Talk:Virtual Guns

Old discussions from 2006, from 2007.

Virtual Bullets

Are you sure we should have Virtual Bullets redirect here? It is not mandatory for a virtual guns system to use virtual bullets - for example, in an upcoming version of Horizon, I plan on implementing a virtual guns system that treats the success rate of a gun as the rolling average of 1 - (abs(predictedGuessFactor - actualGuessFactor) / 2). Obviously, this system will use waves, not virtual bullets. Furthermore, some early GF-like guns used virtual bullets instead of waves for enemy position logging. There are obvious bot design applications where one system does not overlap with the other. --AaronR 20:57, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I was wondering if they should each have their own pages. I'm definitely open to that. But after some consideration when making the page, I was thinking that they are not really describing different things. I definitely think it's worth discussing...

I also implement my virtual guns with waves instead of tracking the frame by frame location of each bullet, but: a) they are still "virtual bullets", in my mind; b) even if virtual guns doesn't need virtual bullets, that doesn't mean virtual bullets can exist without virtual guns. Wouldn't a virtual bullet always come from a virtual gun? Would you not consider those early GF systems to be an array of virtual guns, each aiming at a fixed GuessFactor?

Still, the history of each idea is unique - like you said, the term "virtual bullets" was used in those early GF guns, while "virtual guns" tends to imply a specific algorithm for each gun. But I think it will be tough to really differentiate the concepts. --Voidious 21:16, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh, another factor in my initial decision is that the respective pages on the old wiki seem pretty clearly to define them as the same thing. The top of the VirtualBullets page includes David Alves first showing a picture of different targeting systems firing virtual bullets in a virtual guns array (including linear and head-on), and then a comment describing the old virtual bullet GF system. Actually, I'd really like to hear his thoughts on this. --Voidious 21:44, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

As a kind of side bar to the above discussion: if we do leave these as one page, we should definitely add the original style of GF guns to this page somewhere - perhaps under "common uses" section. --Voidious 19:37, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Question! What is a "decay rate"? What else do you need, if you keep track of the number of hits for each gun? I think the results would accurately express which gun is better.. -- Josh S 12:38, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

"Decay rate" means a way of making newer data more relevant than older data. For instance, for a hit percentage, if you just used the last 10 shots instead of all of them. Or if you were storing shots fired vs shots hit, dividing both by 10 every 100 shots. --Voidious 13:53, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Hmm.. OK, I think I understand... So it's sort of reducing the data size, as it gets larger? -- Josh S 01:41, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, it's more about making new/current data count for more. By dividing shots hit and shots fired by 10, you are basically decreasing its weight of that data from normal to 0.1. One of the most common forms of data decay is Rolling Averages, you should definitely take a look at that. --Voidious 01:53, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, you can choose between 'decaying' the date (better for adaptive movement) or just plain accumulated data (better against random mover and non-adaptive movement). It just like GuessFactor gun with and without Rolling Average. --Nat Pavasant 14:36, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

What do you mean by the "date"? By plain accumulated data I suppose you mean hit rates, and the number of shots fired... -- Josh S 01:41, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, it should be 'data'... --Nat Pavasant 06:48, 28 April 2010 (UTC)