BerryBots updates
That reminds me of some things I was pondering during the development of Glacier. I'd say Glacier's enemy distance segments are among the better ones in the meleerumble, but one thought I had but never got around to trying, was the notion of "single tick" style prediction of the whole field of other bots simultaneously, to predict the trend of group interactions rather than merely predicting an individual one's future behavior from it's immediate surroundings. After all, one bot making an agressive movement in one corner of the field could have a chain reaction causing bots on the other end of the field to move a bit, but the usual targeting systems aren't prepared to consider that.
If one wanted to really get tricky with that, there are ways one could use that "single tick" prediction in movement too... but yeah...
I had similar thoughts while making demonicRage, but never realized the value till reading yours. I think it would make a big improvement against advanced bots.. An "easy" way to test a diluted version of your concept, would be to predict the weekest bot on the field normally, then predict next weekest bot using the weaker bots predicted location and data... then predict 3rd bot using the 2 weaker bots predicted data..and so forth, so that the strongest opponent is predicted using all the predicted data of all the other bots.... That diluted method would likely be quick to jimmy up..
- edit* on second thought that breaks the 'bots interaction' part of your concept :) oh-well :P
Instead of classifying data using a single opponent at a time, classify by all opponents at the same time.
When predicting opponent´s A behaviour, instead of using only opponent´s A distance and velocity as input, use distance and velocity from other opponents too. The same principle applying to any kind of classification.
I thought about this before, but didn´t know how to deal with eliminated opponents. Thinking again, now I have some ideas.
One thing I've tried is attributes based on the force coming from an Anti-Gravity calculation. I thought it was going to be a killer feature, but despite being fairly rigorous to make sure it was doing what I wanted, I never got a performance gain out of it.
It seems like there must be a way to leverage that data, though.
If everyone used anti-gravity movement, assigned and weighted points the same way, it would work wonders.
Combat uses anti-gravity movement, but weights points differently, and also assign anti-gravity points on enemy virtual bullets (shrapnel dodging), which are invisible to opponents. Good luck to anyone trying to guess the resulting anti-gravity force.
Many intermediate anti-gravity bots also assign random anti-gravity points accross the battlefield in order to confuse opponents.
I'd say "use distance from other opponents too" and "force coming from an Anti-Gravity calculation" are similar to what I used in Glacier's targeting actually. I used several dimensions which (more or less) measured the closest distance to another bot at different angle ranges.
With anti-grav systems, different ones will weight things differently, but in all cases the most prominant influences are the closest ones. As such, my goal was to create a measure with a small finite number of dimensions, that characterized the most prominant influences meaningfully.
In any case though, all those methods don't really consider the field-wide interactions that can occur, where movements can cause a chain reaction. For that, I doubt there is much of a reasonable option besides some sort of iterative process (maybe not per-tick, could be larger steps or iterations that are not time-based, but yeah).
Interesting. In Neuromancer I make some KNN attributes relative to the closest enemy, so distance, latVel, advVel. Then I use PIF so it doesn't matter that the attributes were from somebody else's perspective.
