Thing I learn when writing bot for a spaceship shooting game

My friend at WeBuild introduces me to a bot writing game, which we write instructions for a spaceship and let it chase, dodge and shoot at each other. It’s pretty fun and you can find the source code of the game in this repo.

I learned a lot of things during the implementation:

• How to implement path collision:

  • At first I intend to find 2 vectors that represent velocity of each object, then find ax + by = c representation of them. From there, find the intersection point and see whether that intersection point is on the road for the next few seconds.
  • This actually isn’t very good in reality, as representation of a path is not a line but a rectangle, and finding intersection and collision moment for 2 rectangles is not trivial.
  • In the end, I opt to a less performance approach, but works better: loop through each 10ms, move the objects, then find whether they collide.

• How to find angle to X-axis from one point to another (2)

• Always add test if you have doubt about the implementation:
  • When implement point (2) above, I struggle a lot because I couldn’t figure out how the system calculate the angle. Writing all cases and tests them first help me get a better feedback loop and verify my understanding easier.
• How to implement a simple generic algorithm to train my spaceship:
  • there are still quite a lot of bugs that make this implementation unstable