Welcome to MeleeRumble! :-)

Try tracking all waves from all opponents, and if opponent´s A energy drops the same as opponent´s B wave damage passing over opponent´s A, it is probably a hit?

That may work... or open a vulnerability where opponent A shoots an undetected bullet with power equal to opponent´s B wave damage.

That's what I do. I also track gunheat to eliminate invalid waves, and account for the case of them being hit and firing at the same time (or at least, between two consecutive scans).

For that vulnerability to occur the enemy wave would have to be very low power - bullet less than 0.75 - and they'd have to wait for it before they shoot. Eventually I want to check for bullet bonus before I count a wave as hit, it would be much more complex but could lead to a significant score increase. The trouble is that I don't know if it would help much because I don't know how many waves are incorrectly labelled as 'hit', so I'm not sure if this is worth it.

I've heard that gun accuracy can go up by scanning targets just before fire time, so maybe I'll give that a shot next.

I'm still very curious how much true bullet dodging value you're getting from this, but I guess I'll need to get down and dirty and investigate it myself if I want to know for sure. :-) Obviously the end result of your movement algorithm is a very powerful one, so huge props on that regardless.

But for instance, I wonder if you fed the wave surfing false (but realistic) data about enemy energy levels, how much would it affect performance? It still seems very possible to me that the net of all this "surfing extremely noisy data" + the MR elements is about equivalent to a nicely randomish minimum risk movement.

Well, watching Neuromancer in a battle is quite interesting. There is none of the usual 'stick in a corner and avoid other bots' mentality that I tend to see with regular MR, instead it is all over the place, right through the middle of the field, for the most part missing bullets that seem to fly all around it. I think Neuromancer tends to get a lot more bullets fired at it than most bots because the MR isn't the only thing that's directing it, but still manages to do a brilliant job of racking up the survival points. So yes, I think I am getting some very real bullet dodging, but it is at least partly offset by the increased 'targetability' created by that same dodging.

That sounds like an interesting experiment, but I think more conclusive would be releasing a version using Diamond's gun - is that OK with you? Would I need to use Diamond's radar as well?

Wow, that actually sounds really interesting. Maybe I'll watch some battles.

Sure, you're free to test with Diamond's gun, would be cool to see the results. I don't think you need the radar - it doesn't look like they're even connected now that I do Shadow/Melee Gun. The only gun/movement/radar connection is the gun reporting to the movement for Bullet Shadows, so if you're doing that you'll need to rig something up.

I'm also going to get a Melee client going and try to get the latest Diamond into MeleeRumble... It's possible I've broken something since 1.5.30, I'm not sure.

Cool thought on feeding it false bullet drops :P (No wonder I have no tools to test:) but I think you'd be surprised Void.. In Diamond I believe you used a random "push", to modivate and randomise it's minimumRisk. Melee surfing is simply replacing that random push; using additional risk based on the danger of crossing waves. (IMO) As long as you collect good wave data (in melee) I don't think it will matter if it is perfectly accurate.. (It will still "push" the minimumRisk in a smarter direction) On the other hand, the surfing data doesn't need to be noisy ether. eg: If you detect a bullet drop, but it's been a few ticks since you last scanned the bot, you could simply throw it away.. :)Keep in mind: even if your still missing 3 scans, simply choosing the middle missing scan (as the fireTime and position) means you'll only be out 1 tick max. (Good in my books:) I remember testing with spinning radar) @Skilgannon: Yeah, I also use a similar addition for total Risk,(using standard deviation ). You might wanna try multipling if you haven't tried it already (without zeros). Reguarding your "regular old 1-tick-wide waves" : I though about that, but I just binn smooth to hell anyway :) -Jlm0924

I'd rather not throw anything away - I feel that even a badly aligned wave is better than no wave. But I might be wrong - more to test, I guess.