[Botzilla-discuss] Re: [Zilla Chat] BotZilla - the Horror Returns!

[Stephen J B. <sj...@li...>]

(Bill: Please use bot...@li... for your 
questions - the old 'lodestone' list has been moved to the new BotZilla
site).

Kretz, William L. @ Link wrote:
> I have one more request for this year's competition.  Can you arrange it
> so that the random starting points of bots are at least 600 ft away from
> each other when possible?

(I don't think you mean 600ft - the robots are 500ft tall!  They 
shouldn't ever start off *that* close together.)

There are two possibilities here:

ONE-ON-ONE contests:

The initial bot positioning is arranged so as to keep the robots pretty
far apart but if the initial spacing is forced to be too large then the
only places they can be is in opposite diagonal corners.  That means
that you can immediately know roughly where the other guy is.  So it's
important that the initial spacing isn't guaranteed to be TOO far apart.

MANY-ON-MANY contests:

In this varient (which we use for the Mahem round), there are just too
many robots in the arena to guarantee minimum distances and still
preserve an unpredictable starting state.  So I use a different 
heuristic if there are more than two bots and there is no guaranteed
minimum - only that you'll be reasonably well spread out.

I'd need to check the source code to find the exact algorithm  though.
I'll look into it tonight.

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L3Com/Link Simulation & Training (817)619-2466 (Fax)
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