Talk:GresSuffurd/Version History

0.2.13

Great work! I'm curious to see what you changed - that's quite a huge jump at that rating. Just a tweak or two away from returning to the top 20. =) Congrats! --Voidious 21:59, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, but I didn't change that much. Only the wallsegment calculation of the gun is done differently now, next to the very small imperfection in the fireangle to fool BulletCatcher. I used to calc that by extending the current direction of the enemy with 75/150 pixels. Now I assume the enemy orbits me at constant distance and I extend their path with Maximum Escape Angle. I did not expect 22 Glicko-points from that change. 0.2.13 should be compared against 0.2.11 btw, the imperfection of fireangle in 0.2.12 is to big and causes quite some difference in score against other bots besides BulletCatcher. --GrubbmGait 22:43, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

0.2.24

The addition of the second, decaying, gun brought less points than I expected. Although the four bots with the worst difference just seem to have 'unlucky' battles. When I improved the gungraphics, I found a bug that was present since the time I used a kind of Precise Intersection, October 2006. It turned out that the killing bullet was never processed in my gun.

A bigger problem is that my bullets are not always are where I expect them, they should be on the cyan line (gun 1) or on the orange line (gun 2, decayed), but sometimes the bullet is half a botwidth away from either line. I really have to look into that. I still have one improvement I want to make in the gun, next to cleaning up that messy Wave class, and then I will switch to movement, starting with some updated graphics. I really, really want to pass that 'Swedish block' in front of me, the gap to place 10 seems a bit to much for now. --GrubbmGait 10:44, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Good luck with that Swedish block - you're so close! I still remember when I first found the rumble, thinking, "wow, German flag at #1, but Sweden has 2nd AND 3rd place!" =) Is half a bot width of error so bad? I check if my gun turn is within half a bot width. --Voidious 13:52, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

The sequence I work with is: Fire Gun - determine bulletpower - Calc Gunturn - endofturn. When calculating the gunturn on time T, i approximate the data on T+1, so on time T+1 the gun should be pointing exactly right. (and I check if gunturnremaining = 0). Maybe I have to check the rules in what order things happen when calling execute. It may be not so bad, but it struck me as not what I expected. --GrubbmGait 15:59, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

The complete refactoring (0.3.25 to 0.4.4) caused a 0.3 APS loss and a 0.3 Survival loss.
But using passive bullet shadows really paid off: 1.1 APS gain, 1.5% Survival gain, and a jump in PL from 29th to 11th place ! So now I have to find somewhere 0.2 APS to get to 11th place, as 1.1 APS to place 10 is a bit to much to chew on.

Finally, reached 11th place.
The whole passive bullet shadows plus some tweaks was enough to get there with the skin of my teeth.
But how the hell can I find another full 1 APS to get to 10th or even 6th place, any ideas ?

Congrats to this nice improvement with 0.3.19 :) It's interesting to see what big difference changing the distance can make!

Yeah, it is a bigger difference than expected. Long time ago a distance of 540 was better, but since then my gun and movement have improved. I would have made top-10 only with this if not those other annoying bots (Firestarter, ScalarBot) entered top-10 before me ;-) Especially dragonbyte.Neutrino triggered the experiments with distance, a pesky bot with quite a good movement, firing 0.1 bullets till around 40 energy.

Congratulations from me too ;) I’ve never tried to experiment on distancing that much, since I couldn’t get any better score with prefered distance other than 500 ;) Nice to see that worked again ;)

Although my testbed says otherwise, I expect this version to be slightly better than 0.3.8. My testbed predicts a 0.5 APS loss . . ., but frankly I don't trust my testbed regarding rumble-score. I should increase the number of surfingbins, because 37 is to low and inaccurate for bulletshielding. My attempt to set the surfingbins to 73 (version 0.3.3 and 0.3.4) were not a success though. I probably have the optimum setting for 37 bins currently. Still aiming to pass Hydra.

Have you accounted for the increased value from adding more bins? And scaling the width of any smoothing you're doing?