BerryBots demo

You've got me wondering if I oughtn't just scrap my plan for a new Robocode bot and dive into BerryBots. I already did some graphs today what would become Maximum Escaoe Angle for BerryBots. The fact that torpedoes end at a definite coordinate means that it'd be more like Maximum Escape Region in Berrybots, at least for torpedo shots. They're elliptical in shape, with the minor axis parallel to the velocity vector at scan time. :)

After some looking at the API, it does seem like there'd be a lower barrier-of-entry for my high schoolers than Java!

Do BerryBots have a maximum velocity, or are they only constrained by the walls and the number of bits in the velocity variable?

I wouldn't totally jump ship just yet. :-) No, there's no max speed, but you lose some speed when you bounce off walls. On sample.massivebattle.lua some of the bots can get up to pretty high speeds. I originally thought I'd have wall damage to kind of keep you from just bouncing all around, but when it came time to add it I wondered if it really needed it. As it turns out, you could pretty easily add wall or ram damage in via the stage code, too.

I've thought a fair bit about MEA too, mostly for lasers. Because of the high speeds of lasers and ships I think something like the asin approximations we use (or used to use) in Robocode would be almost useless in BerryBots, and you'd have to either do it precisely or come up with a new formula, maybe with linear targeting as GF=0. Since ships can (with enough space) move faster than lasers, there are even cases where an enemy ship could get more than halfway around you before the laser/wave hits. So I'm not even sure exactly how the precise MEA simulations would go - the Robocode approach of always moving perpendicular to abs bearing at fire time is dependent on bullets moving faster than tanks, I think.