Adjusting Bullet Power
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I've been playing with adjusting bullet power the last couple of days. It seemed to be a good idea in theory, but the idea of using 0.15 power and adjusting it would make it seem like you could successfully adjust in a small range of power like 0.1 - 0.2. In practice, if I didn't make an error some where, this is far from the case. I'm seeing a range of more like 0.1 to 1.5, and anything over about 0.4 is, in my opinion, way too high a power for a shielding shot. You might be able to improve slightly keeping a small range of power like 0.1 to 0.2, but it will often be far from hitting the midpoint.
I was also thinking something similar, adjusting the bullet power (in regular surfing) to maximise the overlap of the waves and thus the size of bullet shadows. My biggest objection is that I wouldn't be able to use the x.x5 rounding bug to my advantage. The other problem was that it would also make the enemy capable of figuring out where I fired based on where the overlap was biggest.
I'm surprised it didn't work for you. Maybe if you simulate firing a tick later instead you will get better overlap? If your bullet power is significantly less than theirs you also get lower gunheat, so you have a few ticks to spare where you can choose when to fire.
No matter the bullet power, bullet shadows are still very narrow.
I played a bit with bullet shielding. Guessing which angle the opponent is firing at seems to be a lot more important than maximizing shadows.
Moving in a way to create spikes in opponents targeting history and make their guns predictable also works wonders... unless opponents have anti bullet shielding embedded in their guns.
Hang on, looking at your description on the Xandercat page, are you trying to get the bullets to hit at half-way travel such that bullet.dist(fireLocation) == bullet.dist(targetLocation)? What I was talking about was shifting the point of intersection of the wave such that your bullet 'tail' covers the largest portion of the enemy wave.
No -- Just trying to get the tail to cover largest portion of the enemy wave. But minor bullet power changes just don't seem to make enough difference in bullet speed to do this effectively. However, it could be improved by moving forward or backward a little before taking the shot. I haven't experimented with that.
