemented improvements to the current version, but they need to go into the CVS. 

Jan recently found out how to do textures using kerosin, so we can think about the idea of using textures with player numbers. One problem is, however, how to get appropriate UV coordinates for the textures and the respective meshes. If no UV coordinates are specified, the texture is stretched over the whole surface and is displayed on all surfaces of the mesh. I was thinking that one possible solution might be to model a textured cube in Blender and then export this in the OBJ file format. This is a very simple file format, but it contains all the necessary information we would need. Of course, we would need an OBJ importer for simspark then. Any volunteers? :-)

Another thing is the strange disintegration of the robot if the external monitorspark is used (see screen shots in Yuan's mail from 05/03). So far, I'm not sure what's causing this, but it might be because of the speed the messages arrive and the message length. Is anybody free to take a look at this?

Message format
==============

The current messages are too long. We have to reduce the information transmitted over the network as much as possible in order to enable games with several agents.

I can take care of this.

Sensors
=======

It might be nice to extend the current gyro sensor to also include the 
angle of the corresponding body. The touch sensor in the current release 
gives very simple binary information. Hedayat already proposed to 
include more detailed information like e.g. pressure. Hedayat, could you 
continue to work on these things?

**********

I know that all of this is a lot of stuff and I'm aware that all of you 
must be very busy right now. Nevertheless, I would like to ask to to 
help as much as possible during the next two weeks so that we can 
provide the best version of the server we can for Atlanta.

In order for me to plan things, it is very important that you keep me up 
to date with the status of your work. Please send me (brief) reports, 
both about progress & problems, on a regular basis (daily would be best, 
weekly at the minimum).

I plan to make a release today (rcssserver3d-0.5.4), another one in a 
week from now, and then a release candidate for Atlanta in two weeks. 
After that, we should fix critical bugs and make a final release in 3 
weeks from now.

Thank you all in advance for your help!

Best wishes,
Joschka

P.S.: if you think something vital is missing in the list of necessary 
features, please let me know ASAP. Thanks :-)