TL2 Beta 8.6: Impressions so far

[Borandriel]

Hello Tankers,

after 3 days of intensive testing TL2 in 8.6 here are my impressions.

First of all, TL2 works under 8.6. My initial problems (not able to start it, freezing at the beginning) could be fixed by re-installing the .NET framework again (Thanks to Aevitas for the tip!).
Of course, since TL2 is beta, it is not free from flaws and bugs.

Here are the ones I am mostly concerned with at the moment:

- After making changes in TL2 I have to restart both, WOT and TL2 to actually make the bot work. Otherwise it will just stand still or freeze.
- I often have to start TL2 several times to make it work. Often the program just freezes when I click the "start" button.
- Whereas I can manually interfere in WOT while the bot runs, I rarely can actually "stop" the bot and just click "start" again. The bot won't move anymore. I have to restart the whole thing.
- There are several route problems on maps (Lakeville, Bay) where the bot just maneuvers the tank against the same wall ovr and over again and stays there for the rest of the match. Pretty revealing behavior to other players.
- Bot changes targets without any sense (like shooting one target 3 times and instead of killing it off, switches to next target, simply because it appears at the horizon).
- Sometimes the bot does not care to aim properly and just fires away at long range without waiting to focus. Which would be cool in close combat, where it sometimes rather aims even though it is not really necessary.
- ...

to be continued.

Looking forward to further improvements!
Best Borandriel

 

[Aevitas]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll take a moment to answer your questions and elaborate on what we're working on currently seeing you took the time to provide us with feedback as well.

We're currently investigating a handful of those issues, mainly the map issues with the bot running into ledges and walls - those should be fixed within the hour but will require a couple of server restarts probably.

On top of that we're currently looking into these weird aiming issues where sometimes the bot just takes two seconds flat to actually take aim at something it should've been aiming at already, as well as the bot sometimes not firing at all when the gun is reloaded and the aiming conditions for precision are met. The thing is that we check for a certain radius on the aiming reticule before we fire. At close range this is pretty accurate, as the reticule will cover most of the enemy tank and will almost always his properly. At range, the reticule is still within the tolerance range, but due to inaccuracy of the gun and the distance factor, the chance of actually hitting something is a lot less. It's partially how the game works, as well as the fact that we don't calculate distance properly in the aiming reticule tolerance formula. I'll be looking to make distance a factor in deciding when to fire.

As for your aiming issues, we use a formula to determine which target is the most valuable out of a selection of vehicles. The formula roughly takes distance, tier, health, health remaining and a couple of other things into account in order to pick the "best" targets. Sometimes that'll change, for example when a very low health target or a lower tier tank comes into view while we were firing at another target; the bot will switch to that one if it weighs better. If we were to enable debug logging in TankLeader, it'd look something like this roughly:

[18:46:11.340 D] [DefaultTargeting] Weighted playerXXX with 4696.09390258789.

It'll calculate that score for every tank it can fire at, and it'll pick the highest scoring one to kill.

The issues with not being able to restart the bot properly are known too; it's down to an exception that's being thrown when the bot gets aborted while it's in the middle of something; again something I'll need to look into and will probably have fixed soonish.

Again, thanks for taking the time to provide us with your feedback and findings, and I hope I've been able to answer your questions sufficiently. If you have any more, just leave a reply here and I'll get back to you.