Head on gun in melee

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Strictly speaking, Diamond doesn't have any deliberate corner movement strategy, and he certainly doesn't have a hard-coded triangular pattern that he follows. It's just a well-tuned minimum risk movement with some randomness based on recent locations. So hopefully it looks more predictable than it is. :-) One thing he does is precisely predict a few ticks ahead to avoid hitting walls, so his wall smoothing is pretty graceful and that may help him stay in the corners (where it's safer) and still avoid recent locations. Looking at it now, his melee movement is actually a very small amount of code: MeleeMover.java.

As for what's been tried before - my attitude is generally that everything has been tried before ;), but that doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing. Those attempts could have been suboptimal or outright broken and the landscape of competition has changed over time. If I were climbing the Melee ranks, I would certainly consider specialty guns for the top bots. And I have certainly considered it for Shadow and DrussGT in 1v1. :-)

But no, I don't remember anyone trying that. oldwiki:AreaTargeting came to mind, but looks like something different. Maybe you could formulate something like a GF that's based on a corner / quadrant of the field, the way a GF assumes orbital movement and factors out orbit direction. Like polar coordinates from nearest corner, with 0/north being towards the center of the field.

Voidious (talk)17:18, 11 November 2015

I am shocked. Am I right to observe that there is no bullet/wave dodging in melee code? I.e., the bullet avoidance is all in the randomized motion.

Does it mean that I over think the problem, and should stop wasting CPU on bullet tracks predictors? This is somewhat depressing, but I've seen HawkOnFire as surviver of a melee, so it should not be such a surprise.

Beaming (talk)21:51, 11 November 2015

Both Neuromancer and DemonicRage use some kind of bullet prediction - Neuromancer full waves, while I believe DemonicRage just predicts a few simple kinds of targeting. Diamond is the outlier among the top 3 for using a simple minimum risk movement that does not use waves.

Skilgannon (talk)21:58, 11 November 2015
 

Correct, no melee bullet dodging at all for Diamond. Up to you whether to believe it is a waste of effort to pursue it. :-) Clearly Skilgannon doesn't think it's a waste and he's at #1. Portia also dodges simple targeters, tho I don't believe his dodging learns at all.

I am still skeptical that any effective bullet dodging is possible in Melee. I just think the data is too noisy while wave surfing thrives on precision. So I still personally suspect that Neuromancer and DemonicRage are successful largely due to the minimum risk and unpredictable aspects of their movements. It's not like Neuromancer is that far ahead - nothing like when surfing showed up in 1v1.

Skilgannon and Justin are both super smart dudes that have surely done plenty of testing, but it's a hard thing to prove is doing what you think it's doing. I do think that melee surfing HOT or even Linear Targeting certainly seems possible. IIRC Portia had some impressive results vs a field of HawkOnFires.

Voidious (talk)03:55, 12 November 2015

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