What avg bullet dmg of robot in battle against himself may mean?
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I do fast and rough research and find out, that in battles against themself Tomcat gets ~1200 bullet dmg, DrussGT gets ~1100 bullet dmg and Diamond gets 1000 bullet dmg. Can it mean, that Tomcat has better gun relative to his movement, Diamond has better movement relative to his gun and Druss is well balanced? What do think, guys? And related question: how you decide what to improve next or what is weakness of yours robot?
My first thought would be to look at distancing. If Diamond keeps a larger average distance than DrussGT, and DrussGT more than Tomcat, the hit percentage would naturally be lower. Also, Tomcat might just have the most aggressive bullet power strategy - higher bullet powers is always a trade off of bullet damage vs survival.
Figuring out what to improve is a much tougher question. :-) Recently I've been refactoring Diamond and adding lots of tests, which has given me lots of little bugs to fix and ideas of what might work better. I think just going through your code and writing tests is a good way to get ideas, because you start really getting a feel for how things work. But other than that, I don't have any great advice.
The big ideas kind of come out of the blue, immediately kick ass in tests, and then you can just polish them and release. But usually it's not like that. =) One general thing is I try to think of how to make things more accurate, like data collection or how I'm normalizing my values. I'm really trying to avoid the "tiny tweak and test for hours" cycle recently and focus on significant behavior changes, which I find a lot more fun and which has a better chance of being a big improvement.
Distance and bullets power, sure, thanks:) Looks like i still stuck with my gun...
About tests - i did start work on ConceptA because Tomcat now has high coupling (cohesion?), so test it is difficult task:) But any way thanks for advice:)
I agree, that big things is better, but i think, that APS gap between Tomcat and Diamond and DrussGT just in "tiny tweak", which require hours of tests. But tests is problem for me with my low-end first generation mobile i3 core:)
