What Is Drone Race?
You are looking straight down at a racing quadcopter. The course runs away from you one wall at a time, and every wall has a single opening cut into it. Fly through the opening and you are paid in speed. Fly past it and you are charged for the privilege. The readout in the bar is not altitude and not fuel. It is a battery, and it is the only thing that can end your run.
The score is metres covered from the start line, and there is no finish line. New gates are laid down ahead of you for as long as you can keep flying, so the question is never whether you can complete the course. It is how far you get before the battery goes flat.
Gates arrive every twenty-one to thirty-two metres at the start of a run, closing to about twenty by the end, and every tenth one is a lap gate with a chequered face. Distance is what counts, but the lap clock is what tells you whether you are flying well.
How to Play
- Press the button and the drone is already moving. Forward speed is automatic, between seven and twenty-four metres a second, so the only thing you control is where you sit across the track.
- Steer with the left and right keys. A quadcopter changes direction by leaning: hold one down and the drone builds sideways speed over about half a second, then keeps it after you release.
- Aim at the opening, not the wall. Every gate carries a number and a chevron above the hole it wants you to fly through.
- Do nothing clever at the first gate. It is dead ahead, it is wide, and it is free. Use it to feel how long the drone takes to answer you.
- Watch the battery. It falls at a bit over one per cent a second flying level, and faster the further you get, so a run is generous early and mean late.
Where the Battery Actually Goes
- Flying level. One and a third per cent every second, and that rate climbs by ninety per cent across the course. This is the rent, and it is why a good run gets harder the better it goes.
- Asking for thrust. Commanding sideways movement costs an extra half a per cent a second. Holding a key is not free, and that rule decides more runs than the gates do.
- Missing a gate. Three per cent off the battery, plus thirty-two per cent of your airspeed. The battery is the visible half of that and the smaller one.
- Grazing a barrier. Six per cent a second while you lean on it. Pin the stick to one side and leave it there and you are finished inside twelve seconds.
- The last fifth. Nothing special happens down there. No limp mode, no warning beyond the meter going red. The run simply stops at zero.
Why the Drone Cannot Turn
A helicopter can stop and think. A quadcopter in a race cannot. Sideways speed is not set by the key you are holding. It is built up and given away at a fixed rate, so the stick tells the drone where to end up rather than where to be.
Full stick one way to full stick the other takes nine tenths of a second, and for all of it the drone is still travelling the way it was going. Let go at full sideways speed and it slides another fourteen per cent of a half-track before it settles. A gate opening, for comparison, is thirty per cent of a half-track wide at the start and sixteen by the end.
Everything difficult here follows from that carry. You are not steering the drone. You are steering where it will be. Three and a half seconds of course is visible at a time, and the drone needs most of a second to change its mind, so the useful decision is two gates further out than the one you are watching.
The Opening Is the Only Thing You Aim At
The openings are not scattered at random. They are laid down as a walk that wanders across the track and turns back when it runs out of room, so neighbouring gates sit near each other and a line of them reads as a curve rather than as noise.
Read it and the course becomes a path. Ignore it and you fly gate to gate, arriving late at each one, which is another way of saying you fly the same mistake five times.
Why a Loose Pilot Beats a Tight One
Two robot pilots over the same course make the point. Both hit every gate. The first corrects until it is within three per cent of the opening centre and finishes on 834 metres. The second is content to be within ten per cent, corrects far less, and finishes on 939.
The difference is the half a per cent a second that commanding thrust costs. A pilot who is always nudging is always paying it. Smooth beats exact, which is a strange sentence to write about a racing game.
A Miss Costs More Than Three Per Cent
The battery line for a missed gate is three per cent, a little over two seconds of flight. That is not the expensive part. The expensive part is the speed. Speed comes back slowly: the gap to cruise closes by about thirty per cent a second, so a miss takes close to four seconds to recover from and costs roughly ten metres of course while it does.
Add the two halves and a miss is worth something like forty metres. Ten you did not fly while the speed came back, thirty you will never fly because three per cent of battery is gone. Forty metres is most of two gates.
Racing on a Phone
The controls are one axis, which is what makes a touchscreen workable. Hold the left half of the stage to go left, the right half to go right. The halves are the targets rather than the edges, so a thumb does not have to find anything.
Everything you read is a number rather than a shape. The lap clock sits in the top corner of the stage, the battery and airspeed are meters down the left edge, and the bar carries distance and gate count in type big enough for arm's length. On a small screen the drone is tiny, but the gate is always bigger than the drone.
What the Lap Clock Is For
Every tenth gate is a lap gate, faced in chequer rather than blue. Crossing one cleanly rolls the lap clock back to zero and files the time you just did, somewhere between ten and twenty-five seconds of flying.
It also breaks a run into pieces you can compare. Distance is one long number that only goes up, so it flatters a slow careful flight and hides a scrappy one. A lap is short enough to be honest about a single mistake.