The KO2CV Wish List: Revisited

[mmike]

there is one of the oldest and oddest bugs still in the game:

when the ball goes up or down, near the side edge of a pitch, and you move the player out of the pitch (up left / right, or down left / right - same up or down as the ball goes), and continue to move that player in the same direction, he teleports few meters (approximatly five - six) back in the pitch. this is so unnecessary. he should at least stay out of pitch, or hit invisible wall and stop, or anything, just not teleport back.

[Danny D]

tcp/ip stack code! Think of it, team A and B select their names at the start of a match then ko2Cv talks to a nice restful api in realtime. The scores update themselves. No need for humans! The end result is a realtime ticker, think Sky Sports

** UPDATE Fastest goal scored by Alkis in 0.5 seconds! **
** Score in Final is Team A 4, Team B 3 with 3 mins left!**.


and a realtime League table etc...



Of course this requires Amigas with network cards and a network. It turns out networks cards are only about 30 Euro and require an Amiga 600 or 1200.

[Steve Camber]

I'd probably go for some filthy low level wifi packet hack.
We're currently down to under 20k free on A500 so not much to play with there.

[Steve Camber]

To be viable this would have to work on A500 which rules out PCMCIA cards.

What this leaves us with is littering tournament rooms with serial cables. Eww.
Or some alternative use of the serial or parallel port.

Both bluetooth and wifi are options here but price becomes an issue, especially when it comes to plug and play devices. Minimum £50 per amiga for this.
Alternatively, there's the £5 per amiga solution which is more like it.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/RS232-Bluetoo ... 19f4b9e7c0
I dont know much about Bluetooth, but in theory this would allow each amiga in the tournament room to be able to communicate bi-directionally with a laptop (receiving scores, broadcasting player names etc). It's probably only bluetooth v2.1, and I'm not sure if it's possible to communicate with multiple bluetooth devices at once.. but there's a chance it could be bullied into doing enough for our needs.

[Danny D]

Nice reply Steve.

BlueTooth sounds like the best choice as :
a) it's cheap.
b) it avoids the need for additional clutter (cabled, wifi routers etc..)
c) is Amiga 500 friendly.

A couple of thoughts:

• For this to work players would be required to enter their names in ko2CV before a match in order for the central server to know who is who. This would require a code change. Alternatively the bluetooth receiver could receive a list of names via bluetooth thus players would pick their names as opposed to entering them.
  -
• As ko2cv on a A500 has 20Kb of usable ram what about a Bluetooth driver taking up valuable memory? I'm guessing that no such driver is needed and instead you will be talking directly to the serial port ?
  -
• In my opinion the amigas only need to talk to a central server and not each other. I don't see any advantage of them the Amigas chatting to each other, am I missing anything?
  -
• I believe the max range is 12m meaning that the central server might need to be located in the middle of the cluster depending on tournamet room dimensions.
  -
• The Amiga is powering the BlueTooth chip (at a continual 5V?), Any impact on the psu powering the Amiga ?
  -
• I imagine "hooks" would be introduced that would trigger the communication something along the lines of
  
  

  Code: Select all

  if goal()
   { send  player name, updated overall score etc.. }

if gameOver ()
   { send FT score }
  
  
  Does that sound about right? Would this have any impact on the Amiga performance?

This sounds like a project that would add additional excitement to tournaments. Transmit these results to the internet and the whole world could be updated in real time !

[Steve Camber]

-That amiga would grab the list of player names from the server before the match, and the two players then select their names from the list by some simple method.(up/down/fire)
-I'm guessing minimal memory requirements for this as throwing bytes to the COM port via 68000 I expect would be relatively simple. None of that modern driver rubbish to worry about.
- Yes, the laptop server is the central hub that all amigas talk to.
- Range could be an issue, lots of factors involved there. We can have multiple laptops if necessary.
- I doubt the power requirement is anything significant.
- Communications may stall the CPU, it depends on how it's implemented on amiga. I've not even looked at it yet. I'm thinking initially comms would take place pre and post match. Or maybe during stalls in play - throw-ins, goal kicks etc.

Long term - In theory we could stream all WC games live via the internet.

[Danny D]

-That amiga would grab the list of player names from the server before the match, and the two players then select their names from the list by some simple method.(up/down/fire)
-I'm guessing minimal memory requirements for this as throwing bytes to the COM port via 68000 I expect would be relatively simple. None of that modern driver rubbish to worry about.
- Yes, the laptop server is the central hub that all amigas talk to.
- Range could be an issue, lots of factors involved there. We can have multiple laptops if necessary.
- I doubt the power requirement is anything significant.
- Communications may stall the CPU, it depends on how it's implemented on amiga. I've not even looked at it yet. I'm thinking initially comms would take place pre and post match. Or maybe during stalls in play - throw-ins, goal kicks etc.

Long term - In theory we could stream all WC games live via the internet.

This sounds great. Assuming the coding behind it isn't too much !
What would be nice would be if it talked to a restful api written in something generic, eg Node JS. Then the server can run on any environment, linux, Windows, Mac etc.. The api then logs to a db, the db is queried by a webpage which updates league tables , stats, everything!

No need for human manual intervention anymore. Long live the robots !



I have a similar concept that is hardware independent.it would be limited to near real time and only able to provide updates on FT scores and updates to the league table. quick summary is:
mobile device --> api --> pusher api (web sockets) --> webpage



Advantage is that it's hardware independent and is not KO2 exclusive.
Disadvantage is that "real time" results are in reality FT results and not a goal by goal update.

[Lee W]

how doable would it be to have an option in there that basically stops trap moves? say for instance, if you trap the ball the only option from there is to pass the ball, not continue running with it.

I just ask cause me and my mate kinda banned that years ago cause we just wanted to score shooty type of goals, not routine stuff, would be kinda nice to challenge other players here n there to a more 'pure' game for fun

[Steve Camber]

I think some simple surgery could make this happen, although I don't think this would be a popular feature!
Practicing self-restraint may be the quicker solution if you want to enforce this restriction

[Lee W]

not to worry, just a thought

[Freshmaker]

Steve... come on, you know you'd like it

[hogstrom]

Long term - In theory we could stream all WC games live via the internet.

Indeed such future would be amazing, Steve!

[thor]

Perhaps this is already possible and I have missed the option. Would it be possible to add a checkpoint feature (snapshot of the game-state) that can be returned to? For example, if I pause the game and press a key, a snapshot is created and then later I can pause again and jump back to that state? This would be useful for practicing certain situations over and over again. Not sure how much memory the game state (and if it is scattered or not) takes up, and how much memory is still available.