Version 12.1

Wow... Should I just hold my congrats until you get to #1? =) Friggin' awesome!

Thank you. I really didn't expect to see such success with adding a new mode to XanderCat. But after a lot of work unsuccessfully trying to improve the main surfing drive, I have to say I'm most pleased with it. :)

I'm also surprised how much it helped. I also think there might be scope for the opportunity to open up a shadow enough to completely hide in it with regular surfing, rather than just have a separate mode. And to get the full magnitude of the improvement, I think this diff is more relevant, and even more impressive. Never mind 91APS, 92 could be a possible target.

Speaking of bullet shadows, I think active shadowing could be possible in a 1000/1000 field. It could be used in Melee endgame duels to great effect. First, check if a full shadow is possible, if it is, then fire a low power bullet to create the shadow and move accordingly. If a full shadow is not possible, then just surf and fire normally.

One problem I could see with this is that you might not gain any energy by firing 0.1 bullets, because at long distances in endgame, 0.1 bullets are pretty regular. Also, with the enemy also shooting low power, you won't have much advantage in distance ratios to get a wide shadow because of bullet speed differences, but with enough distance that shouldn't matter that much I guess. Hmm. Food for thought...

/me suddenly wonders if he's re-tuned his distancing since adding Bullet Shadows... =)

I don't understand, I thought as long as there was a 36px area within reach that could not possibly be hit, a bot in that area would be completely safe.

You're right, I was being dumb.

I wonder if this full shield idea is applied in teamrumble. 1200x1200 battlefield and 5 simultaneous shots which can be coordinated to create huge shadows.

It isn't, but it sounds promising. It could also work in twin duel: take out the weak enemy then have your two bots shadow/shield each other until the enemy leader runs out of energy.

This would be tough in Twin Duel with the code size restriction. But I think MegaBot 2v2 would be interesting at this point.

Not necessarily. Make both bots instances of the same class, give them Waylander's gun, fire 3's at the enemy grunt until it's 1v2, then have them hide in corners and shield each other every time the enemy fires. I believe Rednaxela was planning to try something like this. Let's beat him to it! :)

In team battles, there is the added complexity (and fun) of needing near perfect team radar locks to make bullet shield viable.

Provocative movement, which owns bullet shield, is also a greater threat in team battles than it is in 1v1.

Neuromancer does 'bot-shadows', where if a wave passes over an enemy, the section that the enemy covered is marked as safe. Unfortunately it didn't help in terms of score, I suspect that my wave locations and firetimes aren't accurate enough. Also, if the wave was fired far enough away that it passed over another bot it probably wasn't weighted very highly anyway.

In the old days of robocoding, 'bot-shadows' were called bomb sheltering.

Ah, I knew I didn't come up with that idea independently...