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Publicly display drone designs for time trials


Hex7

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Right now, the time trials mostly feel like a competitive excel sheet. There's a column for names and a column for times and nothing else. For the most part, any creativity or originality lives and dies with the drone creator. Was the top score the result of ingenious design or just a bug exploit? Is my use of sensors a decent idea or am I dooming myself to the slow lane like so many others? I really don't know anything about the other racers and that's sad and frustrating.

It would be nice if there was a feature like the "training" from the versus modes where you can see and perhaps even test out other designs from the time trials. Instead of being easy/medium/hard tiers, it would be amateur (top ~250), professional (top ~100) and elite (top ~10). You'd be given the option to submit (or not) to the displayed list any time you set a new personal record.

I think it would make the time trials a lot more engaging and interesting than the current iteration.

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Interesting idea. At least for the "Manual Mode" I think such a thing would be possible or useful, as it's not easy to "steal" one's idea, because the skill to pilot the drone is still needed. For "autonomous only" maybe that's what players want, as the secret design is something they might not want to share :)

I'm not sure when we will work on the racing again, since we now switched to our next update (progression update), but when we improve the racing, I think this is something we could implement to make it more interesting :)

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I am a firm believer in free design, software, research, everything. The greatest inventor can fail to see what is obvious to a neophyte, and only by letting said neophyte contribute can the design be improved any further; the neophytes can learn a lot from their masters, and by copying and experimenting in their own ways they reach results that were way out of anyone's league at first. Imagine if Theodore Maiman had not shared the way he made the first laser (beam of coherent light; first sustainable one, that is, since Nikola Tesla had made one that consumed ruby to work if I remember correctly), or if Charles Town et al. had kept for themselves how they had made the maser (beam of coherent microwaves) that led to lasers.

I mean, come on. Everything important, from painting to physics to literature to cryptography to computer science to security, progresses faster when everyone shares their knowledge. As for drones, it sucks being stuck with an idea that could make for great designs, but not possessing the experience to make it work. At least if said idea and experience are shared (through drone sharing for example) the spark of genius will be all but lost.

Shortly put: yes, yes, yes!

Addition: as for ownership or exclusivity that constitute a part of the reason why inventors are not always open to setting their ideas free, what does one earn from keeping a design completely secret? One is talked about a little, peers wonder how one placed first in the rankings. And that is all, because there is nothing to entice imagination. With a page referencing one's design as e.g. "Ookami-sama's deplexifier" (or something) and players flocking to it, though, one is bound to be talked about a lot. Some game communities go so far as to call strategies or builds by the name of their authors, in a manner that makes one's username a common noun ("use an ookami logic circuit"). That in itself makes most people more content than just ranking first in some obscure and private competition.

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Devil's advocate:  We actually compete in races.  If you had a #1-worthy design, would you give it away so easily?  Especially when you could find yourself fighting its clone in a three-star arena later, needing to beat it to progress through a system.  This is a little different from 'free software' where, after giving something away, you still have it ...

I also think the creative spirit of Nimbatus would suffer if we had to rebuild Best Known Racer 3.4 and upgrade our video cards to squeak out a win monte carlo.  The 'best designs' should be somewhat secret just so they don't proliferate the way fidget spinners took over sumo.

Bottom line, if people want to show off their designs, the game already has screenshots, gifs, and steam to opt into doing so.

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As I alluded to above, you can always choose not to upload your drone (or the best / latest variant), if design stealing is something the player cares about. There's already a system for exactly that in the 'training opponent' versus system and it could be made opt-in instead of opt-out for time trials quite easily.

