Melee WaveSuffering
I just want to say, if you thought 1v1 WaveSuffering was bad, melee is on a whole different level. For instance, in 1v1 the changes I made from 1.1 to 1.2 would probably boost my score by over 1%, but in melee it got lost in the noise. I've done a major restructure to allow me to keep post-scantime-interpolated snapshots of where everybody is on the battlefield, and to let my wavesurfing get updated by it to use the improved wave centres, enemy locations at fire etc. As far as I can tell everything is working perfectly, but it now tanks fairly horribly against simple targeters outside of the 1v1 context.
I can only imagine. And you're making me feel pretty good about my hunch that there's not enough data in Melee to effectively surf. :-) But if your score is tanking vs simple targeters, I have to think you have introduced a bug somewhere. How could it be otherwise?
Unless there's a side effect to the predictability of your movement profile, or other risk factors are now being under-weighted... I guess there's a lot to consider. But if it's really that much more accurate, I'd expect the scores to improve after some re-tuning, right?
There is less data to surf in melee, but completely ignoring opponents energy drops and bullet hits is counter-intuitive. Changing your movement when you are hit contributes to being less predictable at least, even if only at the end of a round.
Maybe some weighting according to number of opponents?
I've tried making the weighting change based on the number of enemies, but it seems that for all of them just having a touch of regular minimum-risk is better than any sort of weighting. Maybe my non-wave minimum risk is just really bad.
However, the fact that my score went up considerably by making my firetimes more accurate makes me fairly sure that my waves are making my movement better.
The only catch is the one arguing against melee surfing, Voidious, have a bot in 1st place in meleerumble, and my bot is 12th. Intuition says one thing, the numbers say another.
My bot uses neither wave surfing, nor minimum-risk, but anti-gravity with shrapnel dodging instead. The idea is the same, but with a lot less code, and lower accuracy. Try to stay away from other bots, and stay away from points in waves where you expect to have bullets in it. Dodging incoming waves at least help the bot not getting stuck in stationary local minima, the worst problem with anti-gravity movement.
I guess, in melee you have to be careful with wave surfing taken from 1v1, because you can not just move to the least dangerous position. The field changes sometimes very quickly, especially in the first rounds, that it would be better to do some sort of weighting between defense and offense. Most bots that only avoiding confrontations get caught on a local maximum and if the whole field changes it position they are in a very bad position. A nice example is, if Wallaby goes for a corner and moves closer and closer, most bots get out of the corner because the risk raises and end up in the open field. I guess a well weighted wave surfing combined with a nice minimum risk would be awesome if not to say superior :). Just my 2cents.
My observation for simple targeters is, that because of the radar sweeps most guns shoot not straight HOT or linear. There is always a little shift. Especially nano bots have not very reliable (from defenders point of view) simple targeting. The fact that most nano bots don't have the setAdjustXX() methods set is also one thing that they don't shoot 'straight'.
I've seen this happening many times. A bot will move and fire towards a nice corner position that Neuromancer has, and Neuromancer will dodge the bullets out of the corner and end up going right across the field dodging bullets the whole way, bullets which wouldn't have been aimed at him if he had stayed in the corner. Mostly when Neuromancer gets killed it is because of bad positioning, being so close to an enemy that it was impossible to sense the bullet drop and dodge in time, but can't go in the other direction because of a wall or other bots. It is also a problem when about 5 waves are converging at once, it is difficult to weight which direction is best, although I have an idea for both of these problems...
