My predictions for 2024

I have faith in you, it'd be great to see a few more crowns changing hands (especially to somebody other than Kev! :p). If you find some changes that could get Epeeist to the top but don't have the space I'd be happy to see if I can help squeeze it in.

Mirage looks like it could potentially be squeezed down to 12xx bytes (or further) without loss of performance, so that prediction feels like a question of when, rather than if.

The energy management in Quantum v0.2.4 was a bit of a flop but I have v0.2.3 down to 230 bytes so far which gives me a few easy options:

• Add a check so that it doesn't fire if it would disable itself (Testing suggests that's worth around 0.2 APS)
• Add a check against getGunTurnRemaining (Testing suggest that's worth around 0.1 APS)

I think I'll be able to fit both of those in for v0.3.0.

The interesting gun changes will require me to build a melee version of WaveSim if I'm going to have any hope of tuning them properly. The first thing I'd like to try is replacing the Math.pow call with a table, since that would allow me to tune the lead in the gun precisely and it also doesn't require any extra space.

Alternatively I could forgo the two changes above and add a table based gun that uses lateral velocity, lateral velocity last tick, distance, bullet power and getOthers as attributes. My gut says that gun could rival (or possibly even outperform) circular targeting if tuned well, but I'm not going to be building a melee version of WaveSim anytime soon so it's entirely hypothetical right now!

After all that I'd like to try table based wall forces, which if I recall correctly would only cost me a byte or two.

I agree Mirage could be shrunk a lot, but I still think getting ahead of Shadow is a big challenge -- improving APS at that level is really difficult! For one thing, Mirage is way worse at 1v1s than Shadow, which means whenever it's paired with Shadow (or another surfer) it gets lots of 2nds and very few 1sts.

It would definitely be a challenge, and Mirage's movement and/or gun might not be the right approach, but I think Mirage is proof that it's possible. If somebody had suggested a mini could beat Shadow before you'd released Mirage I'd have laughed but not anymore!