Talk:Bullet Shielding

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Revision as of 06:24, 24 April 2010 by Nat (talk | contribs) (→‎Multiple bullets?: yes and no)
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Credits - Bullet Shielding
Old wiki page: BulletShielding
Original author(s): Vuen

Discussion from Old Wiki

I was just reading this, and thought of an idea: Instead of theming Firing/Movement? on bullet collisions like this, why not use this technique to enhance the existing methods of WaveSurfing? Basically, track movement of your own bullets, and check what "umbrellas" exist, and set the danger factor to 0 where it is covered by an "umbrella". A robot using this would be able to take advantage of these zero-danger locations while still using good movement when it can't get to these zero danger locations. You don't even to make the firing algorithm optimized for creating as much BulletShielding as possible, just just look at what lucky BulletShielding happens to exist. Perhaps this could be combined with firing that is designed to create more BulletShielding, but even without that you could use this to make WaveSurfing just a little bit smarter. -- Rednalexa

I've tried this recently, and in practice the width of these umbrellas are rather narrow. I'm still working with the idea though. I spent a couple hours earlier today looking at the logistics of creating deliberate safe(r) areas. More work ahead of me. -- Martin
Well, even if the umbrellas are very narrow, it could still reduce the overall danger (both actual and calculated) across the width of the robot. Even if it wouldn't change the lowest danger location for the robot very often, every avoided bullet counts. Best of luck tring to implement this type of thing. I might give it a try once my WaveSurfing is working well enough to be worth looking for these smaller optimizations. -- Rednalexa
I've tried this too, no success. I thought this could be a nice secret weapon, but it hat no impact on the score ;( But the idea of BulletShielding is fascinating, I tried it every once in a while :) --Krabb
Interesting. Well, despite the past failures people have had with this, I'll probably give it a try some day just for fun. I think that somebody will manage to get this to add a tiny tiny fraction of score. Maybe 0.01 extra score in the RoboRumble will be achievable some day with this? :) -- Rednalexa

Multiple bullets?

Is it possible for more than 2 bullets to collide? And if so, how do the mechanics of that work? --Starrynte 04:29, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I actually have no idea. Both may be removed from consideration as soon as the collision is detected, but I dunno. I imagine you could easily tell from looking at the Robocode source. Or of course you could code up some bots that fire intersecting bullets and see what happens. =) --Voidious 20:52, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Voidious is correct and incorrect. Each bullet can only hit once, either other bullets, robots or wall. So if more than two bullets collide, each bullet will be paired with other bullets and the odd one is left. This happen randomly, so it is completely unpredictable which pair will collide. No, it can be easily tell from Robocode source. It is quite complicated and very modular. =) --Nat Pavasant 05:24, 24 April 2010 (UTC)