Progress

Well, actually I think #4 could be > #3 - wall smoothing is not the way to get true MEA, turning and moving directly to the farthest point you can reach is, but I use wall smoothing w/o wall collisions as an approximation as I try to iterate towards the max MEA. The full algorithm I use is here: Talk:Maximum_Escape_Angle/Precise#Calculating.

But yeah, I think getting close to precise MEA is good enough, and GFs barely > 1 aren't really the worst thing, although obviously can result in shooting at unreachable spots in situations where your MEA is accurate. At the same time, just because I settled doesn't mean you have to... =) My current method has room for improvement, and it is one of the things I consider revisiting in Diamond's gun.

I like your algorithm as described on the MEA talk page. A nice, clean solution, and after a few extra iterations, I do think you probably bump up against the law of diminishing returns.

I think I'll give that a shot, it should blow some annoying cobwebs out of the code, not needing to jump through the hoops I was starting to jump through to get it right.

I'm refactoring this now, and just to be accurate, I actually don't ignore wall hits in the prediction, though I thought that was my intention. I wrote this code so long ago I'm not really sure if I screwed up the code or the original description! My old predictor didn't do wall hits right anyway, so either way would've been a bit off....