Parallax

Background Information

It has one of the highest vote percentages in the NanoRumble.
It features a unique gun, long-range random movement, wall avoidance, and energy management, all in a nanobot!
It's extremely effective against the Nanobot random-movement pattern-matcher archetype!

How competitive is it?: The development of Parallax can definitely be considered a cautionary tale for bot authors. When designing it, I only tested against the strong, top bots in the NanoRumble, completely ignoring the lower ranked ones. I got some very promising results from my tests, and Parallax beats every single Nanobot in the top 10 (with very good margins too, I might add), and only loses to 3 bots in the top 30. Looking at this, I of course assumed Parallax would be a top bot as well, and a contender for the throne. But it turns out that Parallax's skill at dispatching top bots does not extend to its weaker opponents, and Parallax racked up loss after loss against bots in the middle of the pack, ending up at number 57, not competitive at all :(

How does it move?: It uses random movement, taken and modified from RaikoNano. It tries to stay as far away from the enemy as possible, and reverses direction randomly, or when wall-smoothing would bring it close to the enemy. The real strength of this movement is the wall-avoidance. The lack of wall-damage and energy management allows it to stay alive much longer than other nanobots, which usually end up disabling themselves. It just sits around and waits for the decay timer. Not the flashiest strategy, and kind of lame, but hey, it wins :)

How does it fire?: It fires using a rolling-averaged linear gun. The rolling average is pretty effective against perpendicular orbiting, oscillating, and random movement, which allows it to hit many of the top nanobots which use these strategies. However, its completely useless against adaptive oscillating movement, certain oscillating frequencies, and some other uncommon forms of movement.

How does it dodge bullets?: Most of the bullets are dodged by chance, with random movement. It also constantly moves away from the opponent, and the distance makes effective targeting fairly difficult for most nanobot guns. The constantly changing distance is also extremely effective against the standard nano pattern matchers, since they don't take into account advancing velocity when making matches, so even if they perfectly predict my bot's movements, they still have a chance of missing because of the distance change.

What does it save between rounds and matches?: It saves the averaged velocity for the gun between rounds, nothing between matches.

Where did you get the name?: I checked out Dsekercioglu's Robot Names You Can Use page, and thought it sounded like a space alien.

Can I use your code?: Yep, feel free to extract it from the .jar file. Licensed under the RWPCL

Improve performance against adaptive oscillator movement
Improve performance against mirror bots
Improve performance against the other long range bots, like Acero and RaikoNano.

What other robot(s) is it based on?: Movement is based off of RaikoNano, and targeting is based off of the Linear targeting page.