Work out how we're going to run the simulation for the competition

[RealOrangeOne]

Are we pre-recording or live-running simulations?

How do we apply the commentator audio to the livestream (assume it comes from somewhere)

This impacts how long teams have between submitting their code and their match.

[antoinepetty]

Jenny looking at rendering in blender.
One alternative might be to capture the output of cameras:
"only the viewpoint can genereate video, and only one viewpoint per simulation is allowed. However, the cameras can be used to save pictures at each step (a function of the API is available for this), you can then use these pictures to generates a video. "

[PeterJCLaw]

Things to solve:

• how will we ensure that we have robots in the right corners of the arena?
  The simulator supports running multiple robots, but defaults to running four robots. We'll need a way to remove robots which shouldn't be there and to ensure that the robots in the arena match up to the competitor code which has been put in place.
• how will we get the code from wherever the teams submit it to actually on the simulation hosting computer and in the right places?

[PeterJCLaw]

Having done some experimentation with the web stream from Webots that seems like it could work, however:

• the render doesn't seem as good looking as the webots render
• there are some weirdnesses around the textures; at the very least they don't seem to get their paths right by default -- you need to modify their paths to be absolute

There is also some risk in the fact that this is opening up a server (Webots) somewhere to (somewhat) direct access from the internet.

We therefore don't really think this is a good fit for now.

[PeterJCLaw]

Currently we are expecting that we will:

• run the simulation on a machine (probably a volunteer machine)
• have the simulation capture an HTML video of itself for later review, replays, rendering etc.
• have a fixed, single camera perspective for the stream
• stream that single camera to a Youtube livestream

Outstanding questions:

• how do we get commentary onto the stream
• how do we handle latency variations around the commentary

[PeterJCLaw]

Conclusion: we're going to pre-record the matches and play them back for the live stream.
The minimal solution is that the playback is manually triggered, though if we can automate this then that would be awesome.

Code submission will be ~hours ahead of the streams to account for this.

We'd like to run Saturday and Sunday leagues on both weekends.
The knockouts will run on the Saturday.

#606 to update the website with this.