Random Chance of Reversing

Fragment of a discussion from Talk:Yatagan/Source
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Those two oddities are linked. Because it only decides once per enemy bullet which direction to go in, and because of the close fighting distance, we end up with two large probability spikes, one at GF1 and one at GF-1 (or as close as is reachable). If it were further away more than one bullet firing event would happen, so it would make the decision more than once, adding variability to where it ends up (2^n spikes for n bullet firings). Either we need to take the reversing decision out of the bullet-fired dependency, or we need to be far enough away that it can even out those spikes.

Skilgannon17:55, 21 March 2013

PM doesn't care about GF's, but a movement that is easy for a GFT gun to hit is usually easy for a PM gun to hit.

If you could fit a .08 probability of reversing every tick without loosing performance elsewhere, that would be amazing. The reason Yatagan's movement is small enough to fit distance control and good energy monitoring is because it's so simple and elegant. When the enemy fires, either never reverse, always reverse, or have a random chance of reverse or not reversing.

I guess we'll try a distance of 200/220 in the next version. It will almost certainly harm performance against HOT, but the gain against PM might make up for it.

Sheldor18:25, 21 March 2013
 

I think I might have something which keeps full functionality but also reverses with a 0.08 probability. The problem is, it also reverses with any enemy bullet fire, so should I decrease that probability? I'm thinking down to about 0.06, since there needs to be a good chance of a direction change happening during the flight time of the bullet, but there was already one at bullet fire time so we don't want it reversing all over the place. Or should I stick with 0.08?

Skilgannon21:03, 21 March 2013

Go ahead and test with 0.06 or 0.05.

Sheldor21:35, 21 March 2013
 

Never mind, I figured out a way around that too, all while using even less codesize than our previous reverse method, so I added back setAdjustGunForRobotTurn(true). Being able to feed custom variables to a random multiplier can do miraculous things! Particularly when you only want probabilistic behaviour, and not absolute behaviour. But hey, a probability of 1 in 20k is pretty much 0, right? ;-)

Skilgannon21:53, 21 March 2013