(1) is not relevant anymore, and in general, most of the fields that were used for drop-in games have been removed together with the discontinuation of the drop-in tournament. (2) has become irrelevant, too, last year, since all the information that is visualized in the TCM is now sent as part of the GameController status packets to the GameController, which forwards it to TCMs that have requested true data from the GameController. In addition, as discussed on another occasion, the fixed fields of the SPLStandardMessage create a bias in the data minimization challenge towards sending fewer instead of shorter messages because the constant part cannot be eliminated.
I therefore propose to abandon the SPLStandardMessage as a simplification. Teams can just send any datagram of up to 128 bytes length via UDP on their assigned port. (Of course, this would not prohibit using the SPLStandardMessage, but it would be a rather wasteful format - in that case, the effective number of custom bytes would be reduced by 33.)
A possible concern is that this change comes too late, but I would argue that this isn't the case, especially since it doesn't force any change, apart from the fact that the 128 bytes limit is a bit tighter than before if one still wants to transmit all the information that used to be part of the SPLStandardMessage. I would also be okay with raising the limit by some bytes for compensation.
The
SPLStandardMessagehad two purposes:(1) is not relevant anymore, and in general, most of the fields that were used for drop-in games have been removed together with the discontinuation of the drop-in tournament. (2) has become irrelevant, too, last year, since all the information that is visualized in the TCM is now sent as part of the GameController status packets to the GameController, which forwards it to TCMs that have requested true data from the GameController. In addition, as discussed on another occasion, the fixed fields of the
SPLStandardMessagecreate a bias in the data minimization challenge towards sending fewer instead of shorter messages because the constant part cannot be eliminated.I therefore propose to abandon the
SPLStandardMessageas a simplification. Teams can just send any datagram of up to 128 bytes length via UDP on their assigned port. (Of course, this would not prohibit using theSPLStandardMessage, but it would be a rather wasteful format - in that case, the effective number of custom bytes would be reduced by 33.)A possible concern is that this change comes too late, but I would argue that this isn't the case, especially since it doesn't force any change, apart from the fact that the 128 bytes limit is a bit tighter than before if one still wants to transmit all the information that used to be part of the
SPLStandardMessage. I would also be okay with raising the limit by some bytes for compensation.