I'm having trouble figuring out how we're supposed to find the Kia buildings in the simulation.  I can obviously find them all by flying around with the camera, but I doubt that hard-coding their locations is encouraged (or allowed, even).  Is there some way of accessing the GPS coordinates of the Kia buildings somewhere that I'm missing?

If there isn't a way to find their location at runtime, will the map when I qualify be exactly the same as the map that I test on?

 The map that you qualify on is exactly the same as the test map. All you have to do is hit the qualify button instead of test. One way to get the GPS coordinates of the buildings is to use the trackball on the GUI to drive to all the buildings and then write down their coordinates.

Hi bitwise,

My assumption here, for what it's worth, is that the buildings won't be moved.  I believe the intended way is drive the car around manually and determine where you have to drive to trigger each building's proximity sensor and then program the car to drive a route that takes it through each trigger point.  So, in other words, I think it's expected that the path to get to the buildings won't change (because there's no program accessable list of waypoints as there are in the Mars sim).  My assumption for things that could change in a "tie-breaking" match, if it comes to that,  would be the timing of the lights and location and timing of the other traffic on the roads.

I guess conceivably there could be obstacles (like the construction site) introduced on other road segments so that you have to find a way to get to the trigger points and end point via some other route but that seems like a fairly high bar to expect entries to meet (e.g. do you assume that the obstructions can only occur at lights or can they occur anwhere on a road??)

Personally, the way I read the rules, I don't see how tie-breaking matches are likely to be needed since the top two criteria appear to be 1) Referee Score (including point score and maybe(?) elapsed time or some other hidden criteria), and the 2) date/time of entry submission.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Shakey

Shakey,

 I don't even think that the scenario you envision for a tie breaking match is possible under the rules. As you point out, the tiebreaker for identical referee scores is time of submission. I can't imagine how two people could submit at EXACTLY the same time. Also, even if that did happen, the rules don't say anything about a tie breaker match with different roads. They just talk about originality. I think this thread, and a few others in this forum, illustrate the need for some rules clarification.

 Josh

The map itself is fixed. The building locations won't be moved.

The two non-static items to focus on are traffic lights and other cars, as both will affect your score. 

Are the initial position, direction and GPS coordinates of the car fixed too?

Yes.