It's a substantial performance improvement for heavily read/written files, as the OS doesn't have to copy a bunch of bytes. It just has to point the MMU towards the files
@Alion I feel bad for Highway now. Glider's highway banditry code is very good. The problem I have and wish I could solve...would be when the ants get involved. If I try to wait for them to be Flying Solo...they interfere with each other when being bandits. If I make the highway banditry code priority, then the entire glider transitions the MOMENT it sees the highway.
Solved that problem by discriminating on whether or not a given ant THINKS its part of the glider formation during the "standing in highway space" check that happens first. If it can reasonably assume its part of a glider, it aborts highway robbery and glides. Then on top of that I needed to fix some logic to make the robbery more robust during a 16 player game
Just a heads up - the update will feature a very slightly modified pattern (lime swapped with cyan). This was done as a last resort to mis-ID of Medusa as part of Highway (which often caused invalid transition from stage 1 to stage 2).
ie. you're just swapping those two with each other?
that's a trivial fix on my end for both Glider and Vampire, as both use arrays of color values and changing two of them around isn't that big of a deal
Also, the code to detect "is this highway" is different in both Vampire and Glider. I rewrote the detection code from scratch (the "is this the center?" is essentially the same, just due to how I check for the view being mirrored)
But both ants do the overall check differently.
(actually had to fix a bug in Glider's detection code a minute ago that detected Windmill's main rail as Highway, causing a deadlock!)
current code running in Dave's controller is showing me that Vampire is not effective enough. Possible that the Highway attack code is too permissive and it's not going after SlM or Windmill enough. Glider does have a 13.6 (3rd place) after about 17-20 games
Now that Medusa is dealt with, Explorer decided to screw with my rail... You'll see the finally rail pattern when I post the update Draco, 'cause at this point I'm not even sure which pattern I can use to avoid the wrath of otherwise forever-irrelevant entries...
hmm this whole hexagonal non-100% certainty thing is gonna take quite some work to work around. At least there aren't going to be that many patterns possible to match at a given moment with remembering where you probably are
my idea is to have a stack of actions needed to be done in the memory
I'm planning how to play the challenge already but it's still in the sandbox without a controller :p
One of my ideas is a essentially super-charged whatever @eaglgenes101 is doing. Since you can transfer food between workers, you can just order 'em the right way and bam. Instant food transfer.
And falling apart is less of a problem since you can communicate with ants via memory, so nobody can disturb recovery processes.
No, that's not enough. LS-types would be winning... Hm. How am I supposed to write this, so there aren't just rampant vacuum-types everywhere. Is that even bad, though?
@dzaima Depends on how much food they spew out... If they spew out tons, then whoopsie, move base or get rekt. If they spew out barely anything, then what's the point?
"An unladen worker trying to move onto an enemy worker will kill that worker and gain one food instead. If the enemy worker was laden, it will drop its piece of food on the cell it occupied before its death." How's that sound? Stationary workers will have an advantage, but after killing a worker, they will gain food (and become unable to attack as a result). Queens are immortal and cannot attack.
Oh, good question... Right, since laden workers can move onto food, they can also die on a piece of food...
Food can stack on a single cell, I guess? This will also allow the generators to be one cell in size.
But all of this would make the challenge entirely different. Most things from here wouldn't work well over there. It would basically be "who can control the most generators".
...and I think that's a downgrade, if anything. Surely there can't be more ways to control generators than to control a map...
And that would also encourage edit wars between the raiders and the raided...
@Alion I think that generators would definitely have to be bigger than a single cell. Maybe, keeping up with the same idea, the dropped food would appear somewhere nearby?
At least it doesn't fit my vision of what the challenge is supposed to be.
As well as those generators. I feel like those aren't too in line with what I want this challenge to be. Maybe I could justify adding food over time, but on a global scale, randomly.
how about the chance that a certain cell on the map can spawn food is based on some noise? So there are pockets of more and less food. The gap doesn't need to be big, just noticable for more advanced entries to be able to get just a bit more by being more strategic
A few more fixes to Glider later and it might be competitive with Highway, Windmill, and SlM again. Found an issue where Glider would attempt to rebuild inside (a half-erased) part of Highway and Worker 2 would say "oh, I'm on a highway, see ya!" and wander off.
And here I am, still trying to figure out all the things that are wrong with Highway... Caught some asymmetry bugs, fixed a couple of things, but it's still hard stuck on 4th place...
@Draco18s That's probably related to #13 on my TODO list (should really make a git, even if just for tracking issues). Basically, the Queen does some weird stuff with her type 3s... Although that is the first time I heard about getting stuck between 2 type 3s. Mind providing an example?