Initialization Code Runtime Reduction Effort

I don't know, I agree that dynamic overclocking is theoretically a concern, but from what I can remember, skipped turns have been quirky since long before we all had huge multi-core machines with hyperthreading and dynamic overclocking.

Quirky like skipping more turns vs an opponent that uses a lot of CPU (but doesn't skip turns!), or skipping lots more turns in the first 50-100 ticks of a battle. Obviously you do some initialization in the first tick, but shouldn't the subsequent ticks be mostly unaffected by that? Seems like that was never the case and still isn't. I guess garbage collection being outside of the scope of Robocode's vision is the most likely culprit for all this. But it's pretty frustrating, in any case.

Remembered a 3rd possible cause of skipped turns. The JVM executes all code in interpreted mode for a while until JIT compiler kicks in. And at least in Sun/Oracle JVMs, the default JIT mode, client or server, varies with OS.

Hmm... frustratingly, XanderCat seems to have a higher success rate vs Virus (the most problematic on my system) when running through the UI. I did catch one 56% score with only 2 skipped turns, though, which raises some doubt that skipped turns are the issue (or only issue). Running some more single-threaded seasons with RoboRunner now, in case it's something like a fresh reboot helped (after testing in Windows earlier).

If you want to play around with it, I went ahead and released XanderCat 12.3. It's basically the same as 12.2 but I fixed some CPU performance issues. The main drives and guns execute quite a bit faster now with much lower peaks. Maybe it will make a difference...maybe not.