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I just spent a fruitless day trying to get some anti-bullet shadowing going to boost my PL score against a few specific bots ;-) I am admitting defeat however, as so far it's done nothing for my scores. My idea: By seeing where they move to, I can figure out where the bullet shadows are, and thus where they are shooting.

When one of my bullet waves breaks on the enemy, assume they are in a shadow. Play the shadow backwards to see where it intersected with all of the enemy waves (the waves they shot), and log all of those shadow/wave intersections to my flattener for that position/wave combination.

Perhaps somebody else will figure out something more accurate... I haven't put any sort of threshold in to only take the shadow into account if it is above a certain width, and I haven't tried running a simple (Raiko-like) gun to see whether they are in a 'dangerous' position for no apparent reason. Either of these has the potential to make this a valid idea, but I thought that I'd throw the idea out before working on it too much more =)

Interesting concept! My suspicion is this ultimately can only provide a very small effect though.

The problem I see, is that the times when the bullet shadows affect movement most noticably (when they are "in a dangerous position for no apparent reason"), are also the times when actual bullet collisions are most likely, and in those situations it doesn't help to know where their bullet is anyway.

(I don't think the term "anti-bullet shadows" is ideal, since it's just taking advantage of leaked information. "anti-foo" makes me think of something directly countering "foo", when this just takes advantage of it rather than countering)

Yeah, I also wasn't completely happy with the name but I wasn't quite sure what else to call it. ABS was the best I could come up with.

So I was curious what this new segment in 2.4.6 might be and I diffed DrussGT 2.4.5 vs 2.4.6 and noticed you decided to keep all this anti-Bullet Shadow stuff in there? I have to wonder if something you did here is what yielded that 0.25 APS gain, since I was a bit shocked that tuning your anti-surfer gun vs Diamond and Tomcat could do that. =)

I was still testing against 2.4.5 and was up to ~50%, but 2.4.6 looks a lot worse. Now I'm curious if that's the gun tuning or the ABS...

I really doubt the ABS was what did that. The ABS only actually comes into effect when the flattener is on, which even against Diamond is only reliably from round 15 onwards. I think adding rolling to my AS gun could actually make the difference you're seeing. Of course the ABS may have altered my flattener profile enough that any bot particularly tuned to the old one might now have trouble...