Author Topic: Quick question  (Read 8173 times)

Offline abyaly

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Quick question
« on: March 14, 2008, 02:11:21 AM »
A few things seem to have changed since the last version I saw. It seems bots can now kill themselves by body feeding. It seems tie feeding works. It seems that bots with very low body have completely useless -1 shots now (in addition to completely useless body shots). Is this all accurate?

Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline EricL

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Quick question
« Reply #1 on: March 14, 2008, 10:17:05 AM »
What two versions are you referring to?   It's theoretically possible body feeding can cause nrg loss and lead to death, depending upon shot/tie costs.  Happy to look into it, but you'll have to post a sim for me to dive into it in detail.   Same with the relationship between feeding shots and body.   Tie feeding should work and to my knowledge has worked for a long while.

The specific list of changes from version to version is documented here.
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Offline abyaly

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« Reply #2 on: March 14, 2008, 11:08:21 AM »
I last used m, and I looked through your release notes for the changes since then. I noticed the body change; I don't know which change could have altered energy shot behavior. Tie feeding didnt work in m, although sharefeeding did. It works now, though.

When I said body feeding, I meant
*.body .fdbody store
Can be fatal if repeated often enough.

Also, it looks like eye vision distance now depends on width. It isn't proportional. Is the formula available somewhere?

*edit - Oh! As long as I'm asking for formulas, the relationship between shot damage and size is pretty big question for me
« Last Edit: March 14, 2008, 11:12:37 AM by abyaly »
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline EricL

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« Reply #3 on: March 14, 2008, 11:34:57 AM »
Quote from: abyaly
When I said body feeding, I meant
*.body .fdbody store
Can be fatal if repeated often enough.
Ah.  From the code, it looks like there arn't any safeguards when trying to feed from body when that would take your body negative.   I haven't been in this specific code, so I don't think this specific thing is new but I could have closed an nrg leak down the road that now kills bots whose body goes negative instead of properly plugging it upstream here and preventing it from going negative in the first place.  Will change for next drop.  Nice find.

Quote from: abyaly
Also, it looks like eye vision distance now depends on width. It isn't proportional. Is the formula available somewhere?
There's a detailed topic on this in the suggestions forum.  The formula is there.  

Quote from: abyaly
*edit - Oh! As long as I'm asking for formulas, the relationship between shot damage and size is pretty big question for me

Me too!  This code predates me and is a total mess.  Shot damage depends on a bunch of things including where the shot is in it's range.    I think I tried to figure it all out once and posted on it but I can't seem to find that topic at the moment.
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Offline Numsgil

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« Reply #4 on: March 14, 2008, 12:57:35 PM »
Quote from: EricL
Me too!  This code predates me and is a total mess.  Shot damage depends on a bunch of things including where the shot is in it's range.    I think I tried to figure it all out once and posted on it but I can't seem to find that topic at the moment.

You have to be especially careful with that code, because variables tend to get "recycled".  Shotnrg might refer to something totally different than you think it should.

Offline abyaly

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« Reply #5 on: March 14, 2008, 05:36:00 PM »
What about shot range in relation to body?
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline abyaly

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« Reply #6 on: March 14, 2008, 07:57:56 PM »
After a little testing' I've deduced that -1 shots are completely useless when fired by bots with little to no body. On the chance that this is not intended behavior, I'm attaching a sim and and bot DNA.

RIP
Here lies Etch. Mauled by size calibration.  

RIP
Here lies Aura. Disemboweled by eye revamping.  

Let's take this moment to be impressed by how version resilient excalibur is.
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline Numsgil

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« Reply #7 on: March 14, 2008, 09:30:53 PM »
Smaller bots should use ties, and larger bots should use shots.  Or at least, that's the general idea as far as strengths and costs are concerned.  The idea being that smaller bots are hard to hit with shots, including returned nrg shots.  For larger bots, not only is their returned nrg easier to get, but they're stronger, making ties comparatively less useful.

Offline abyaly

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« Reply #8 on: March 15, 2008, 01:25:54 AM »
Quote from: Numsgil
Smaller bots should use ties, and larger bots should use shots.  Or at least, that's the general idea as far as strengths and costs are concerned.  The idea being that smaller bots are hard to hit with shots, including returned nrg shots.  For larger bots, not only is their returned nrg easier to get, but they're stronger, making ties comparatively less useful.
I think that was the point of -6 shots. -1 shots used to be completely independent of body. I always considered that the main reason for having two flavors of shots. Also, my experiments suggest that tie feeding rate is capped by one tenth of body.
At this rate, the only weapons still available to small bots are venom, viruses, and info shots. Assuming those dont scale with size, anyway; I'm suspiscious of venom.
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline Moonfisher

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« Reply #9 on: March 18, 2008, 08:58:34 AM »
I think venom is also scaled... so it only leaves info shots and ties (And ofcourse viruses).
But ties and info shots should be enough to handle anything I've seen so far. Being small is still a big advantage, and it also allows for greater numbers which is a very big advantage, should probably nerf the eyes on small bots or something like that if you want to balance it out. TieFighters stays small and has an attack that uses ties only to kill oponents, and it works against any oponent I've tryed it on, but only if they're not moving too fast, which is why it also acts a bit like pacifist once below a certain amount of nrg to give people shell and slow them down.

And Excalibur is my favorite bot to test against... it's stable and simple and usualy performs well. It was also one of the bots with the best defence against pacifist (Just pushing a value into .up through the tie to bring enemies closer), multiply did better though, because it was focusing on -6 shots, and the thing they both had in comon was killing enemies from a distance which is why they never got within venom range of the pacifist. This is also why I saw it as a chalenge to kill Excalibur only using ties... and TieFighters manages that, but it uses info shots and venom along with it's tie when killing alge, but onyl on alge though (This can also be a problem if facing oponents like pacifist which makes shell on the alge to protect them and confuse enemyes)

Offline Numsgil

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« Reply #10 on: March 18, 2008, 05:59:35 PM »
It might be that small bots are too advantaged in the current version.  Could one of you master bot programmers try and make a huge, fat bot and see if it can win against the newer, aggressive small bots?  If not, then we might want to do some tweaking.

Offline abyaly

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« Reply #11 on: March 18, 2008, 07:08:10 PM »
Well, I think small bots will be significantly less fearsome if customizable shot spread is introduced. Also, I think small bots always had a huge advantage that just wasn't being exploited yet.

In a slightly related note, how is shot range calculated in relation to body? This seems like rather important info, but I can't seem to find it.
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline Numsgil

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« Reply #12 on: March 19, 2008, 02:52:29 AM »
IIRC it's logarithmic with body.

Offline abyaly

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« Reply #13 on: March 19, 2008, 11:04:31 AM »
Do you have something more specific?
I guess I could test some values and try to match it, but that seems like wasted effort if someone here knows the answer.
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline EricL

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« Reply #14 on: March 19, 2008, 11:54:20 AM »
From a quick look at the code, -1 and -6 shot range appears not to depend on the body of the shooter at all.
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