XanderCat's Future
The highlighted comment was created in this revision.
On the heels of Tomcat, with XanderCat I achieved a decent rank, then figured out how to fight the top robots but it dropped my score, then I got my score back up to where it was. I'm happy with top robot performance for now; top 20 in PL score (PL score was 1630 earlier today, but it can fluctuate, as a lot of close calls), only a couple of robots that can make over 60% against XanderCat now, and I finally figured out how to hit Chase's robots (or at least, not miss them as badly) -- and it's not tweaked yet, so watch out Chase! *grin*
However, now I'm a bit stuck. I'm underperforming against some easier and mid pack robots like csm.NthGeneration, janm.Jammy, mcb.Audace, and morbid.MorbidPriest, to name a few. Not always the same problem. In some cases, I should be dodging bullets better; in others, I should be hitting with my gun better (my gun is not handling oscillating movements as well as it should). I've been monkeying with my data system for quite a few days now without making any headway. My top idea involved mixing and matching segmenters, selecting by which segmenter combination is providing the best hit ratio (either high or low, depending on if gun or drive). I still think it's a good idea, but I haven't seen positive results with it yet. Might be time for another break.
Le Gasp! You hitting my robots, nuuuuu, my poor cute little robots! T_T
In other news, I find that most of your gains come from bug fixes and structural changes. Segmentation is mostly there for fine tuning and for base targeting ability. You should focus more on examining how your targeting works and thinking up ways to improve that. Not saying to ignore segmentation, but it shouldn't be your primary focus until you are already doing pretty well with it's targeting.
I've planned out my next steps now. First, I'm going to do a little refactoring of my code to seperate responsibilities a little more for my guess factor / wave surfing code. I'm going to seperate the basic parts out into a hit logger (the component that logs hit and visit data in a tree), hit log reader (the component that decides on what data to select from the tree), and factor array constructor (the component that decides how to use the data). This will make further work easier and allow for improved efficiency in some areas (will be easier to cache certain data). Then I'm going to more closely review my tree code for issues and try a few variations on my selection algorithm that I think could yield good results.
