Multiple bullets per gun
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I take it as a given that we all choose the wrong gun pretty frequently. I use precise intersection and normalize hits by distance and MEA. So a hit percentage of 12% from distance 400 is rated the same as 6% from distance 800, for instance. I think this is all pretty optimal, but we still just don't have much data. There's the option of firing a virtual bullet every tick, but this seems inaccurate.
I got the idea to not just fire a virtual bullet for the best angle produced by each gun, but also for 2nd best, 3rd best, etc, with progressively lower weights into the VG stats. I felt this had a lot of promise and I spent a few days tweaking various configurations, disappointed to find no improvement in my test bed. But I liked the idea enough that I figured I'd give it one shot in the rumble before moving on. I'm not convinced this isn't random fluctuation or a side-effect of the Anti-Surfer gun changes, but 0.1 APS improvement: [1]. Anyway, just thought I'd share. Maybe I'll revert the VG changes in .14 for a direct comparison.
In my humble opinion the best virtual gun array is no virtual gun array. It add's a great deal of complexity for marginal benefit in most cases. Just try to make the best gun better.
In order to hit both DrussGT and RandomMovementBot12345, you're going to make a trade-off somewhere, whether it's by adding a VG or by sacrificing performance against one to hit the other when tuning a single algorithm. I don't consider it that complex. Improving my Anti-Surfer gun is what got me beating Shadow, which is reason enough for me to have one, and more than a "marginal benefit" in my eyes.
Hmm, while such a trade-off has to exist in some form, a VG array is not the only way to handle minimizing that sacrifice.
The primary trade-off in the "DrussGT and RandomMovementBot12345" case is the question of whether old data should be kept. In some things like a NN targeting system, you could have methods of adjusting that learning parameter besides VG, based on some characteristics of the data. That's just one example, and there are many other ways the sacrifice could be minimized within a single gun. I think that is something that hasn't been nearly as explored as it could be.
