King of Two Hills

After Action Reports
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1

KTag After Action Report

Event Overview

  • Event Name: Testing the Medic App
  • Date/Location: July 19th, 2024 / Dubuque
  • Participants: Uncle Joe and the KKids
  • Equipment Used:
    • 2020TPC: Software version 33ce7bb79c7aad351fe9014b812693b4b52847d7
    • King of the Hill App: 704407c756626f4e13ce1f173567c0c81ffb9b21
    • Medic App: c60e2ff5bf9726869f2d5f961d93cf491fb4793e

We tried something new this time: Two hills, using two phones running the King of the Hill app. We set the countdown time to 120 seconds, which gave us time to place the hills in the agreed-upon spots before the game began. The arrangement was something like this:

[Blue Team’s Base] ----- [Upper Hill] ------ [Lower Hill] ----- [Red Team’s Base]

Environmental Conditions

  • Weather: 66F, 84% humidity, mostly cloudy
  • Terrain: Hilly (it’s Dubuque!)
  • Impact on Performance: It was cooler than it normally is this time of year in DBQ, but the humidity has its effect.

Scoring

We played two ten-minute halves, switching sides at halftime to even out the terrain advantage. To score each half, we added the times from each hill.

Period Upper Hill Lower Hill Total
First Half Red 1:01
Blue 6:43		 Red 3:15
Blue 4:44		 Red 4:16
Blue 11:27
Second Half Red 6:58
Blue 1:13		 Red 3:15
Blue 4:22		 Red 10:13
Blue 5:35
Game Red 14:29
Blue 17:02 :1st_place_medal:

Upper_1st_Half
Upper_1st_Half720×1600 47.8 KB

Lower_1st_Half
Lower_1st_Half720×1600 47.7 KB

Upper_2nd_Half
Upper_2nd_Half720×1600 47.7 KB

Lower_2nd_Half
Lower_2nd_Half720×1600 48.2 KB

What Worked

  • This really was a lot of fun. Having two hills, one near and one far, forced strategy decisions about whether to hold your own hill or push for the enemies.
  • Switching sides at halftime does even things out. This is ancient wisdom, and no surprise to anyone.

What Didn’t Work

  • Some of the 2020TPCs started after 30 seconds, even though the countdown should have been 120s. There’s a bug somewhere.
  • We need a better way to assign teams. Right now we have to use the IR remote, which is clumsy at best. Being able to do it from one of the apps would be ideal.
  • It would be really great if the KotH app could create the Markdown table for the AAR.
  • If the KotH app responded to the “Instigate Game” packet, we wouldn’t have to worry about starting both apps at exactly the same time. We could also use MQTT for this.
2

We still need bombs.

3

At one point in that game, I was standing right on top of the upper hill, and I thought I had cleared the area, but the hill still displayed contested.

Do we need an RSSI filter for the KotH app, like we have on the Medic app?

4

I don’t see a reason not to add this.

5

We should score more points the closer you are to the base. We will have to make it a point system.

6

This game in particular, I felt like we were losing the whole time. In general, I always feel outnumbered and outplayed in any game.

7

I think we need better real-time feedback of who is winning.

I imagine something like a stack of lights (we’d use NeoPixels) on a PVC pole, where the top one is lit the color of the team winning overall, and the bottom is lit the color of the team who currently has possession. We could just reprogram a 32ESPecial to control the lights. It would listen for BLE from the phone, and just change the colors–pretty simple stuff.

We could have animations to know when the game was actually over, too.

8

What are these version names? Git commit ids?

9

Yes, that is exactly what they are.