Has anyone got the Gold level environment working when using perl? So far I seem to get a lot of sync issues, like:
The game environment does not detect a pod passing over a checkpoint.
I get multiple inputs for the pods, sometimes I get 2 lines per cycle of the game loop (normal, one for each pod), sometimes 3, or 4 or even more, like the environment is lagging behind and running multiple passes in one cycle of the game loop.
The game environment seems to drop sync to the output, so pods get multiple inputs like it is still seeing the input from the last cycle of the game loop, likely the same issue as #2.
well, as ever after posting I found the problem, during input debugging I had introduced and off by one error, and the instructions for the gold league are vague, all pods must pass through each cp in turn, it is only on the first reaching the goal on the last lap that the game ends, not that only one pod needs to pass through each cp in turn.
Why was this game so popular? When I look at the leaderboards, there were over 5,000 competitors for Coders Strike Back, but most of the other contests only have a few hundred.
I did. As I didn’t bother to look previous answers. But now I have done and already searched. So, I would like to thank your 9 days ago answer…
And am sorry I couldn’t come 9 days ago…
I just started (got to Wood League 2), and I’m rather confused about what the target location which I specify in the output actually does; how it’s used to calculate what the pod does next, and how it’s affected by the physics; what the images of the pod race actually represent.
Some plausible explanations that come to mind:
a) the thrust I provide is applied directly toward the target (but there’s inertia from my previous speed, and that’s why the pod ‘overshoots’);
b) the thrust is applied in a direction that gets the pod closer to going toward the target, but there is some maximal amount of turning the pod can do in a turn, which no one told me about (and there’s probably still also inertia)
c) there’s some more complex function that calculates the direction of the thrust based on my desired target
I suspect it’s b), and the next level will tell me how it actually works, but it’s a bit frustrating to have to guess. There’s tons of text in the problem spec anyway, why not throw in the actual workings of the pod somewhere?