Another bug fix, another 15 places gained ...
It still surprises me that fixing bugs gains so many places! I had a bug in my enemy wave generation because my bot lost its radar lock every so often for a tick. Fixed the radar lock and added gun heat tracking to stop other erroneous enemy waves being generated and my score increased around 2% APS! :o Unexpected! Made it into the top 100! Whooop!
Congrats dude! :-)
If you don't mind a suggestion, I'd forget fancier stuff and focus on high scores vs Head-On Targeting until you're crushing it. HawkOnFire and Barracuda are the classics - vs HawkOnFire, you get 97.48 while Diamond gets 99.73. Both get 100% survival, so that means he's hitting you almost 10x as much! I think something like that can only be due to bugs in your core surfing code.
Hah its an interesting thing because it also might be my targeting too. If you think about it if HoF hits my movement 1 time each round (for example), but I hit him twice I will still win, but the APS will be much lower than if he hits me once and I hit him 10 times a round. So I have looked at the matches vs HoF and my movement is pretty good, I only give up a few hits over 35 rounds but my gun is pretty rubbish at hitting him so he tends to lose a lot of energy shooting me and I just get a low number of hits on him. I think there probably is still room for improvement in my movement though. There always is isn't there! :D
Hah, no way I'd blame the gun! If Head-On Targeting hits you at all, you've got a bug. :-P At least that's the standard to aspire to. But IIRC, HoF has a quirk where he sometimes fires a little bit off of HOT (radar related?), which is why you don't see top bots getting 100% against him...
True, looking at the stats, Agent Smith gets 100 damage taken vs HoF over 35 rounds and Diamond takes around 30 damage over 35 rounds. So its not exactly a massive amount of damage taken but I guess its 3x more hehe! But its not a bug in my wave surfing as I am not doing traditional wave surfing, its a form of minimum risk movement. I'm sure I can improve it but I think I would increase the score in the rumble more by performing a lot better against the top 50% bots rather than trying to increase the score vs HOT bots by 1%.
Got a question though, do bullets that hit after the opponent is dead count towards damage taken? My bot stops as soon as the opponent is dead and sometimes takes hits from bullets in flight before the round ends. Didn't know if the robocode scoring ignored these hits or not? That might be the difference between our scores!
In any case, HOT is 100% predictable and so is your own movement, so you should never get hit by HOT, really. I think it's fair to call it a bug if you do. Fixing those bugs should improve your score vs everyone else too.
And yes, those bullets count - keep dodging until the end!
I just did a bug fix and improvement on my bot and I can actually get it to 100% APS vs Hawk On Fire but it degrades my performance against other firing types of course! I think I can probably improve my score vs HoF and other bots with some tweaks to my adaptive movement basically. If its not adaptive then I get 100% vs HoF and if it is adaptive I get 98-100% vs HoF - slightly better than it used to be. The adaptive part uses the same DC code as my gun so I really think improving my gun will improve my bot's score all around now!
