1.7.30 - As the wave breaks

I'm really curious to see how "cast shadows over firing angles that already would have hit" works out. This is actually a feature I had implemented in RougeDC a long time ago, but I can't remember if I saw much benefit in the rumble or not.

Yeah, it seems like a cool feature, and it doesn't seem possible it would cost you points unless there is some other bug or quirk at play. Looks like I lost 0.1 APS, which could be margin of error, but I didn't really reproduce a score increase in tests either, so I think it's accurate. Another nice thing this would let me do is surf a wave until it completely passes without sacrificing anything. If I'm modeling the danger accurately, I'll pretty much be surfing the second wave as soon as I am now anyway, and even a tick or two sooner in a lot of cases where waves break along my front edge.

The one aspect that probably needs improving is how I apply shadows to the danger calculation. I ignore any firing angles that fall within a shadow, and I multiply the final danger by (1 - the percentage of firing angles that are shadowed). Of course this yielded like 0.8 APS with bullet shadows, so it must be a decent approach, but the right way to do it is obviously with integrals and all that. I think I need to change my kernel density formula to do it right, which is something I still need to figure out.

It's funny, I've thought about this idea before, but it always seemed like a hugely complex thing to try to deal with. This time I already had all the pieces in place to do it without much additional work: precise intersection, bullet shadows, plus a lot of newly refactored wave code that makes my life a lot easier. =)

Ahh, a pity it didn't seem to really help, though maybe it would more with the integral-style danger.

Makes sense. It was pretty natural for me to implement in RougeDC because it had both precise intersection and integral-style danger right from the start.

I'm also surprised this didn't work. With Goto surfing I could understand, as it doesn't make any accel/decel decisions once the wave starts breaking, but with True Surfing the decision to speed up/slow down is made as the wave is breaking over you. Are you creating the wave shadows in your simulations as well, or just using the ones which are actually created by the bot hitting the waves?

And you're making me nervous with your recent gains =)

I'm just creating shadows up to the present point in time, including the firing angles that will hit me next tick (before I can move again). I did consider that as an extension, I could shadow any angles that are totally unavoidable, starting several ticks earlier and simulating until the wave is gone, but I'm taking it one step at a time.

My best guess is that the crudeness of how I apply bullet shadows to my danger calculation is what's holding me back. My kernel density danger calculation just ignores any angles that fall within a shadow. But an angle near the edge of a shadow would otherwise cause me to go the other way, and that's probably worth doing since those angles are just guesses. With these shadows, I'm totally ignoring that firing angle. I'm going to try some integral style dangers and see where that takes me.

It's also worth noting that while it's true those angles really should be viewed as having zero danger, many of them are in common across the movement options, so they may frequently cancel each other out anyway. (Ie, what's the difference if I add zero or some other number to all the movement option dangers?)