Category talk:Tutorials

New tutorial topics

I've been trying to think of what other tutorials would be useful to have here. I feel like there's room for a lot more and I'd be willing to write some. Here are ideas I've had and the thoughts / doubts I have about them:

• Pattern Matching - This seems like an interesting one that we're lacking. I'm not really the expert here, but I could certainly manage to write a basic tutorial, and then maybe get feedback from Skilgannon and/or Simonton for updates. I first learned from David Mold's explanation.
• Dynamic Clustering - Certainly a very popular topic. We already have DCBot and lots of open source bots that use DC, so there's no shortage of source material to learn from. I'm not sure how much that negates the utility of having a real tutorial, though.
• Minimum Risk Movement - We already have Melee Strategy/Understanding HawkOnFire and Melee Strategy/Understanding Coriantumr (still on the old wiki), which are extremely useful. Would a straight tutorial add much?
• Segmentation / Attributes - There's a lot of simple stuff in this topic (distance, lateral velocity), but there's also a lot that's not as obvious (good wall distance styles, time since velocity change details), and it could be very useful to beginner / intermediate people to have as a reference.
• Anti-Surfer Targeting - This almost seems silly, since there's only a few specific things I can think of, but I bet some would find it useful and we could add more later. Maybe have different sections that start with a basic style of gun and demonstrate ways to make it better at hitting surfers? Basic Visit Count Stats and basic Dynamic Clustering I could do pretty easily.
• What else? Simpler stuff? Random Movement? Wall Smoothing? Virtual Guns? Basic Twin Duel? Debugging graphics? "Advanced" Wave Surfing? Go-To Wave Surfing (*looks at Skilgannon* =))?

Thoughts? --Voidious 21:14, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

That would make the very steep learning curve of Robocode a lot flatter =) I must admit that Robocode learning curve is too steep. There is not anywhere in either this wiki or the old one (minus very messy talk that no one will have enough to read them all) that mention 'How exactly is GF-DC gun?'. I used to confused with that, for the old wiki Dynamic Clustering page is really un-understandable. I tried to make the new wiki better.

Anyway, I disagreed that we should have 'Segmentation / Attributes' tutorial. They (and we too) need to figure that out by them/ourselves. And I would like to have only pseudo code on the tutorial, or very light Java code.

Random Movement, well, it think we should have Basic movement tutorial, which basically tell use how to move perpendicular and really basic Random Movement. Again, the good value must be figured out by them/ourselves, or where was the fun? I know that new Robocode will do a lot to gain top performance as soon as possible, but as you know deeper, you won't need to be the top and you can be happy with it, like me. Darkcanuck and I probably the more active Robocoder without any bots in top range (You , Skil, Red, and Pos are all have robot(s) in top class, aren't you?)

Debugging Graphics should be useful too. A simple how to draw circle, draw status text and all. VG/PM/DC/AS/MRM should be on their/our owns. This wiki page (or the unmigrated one) is detailed and current open sourced robot is cover enough for that. But I would like Wall Smoothing... I always having problems with Wall Smoothing direction, Wave Surfing direction, Actual Going direction and Sign of Velocity =) » Nat | Talk » 12:23, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I must say that I agree with nat on this one. It would probably be better to have some advanced tutorials that explain advanced stuff such as DC and so forth, but I think it would be good to make them almost code-free and let people figure out the nitty-gritty details themselves.Nat's idea about making simple ones such as wall smoothing seemed like good idea too; it might be good to make a Debugging Graphics tutorial that could also explain basic stuff like tracking waves and virtual bullets(and drawing them, of course)--CrazyBassoonist 13:37, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Really interesting that you guys would prefer pseudocode! I wouldn't have thought of that. --Voidious 20:48, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I believe studying DCBot is a great way to understand DC in targeting, but I don't think I've ever seen any explanation on how to use DC to movement. Of course, if you are already used to wave surfing and have understood weel the idea behind DC you can figure it out yourself, but it is painfull. Perhaps we should have a DC-surfing tutorial. --Navajo 22:00, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I believed that if we have tutorial for DC-GF it can be use to understand DC-WS easily. However, one thing that I consider, is the definition of terminology in Robocode is not clear at all. New people will believe that GuessFactor Targeting is a GF+VCS+Segmentation and thus not understand at all on how to use DC in GF... At least I'm. And it needs a lot of time to understand that GuessFactor Targeting is any targeting to involves with GuessFactor, and VCS is just a kind stats management system, just like DC. That's why I have an intension like that in my emails toward you, Voidious, if you remembered it. I am considering to re-define all terms in that not-yet-started thing. I think we need a full-wiki cleanup and re-migrating contents. » Nat | Talk » 12:13, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

It is very difficult to control how people use language. I think we've done a much better job on the new wiki in separating GF, VCS, DC, and PIF - I think the Terminology pages are all pretty clear, anyway. At least we all agree they are separate! I think PEZ lobbied for the separation of those ideas for a long time on the old wiki. One thing that would probably be good is to update the GuessFactor Targeting Tutorial to mention what Visit Count Stats is, and to point out that it's not necessarily dependent on GF.

We could cover both Wave Surfing and GuessFactors in a Dynamic Clustering tutorial. I'll start thinking about this one and maybe doing some writing this weekend.

--Voidious 13:34, 14 August 2009 (UTC)