Thread:Talk:Neuromancer/Melee Gun Thrashing/reply (7)

Yes thats how it works if you take gunTurnRemain() before fire() (worst case is checking against 0) but with 40/distance you have a good value that it happens very rare. You just have to decide whats better for you - shooting one tick earlier (with 40/distance) or shooting more precise with one tick later (zero check). I spend quite a while on this issues and finally decided to go all the way with zero check. You also have to decide what bullet power to use - the one that is used to calculate the angle or the current one. Both have some pros/cons to. Shooting if the last target is not the same as the current target is also something you have to decide.

Hmm its hard to explain for me right now but even with zero check you can end up with not firing. If your gun targeting constantly decides to change the target/area your gun will never (at least less often) be zero as you wish. That mostly happens on loose radars, every time the radar sweeps to the opposite side and finds a better target the gun begins to rotate to this point - the radar sweeps back and decides oh this target is better (consider the movement as well) so the gun has not finished its turn and gets a new target - and so on.

A quite good test to see if your gun has trashing issues related to your movement is putting your bot against 9 Sitting ducks. If he misses some shoots or break the fire frequency to often you have something to change.

If it comes to score, my experience tells me that +-0.3 after 5000 battles translate to no change at all. I see you have a 0.04 difference and this is clearly equal to the last version. In melee it depends on what start battles you get to bring all the pairings up. I have seen jumps of 0.8 score even after 15k battles just because the start battles where to easy.

Maybe it helps: i have a test bed of some sample bots (always the same) and let it run 100 rounds ... i call it 40k/100k+ challenge. 40k = 100 firsts 100k+ = dmg. If your bot loose just one round he has some radar/movement issues. If he gets less than 100k dmg the gun need some changes. To be one of the top bots i guess you have to try 110k+ or more. I use this challenge almost exclusively to decide if i had made progress or not, because it runs fast and has almost every battle state i have to take care of in it. I might be wrong with it but it served me well so far.

Take Care

edit: not sample melee bots just sample bots