As judges vote on your opticon, your score is updated. Each judge earns one more weight point for each opticon that they judge, and the total score of your opticon is a weighted average of all the judges scores. The highest scoring opticon each week will pass the test, which is announced in the System channel.
Overall, the opticon design consists of one or more phases, which are like frames of a slow motion movie. Each frame contains a set of rays between targets and each ray is a colored light beam that starts at a point on the base and connects a sequence of targets in the 3D space around the base. The number of targets and rays and the color of each ray is the same for every frame, but you may change the target positions and the connections of the rays. A ray may end abruptly at one of the targets, or it may extend straight through, fading into space. When you run the opticon (described below) the rods will smoothly animate between each frame, and any rays that connect between the same targets will stay on continuously. A change in the rays between two frames will take effect at the beginning of the animation to the second frame.
To design your opticon light show, click on the opticon to get the configuration controls. If there is more than one person who may modify the opticon design, first reset the opticon, and then ensure that no one else modifies it until you have passed the test. You can see the current list of designers in the menu.
Several of the configuration controls are not very useful, so the following short tutorial will focus on the few that are useful. You can skip the parenthetical details your first time through. It is recommended that you do a small test design from start to finish, so you can get the feel for how everything works before launching into your real work of art.
Pin up the "Reconfigure..." menu, which lets you Add a Target, Add a Ray, and Add a Phase. When you reset the option design, you start with one of each. First add two or three more Targets and one more Ray.
The targets are the balls at the end of each rod, but it is the rods that you select. Select a rod so you can move it by clicking on it directly. (Don't bother with the target selection menu. If you have several overlapping rods, you may have to move one out of the way first.) To move a rod, pin up the Target Movement... menu. Play with the Up, Down, Left, Right, In, Out controls to move the rod. The Fast, Medium, and Slow speed controls change the size of the motion steps. (... info on the polar coordinates needed here.)
To make a ray visible, click on one of the ray balls on the top of the base; then click on one of the targets, and then on another, etc. (You can return multiple times to the same target but only after you go to another target.) You end a ray just by leaving it. (If you click multiple times on the last target, it toggles whether to extend the ray into space. You cannot edit a ray; you must start over if you want a different configuration. You can delete a ray just by selecting its base ball.)
Change the color of a ray by using the Change Ray Color menu (or whatever its name is). Keeping track of which ray is which color is awkward, so it is best to set up the colors you want early in your design.
Use the Add a Phase menu to add a couple more phases. Pin up the Select Phase menu, and select each of the phases. Notice that the new phases have the same set of targets and rays, but the targets are in the initial default position, and the rays are all off. The easiest way to get a smooth transition from one phase to the next is to use one of the copy operations. First select a phase that you want to change, one of your new phases, and then use Copy Full Phase and select the phase you want to copy from. Then go to each phase and move a couple of the targets around, and change one of the rays. (Another choice is Copy Targets, which will copy the positions of all the targets without the rays.) Now when you select each of the phases, you can see at how it will look when you run it, but without the smooth animation between frames.
The last essential thing to learn is how to run the opticon. Select the Run menu and note what gearbox it requires. You cannot see the animation of the opticon without the required gearbox. But each time you change the opticon targets (and perhaps the rays as well) a different gearbox will be required. Since it is very useful to see how your opticon works in action while you are designing it, but rather difficult to design a new gearbox for each configuration, there is a simple trick that lets you reuse a small number of gearboxes. Reserve one extra rod and make it very short. (If your design does not require precise positioning, you might use any of your rods.) When you want to do a run, move the extra rod around in the Slow mode, repeatedly testing what the Run menu requires, until you hit upon a requirement for a gearbox that you have. If you have a rod that points straight up, you can rotate that rod left or right, which will not affect the presentation but will change the gearbox requirements. Install that gearbox, which removes any gearbox which was previously installed. Your opticon becomes judgable as soon as it is running.