Playback files are written in a form of XML called BRML (Big Red Markup Language). They record all robot and ball positions and velocities during a game, and can also log information about what the AI is "thinking" at any given time if desired. Most games logged during the competition will not contain this complex AI information, rather they will simply log robot and ball positions and velocities. In order to watch a playback file, you must install Tcl/Tk on your machine, and download a copy of our playback viewer software.

1. You can download Tcl/Tk here. Just run the installer and you'll have tcl/tk installed on your machine. It's important to just accept the defaults when installing, Tcl/tk, especially the destination installation folder. Click on next/ok several times will do the charm. This small program allows you to run our graphical user interface.
2. Next download our playback viewer software. If you are running Linux down this copy here. You'll need to unzip this file. We suggest using WinZip under windows, or the unzip command under UNIX. Once you have unzipped the file, look in the folder and run the program called runMe.bat (in Linux, run the program called playbackViewer_Linux). These executable will use the accompanying .tcl file so don't delete it! Next click on File->Load and find the playback .brml file you saved on your machine.

Using the playback viewer is easy. Use the simple buttons to load/stop the sequence, or drag the scrollbar to any place in the sequence at any time. The viewer acts like media player. The red square robots should be Cornell robots and the circular robots are the opponents. The opponents are circular because we are unable to determine the opponents orientations because there is no standardize orientation marking scheme.

Are the robots really squares and circles

No. Last year our robots were square, so when this software was written we made our robots squares, even though that changed slightly and our robots became slightly circular! The opponent robots are circles because we only know their location on the field, not which way they are headed. Global vision systems identify robots and determine their rotations by looking at colored markings on the top of their hats. Unfortunately there is no standardized marking scheme in RoboCup. Hence based on our opponents locations we can best represent them with circles.

When I try to running the playback software on my computer I get an error message regarding a missing tcl84.dll file. What's going on?

One of two things could be the problem. First, did you install tcl/tk like we said to in step one above? If you are sure you installed tcl in the normal destination, you might have an older copy of our playback software. Download the latest copy and see if that fixes the problem. If you are still having trouble please email us..

When I try to open a playback file it seems to hang or lock up. What's going on?

Playback files of games are very large. How large? Well, we log about 60 frames every second (that's how fast our vision system runs). When you consider a 10 minute half, that's about 60x60x10 = 36000 frames. The files grow to about 45 megs per half. Our software tries to load all that into the program all at once, so it will take a second or to, but no more than two minutes. A second DOS window should pop up and be printing our messages about loading frames and such. If that window is still active, just wait a bit longer. Don't worry. It hasn't locked up.

What are playback files for?

At first we wanted to log all game footage so we or others could create learning algorithms and use real game footage as data sets to work on. Playbacks have also turned into an awesome debugging utility, because we are able to watch exactly what the AI was thinking (and why it did something wrong) over and over and fix problems right away. This year no live broadcasts were provided of the competition, so these playbacks also provide you a way to see our games as they occured.

Some of the games are slow. Is there any way to speed this up?

Yup! Use the + and - keys on your computer to speed up and slow down the progress of the video. You can stop the playback with Spacebar and start it back up again with Enter. You can also use the scrollbar to drag the playback forward and backwards. Hitting R resets the playback to the first frame.

Games:

Game 1: Cornell vs Canucks (Canada) Final Score: 10-0 Cornell First Half

Game 2: Cornell vs Rogi (Spain) Final Score: 10-0 Cornell First Half Second Half

Game 3: Cornell vs Sharif (Iran) Final Score: 10-0 Cornell First Half Second Half

Game 4: Cornell vs RooBots (Australia) Final Score: 8-0 Cornell First Half Second Half

Game 5: Cornell vs 5DPO (Singapore) Final Score: 2-1 Cornell First Half Second Half

Game 6: Cornell vs Field Rangers (Singapore) Final Score: 0-1 Field Rangers First Half Second Half

Game 7: Cornell vs FU Fighters (Germany) Final Score: 6-5 Cornell First Half Second Half

Demos:

• Circus
• Cones
• Ellipses
• Figure Eight
• Five Man Star
• Radar