Can i ask you to have a look at ....

Oh no - real tabs, braces on their own lines, lines over 80 chars?! :-) It's funny, at my last job, almost every file had its own different code style, so I was very flexible. My current job is much more rigid on code style, and now I realize I've also become more rigid... Might have to reformat some stuff, at least in the main package. :-) I just took a quick look for now, though. I'll look more and test out your stuff when I get home later. Btw, should I hold off playing with the code much if you're still making major changes?

The first thing I wanted to do with custom scoring was to track start positions for Diamond in 1v1, to see if there was any pattern to which rounds he lost. Like, when he loses 1 random round out of 35 to Raiko, is it because we started near each other? Or I started in a corner? Or I didn't start in a corner? Or is it just always the first round before we have much data? Seems like there could be a lot to gain just shoring up some of the "unlucky" stuff that can happen in a battle. But yeah, I realized most of the useful stuff you'd do with it would be custom stats like that, not traditional "scores" like with percent score or bullet damage. Passing values back from RoboRunner and storing them in the XML should be no problem, I just want to come up with a nice/simple/flexible API for the listener to log the values and RoboRunner to format them. I might want to peek at some of your code for the dynamic class loading, since I haven't done much of that before.

If you're wondering about Raiko (or any other multi-mode random movement bot), what I find is that I win the first round because of their Musashi trick / stop-n-go / anti-simple movement, and then whether I win the next two rounds is a matter of luck, until I can unlearn their anti-simple movement and learn their actual movement. Simultaneously, these rounds are the ones where their non-rolling-average VCS guns are still adapting quickly, so they get a decent hitrate against the surfing still.

Ah, very good points. The Musashi trick shouldn't last long (stops as soon as they're hit once), but certainly the 1+ rounds of stop and go would screw up my guns. Maybe it's worth special casing that and clearing gun data once you detect the switch.

And the relative fast-learning of their guns in early rounds isn't something I'd thought about much. Maybe there's a place for some light flattening early on as soon as you know they're using something besides simple targeting.

I've just been thinking a lot about all these bots that take 1-2 rounds off of Diamond (and DrussGT). If you're winning 95% of rounds vs a given bot, maybe you’re just a little consistency away from 99%. And it could be from simple stuff, like starting a round cornered or too close. But it might take some real research to figure out some causes (or just give up and accept "randomness" =)).