User:D414/Diary of a Robocoder

14th February 2024

My Robocoding time has been quite sporadic lately so it's been difficult to make progress on the ideas I have for a build system, testing framework and modular robot class. On the one hand that's disappointing because it's greatly slowing my efforts to develop an advanced melee contender however a few throwaway experiments have led to some interesting ideas for movement in mini (or possibly even micro) bots.

The movement appears to be doing a good job at evaluating risk despite using a spinning radar and tracking very little information on enemies. The code is a bit buggy and needs some improvement but I think a half-decent gun could be implemented that mostly reuses the movement code, which is very interesting.

At the very least the graphics displaying the risk evaluation are very satisfying to watch, even if these experiments don't find their way into a released bot.

15th February 2024

My experimental bot had become a pile of spaghetti so it got a rewrite today. I'm still pleased with core design principle, especially given how quickly I was able to experiment with an idea I've not seen mentioned on the wiki before (no spoilers :p). My initial assessment is that it shows promise but definitely needs refinement as my bot now has the tendency under certain conditions to turn into a melee rambot...

19th February 2024

A picture is worth a thousand words

Over the last couple of days I've fallen face first into the pit of premature optimisation. I noticed some interesting behaviour emerging as a result of my risk function and got carried away tweaking parameters and adding cobbled together versions of bits of code I'd not implemented in the hope of perfecting it. This predictably led to another pile of spaghetti code that needs (another) rewrite. /sigh.