Mercutio

Mercutio
Author(s)	CrazyBassoonist
Extends	AdvancedRobot
Targeting	Linear Targeting
Movement	Special
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Background Information

Bot Name

Mercutio

Author

CrazyBassoonist

Extends

AdvancedRobot

What's special about it?

Its fairly competitive (5th place in micro melee) and has, in my opinion, a very interesting movement.

Great, I want to try it. Where can I download it?

http://robocode-archive.strangeautomata.com/robots/oog.melee.Mercutio_1.0.jar

How competitive is it?

5th place in the micro melee rumble.

Strategy

How does it move?

For Mercutio's movement, I made a very simple anti-gravity movement that moved away from enemy robots and the center of the field. However, instead of being based on avoiding being shot at in the first place like most melee movements, Mercutio's movement is actually based on avoiding simple targeting. Every tick it records its position and a linear projection of its position, and then dodges those places in the future. This means that it rarely gets hit by simple targeting, and makes Mercutio my favorite bot to watch in battles because it often seems to randomly slide between all the bullets fired at it.

Mercutio's movement is effective enough at dodging simple targeting that it can actually beat robots with head-on or linear targeting without firing in one-vs-one. I believe that if I added in code to make it also dodge circular targeting (which would prevent it from getting into a death circle as it sometimes does) it may start to approach Capulet's level.

How does it fire?

I needed a gun that would be accurate at close ranges without needing much data to operate with, so it uses a gun from the Circular Targeting page optimized for codesize. Its actually amazing how accurate a simple gun like that can be in melee.

Is this robot Melee-capable?

Yes.

Additional Information

Where did you get the name?

Just keeping up with the Romeo and Juliet theme.

Can I use your code?

RWPCL

What's next for your robot?

Well, there are two main flaws with Mercutio's movement right now. It can end up moving in a sort of "death circle" sometimes, and the linear projection isn't as good as it could be.

Does it have any White Whales?

All bots that use anything above linear targeting.