Rumble questions and issues ...

Hi mates

I try to bring my robocode environment back to work and would have some questions and maybe some issues.

Are there some changes in the rumble client for 1.8.1.0, I should know about? Beside the increased upload speed, I mean? Because melee battles are not canceled if one/more bots couldn't loaded. Shame on me - I'm still on java 1.6 and a couple of bots are 1.7 written. I try to exclude all 1.7 bots right now but not sure if I get them all. In 1vs1 I get an 'could not load' error for 'apv.TheBrainPi_0.5fix.jar' which looks perfectly fine, link and package wise, so far :(.

Something different: I have to admit that I do not understand how to use the new scoring columns. I know what they do (maybe not fully), but don't get how to interpret the values. For example NPP. If I have, lets say, 88% against an particular bot - where do I have to look and what should I do to increase this number (or better what is wrong and then find a way to make it better)? Is there a way to spot bugs/uncertainties from the scoring columns? I remember looking at the battle table against each robot quite often to see if I loose one or more rounds here and there which brought me to a couple of bugs/mistakes I made.

I'm not sure what's up with the 1.8.1.0 issues, what version of the JVM are you using? OpenJDK or Oracle?

As for the scoring columns, I added a link on the Literumble homepage which explains how the scores are calculated. NPP is your APS score normalised against the min and max score against this bot, so if you got 88% then you are close the the maximum score achieved, 0 would mean you got the lowest score and 100 the highest score. So somebody gets 0 NPP and somebody gets 100 NPP against every bot.

When looking for bugs I normally look at the lowest KNNPBI score, or compare to previous versions to see the biggest drop in score. However, in melee this is harder because the score in each battle obviously also depends on who else was in the battle at the time. I'm thinking of adding a 'variance' column, which should help point to bots which cause bugs to happen only some of the time, but I'm very busy right now so if I do that it will only be in late August (I'm in the final writing stage for my MSc!)

Are you sure it's a change of behavior about the Java 7 bots? I would expect the battle to still run and those bots to get zero scores. I've removed some bots from the participants list for requiring Java 7 and asked people to update with Java 6 compatibility - we shouldn't be requiring Java 7 yet. A more prominent notice about that somewhere might be nice. (Excluding them is also fine of course.)

I remember TheBrainPi could get into a broken state with his save data. I think that's part of what we "fixed" but maybe it's still possible? Could you delete him from the .data dir, or was this on a fresh install already?