Like most people, when I first heard about Sodarace I envisioned two models on the same screen making their way across terrain in real time. But I am no less excited about the more realistic idea of individually run time-trials.
Here's an example of what I could see working. Let's say that on October 1, Ed officially begins a race. This means that an official terrain is available, and makers must use it to make their models. Then, for the next two weeks, anyone is allowed to submit a model, and each time they submit a model it replaces their last submission. For these two weeks, a leaderboard would be available, showing the rankings of usernames and their respective times. Links to the models would not be available. Then, on October 14, whoever is in first place is declared the winner, and that leaderboard would now, in addition to username and time, have links to all the models that were used.
I think this would first of all be fair, competitive and work well in general. Second, for the two weeks that the race was running, it would be pretty secretive and mysterious in a fun sort of way, as no one has any clue what types of strategies anyone is using. And the best part comes at the end, when everyone can look at what everyone else came up with, and discover perhaps that the best models were all very similar, or maybe discover that there were many very different types of models that all did well.
|
