Melee WaveSuffering

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.