 

I definitely hear you though about the concern that convergent homogeneity toward the =best= design which is freely available is something to be avoided. I suppose my best response to that is to say I hope the Dev's are actually moving to a more varied system of races in the future. Regardless of how publicly available the best designs are, if the races are always exactly the same, sooner or later everyone is effectively going to arrive at the 'best' whether it be by direct copying or through convergent trial-and-error. What I think we should be more focused on to prevent this are ways that a race can be varied, from one run to the next either by just starting at different points along the circuit or having some form of procedural generation. If the race itself is always changing than a =best= design can't really exist, and the design landscape remains fertile for innovation no matter the level of sharing. If secrecy is a necessary part of the game's final form, than Nimbatus is probably not going to do well long term.

 

Full disclosure, the answer to your initial question corona, "If you had a #1-worthy design, would you give it away so easily?", is that I have actually done just that. It admittedly took me few days of internal debate, but I did post #1 grade designs to steam. Ultimately a ranking is just a number. Having other people potentially use and improve your designs (or vice versa) is way more fun.

And that was really my point from the start.

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Yep. It / they are still #1 or adjacent as of a few minute ago. And based on the lack of nearby times, no one has even bothered to try to reverse engineer the proper #1 case. Frankly the game is kind of a ghost town as of late, but that's a separate issue.

-------------

Truth of truths is that I'm obsessed with Nani. And I really just want access to all the wonderfully beautiful, but fully impractical designs like Nani out there. I've been spending part of my time trying to come up with a practical reason to use some Nani-like drogue chutes on a design.

Have you met Nani? Nani is love. Nani is life.

Nani.jpg.bb881ba2853e8dbd2852a009c8277fb6.jpg

696113312_NaniOp.gif.c208c2ae352f3309c340648a2b8c3a4e.gif

Seriously though. It's probably the best thing I've found via the training opponents and I wish there was more stuff out there like it. It irks me that there probably is already, but there's no proper way to showcase this sort of stuff in-game.

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Then I'd say the system is working as intended.  Nobody's cheesed you 0.005 seconds by nudging one fuel tank 3 pixels or whatever since downloaded drones don't count.

So maybe pictures aren't so harmful after all.  Fair enough.

And yes, I love wonderfully impractical things!  Hence putting rotary designs in the racetrack XD  Steering is hard!

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On 4/2/2019 at 12:35 AM, corona_wind said:

This is a little different from 'free software' where, after giving something away, you still have it ...

I had this in the back of my mind for a while, but only now remembered it: some free piece of software can be improved upon -- since that is what free software is about, mostly -- and replace a former version that was spread by a former developer. They still have their software, sure, but it is not used as much any more for a precise thing that the updated/changed version does better.

A drone that is improved upon still exists, and the person who made it still has it. They might not hold first place in the rankings any more, but neither does a developer after their software was upgraded by someone else. The only notable difference I can see is that a developer is (often) credited for their work in various places (e.g. encyclopedia, dictionary, wikipedia.com), while a Nimbatus player evolves among a number of individuals rather than in a system of people connected to one another. Which makes peer recognition a bit more difficult to obtain, somehow, although platforms such as Steam's "workshop" tend to sort this out.

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21 hours ago, Ookami-sama said:

I had this in the back of my mind for a while, but only now remembered it: some free piece of software can be improved upon -- since that is what free software is about, mostly -- and replace a former version that was spread by a former developer. They still have their software, sure, but it is not used as much any more for a precise thing that the updated/changed version does better.

A slightly slower web server still functions as a web server, a slightly slower racing car just loses.  Don't forget that we are quite literally competing.

Also, the point of the GPL and the free software movement it created is you're only allowed to play with the source if you keep it to yourself or distribute it in a way which respects the owners' rights, i.e. don't close it, sell it, or rebrand it as your own.  It's the exact opposite of a free-for-all.

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Big GPL advocate here.

And I think I agree with letting people keep their racers secret for the most part specifically to avoid the script-kiddie approach where possible.

The only exception would be if we had an infrequent, relatively high-profile tournament, where you enter your drone openly.  But it has your name on it, so people who copy it are obviously copying it.

 

This is different to people sharing their campaign drone designs, which is a completely co-operative environment.

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