I have some comments and questions regarding the rules, and have listed them below, in chronological order. The line numbers are consistent with the version of the rules that was on the git on Feb 14.
General:
- Line 27-34: This is an unsettling statement coming from the real FIFA that allows important game parameters to be changed, even though they are clearly specified later.
- Line 359-360: What is the meaning of the magenta line referring to “maximum gaze angle”? It definitely needs to be reworded to make clear sense.
- Line 385: What classifies as seeing both goals? Does that mean all four goal posts?
- Line 389-390: Being able to prove by inspection and demonstration that there is no magnetometer hardware present in the robot should also suffice, not forcibly that there are no mentions of magnetometers in the code. Especially for open source projects it is not necessarily easy or possible to remove all mentions of magnetometers from the code
- Line 451: What does it mean exactly: “Arms, legs and bodies of the robot must be of solid shape appearance”, what classifies as a “solid appearance”?
- Line 712: “A goal can only be scored from the respective half of the field” => Does this mean, to be exact, that the ball cannot be entirely within the other half? i.e. a ball that is ON the centre line (given that it’s not a kickoff etc) can be kicked directly into the goals?
Free kicks:
- Line 812-813: It may be better to say “if a direct free kick would have been awarded and the offence occurred inside the own penalty area etc”
- Line 895: To be consistent with other rules, should it also be that a goal can be scored from an indirect free kick if 10s has elapsed?
- Line 904-908: The procedure needs rewriting to be clearer, remove references to cyan/magenta, and to update the buttons to click with what they’re really called in the latest version of the game controller
- Line 928: All of the free kick sanctions and infringements are defined in terms of whether the ball has moved at least 20cm, while the ball is in play only if it “moves”. This leaves an awkward grey-zone if something in-between these two things happens. Changing the ball to only be in play when it has moved 20cm would fix this.
- Line 946: I presume “goal keeper” here is supposed to be “the taker of the free kick”, as it is not necessarily the goal keeper
- Line 949: “(except with his hands)” does not make sense here, as the player is not the goalkeeper, and so is not allowed to do that anyway?
- Line 949-950: This situation cannot really occur, due to the definition of the ball being in play, so this rule does not seem to contribute anything?
- Line 953: Replace “handles” with “touches” to be clearer?
- Line 988: It would be better if penalty kicks are taken from the closest position on the goal area line (1m from the goal line, parallel to it), not the place the offence occurred, otherwise it would be entirely possible for example that a penalty kick that is allowed to score directly can be taken from 1cm away from the goal line, which is undefendable.
Throw-in, goal kick, corner kick:
- Line 1061, 1119, 1166: “restarting play” would be better as “continuing play”, as in contrast to real soccer, none of these events are actually stoppages of play
- Line 1065: Seeing as there is no stoppage of play, there does not seem to be a real reason why a goal should not be allowed to be scored directly from a throw-in anymore, especially seeing as none of the normal conditions are specified for expiry of this condition (e.g. moved 20cm, 10s elapsed, etc)
- Line 1130, 1178: It should be mentioned in the goal kick and corner kick sections, just like in the throw-in section, that the ball placements are always 40cm perpendicular away from the touch line
Penalty kicks procedure:
- Line 1258-1263: Given the two suspended rules in the “kicks from the penalty mark” procedure, these two last bullet points don’t really make any sense anymore in the context of robot soccer. If 2 robots play against 3 robots, simply because a team only has two robots - not because of a red card - then what is the reasoning behind the team with 3 robots suddenly having to reduce their number of members?
Section II:
- Line 1383: It should be clarified that the removal penalty should be for the robot belonging to the robot handler, not the robot the handler may have touched.
- Line 1397: If there is a goal difference of 10 the game should be prematurely stopped. This has been the standard for many years, even if it is not explicitly in these new rules yet.
- Line 1401: It would be good to have a more precise statement for “kick the ball to reach their respective opponent’s goal”, as for now it is a relatively vague statement
- Line 1455: “Similar to a kick-off situation (typo), one striker robot for each team may be placed manually for a dropped ball, if both teams cannot position themselves automatically”. Does this mean that in a dropball if one team positions automatically then the other is not allowed to be positioned manually? Also, it says “similarly to kickoff”, but for kickoff this clause is not there, so this should be clarified whether something similar applies to kick-offs.
- Line 1470: The free kick procedure needs to be updated to reflect the latest names of the buttons in the game controller
- Line 1507-1509: Is this just the same sentence twice?
- Line 1513: This seems to suggest that a service is only 30s, it would confuse the reader less if it was mentioned here already that if the service is in combination with a removal penalty (most frequently the case), then the time is 60s.
- Line 1520: There is no more illegal attack/defense, so the buttons in the game controller should be updated accordingly. It also seems in the game controller there is still a debug print for “Penalizing”
- Line 1568: The drop-in arrangements should be released prior to the competition this year right? Not just 24h?
- Line 1600-1602: How are these criteria applied and in what order? How is number of games played used to meaningfully rank players when that is a matter of the competition organisation? If the number of accumulated points is the same, isn’t the arithmetic mean by definition then exactly the same also? (and hence cannot be used to further rank the players)
- Line 1673: Issues about team markers cannot be brought up an hour before the match if, as also in the rules, it is decided by coin flip 15 minutes before the game… (Line 457) In general, if the opponent changes something within the last hour prior to the game, then it should still be fair game that a team can complain about it.
Section III
- Line 1776: As discussed in another thread here, the metric should still be divided by Hcom
Thanks