WaveSurfing rethink

Even though I have a bot that used to rank relatively high in the 1v1 division, I couldn’t think of myself fully understanding what I was doing and why it works. I was always assuming some GF targeting which fires at the most frequently visited gf, with the most popular attributes in mind. (e.g. segmenting on lateral velocity, accel, wall distance, etc. ).

And even though I tried to consider more types of enemy targeting strategies later, I was still assuming some specific targeting strategy.

But today, after thinking about all that in dreams, an idea just came up.

Can we just don’t assume anything about enemy strategy? Be tough yourself, and they’ll automagically have some trouble hitting you.

But that’s not enough for a top movement. Besides not showing weakness in all senses, it’ll be pity if you lose the chance to be better dodging them.

Statistics will always tell you the truth — once you are sure that they always fire head-on in some situations, why don’t you try your best to make them see the same situation again when aiming? Yes, I’m talking about automagical stop&go, but in my observation far more guns have similar weakness.

Besides firing situations, when you are sure about that they are very likely to fire bullets they’ve fired before, downgrading to traditional wave surfing seems good. And for else, why risk dodging somewhere they aren’t firing at? If their targeting looks quite random (at given firing situation), sitting still or moving randomly are also good choices. And you won’t risk hitting the wall or get yourself stuck somewhere as well if you don’t move at all.

For every bit of the future you can predict, you can always know what you can do better. A lot of bots are too strict, imo, following the design (and the assumptions behind) strictly. But I think we can do better, give more freedom to the bot itself (who always knows the situation better), rather than planning everything in advance. Given the success in GF targeting and then kNN, I’m pretty sure there are still a lot to explore even in today, and there are still a lot for bots to improve.

I tried something like this in DrussGt 2.6.0, and debugged it until about 2.8.0 when I finally gave up on it. I've had some ideas since then that might help, but at least in a wavesurfing-style framework I was never able to get it to work. Maybe it requires looking further ahead than I did (I only did one wave), or maybe more penalty for entering unexplored parameter space, but I never managed to get any benefit from it.

Give it a try though, if you prove me wrong and find some value behind it I might just have to dust off DrussGT ;-)