I’ve started to measure times as @eulerscheZahl pointed. In battles with “Clyde” I get average times about 5ms and max times about 35ms (this doesn’t include first move which is always about 200ms).
@TwoSteps, what is the timeout for a move in the game?
Response time per turn ≤ 50ms
Response time for the first turn ≤ 1000ms
As written at the bottom of the statement.
Does anyone know how the elo system is supposed to work ? It takes a lot of time to go up ranks, and by the time I’m in the top 20, I barely have any matches left, so I can’t rank up.
The bot is supposed to be a somewhat decent indicator of whether you can pass the league or not, and I pretty much beat the IDE bot 70% of the time.
I think I could still make some improvements, but it does seem like a unnecessary amount of effort just to get out of bronze league.
Is there a reason why the number of matches is limited to 75 of so and not more ? (Could ranking up also be harder later on in the challenge ? I remember getting to gold league on ocean of code with much more rudimentary code while coding much earlier)
I’ve had the same issue recently (since a few days in the challenge).
Here is another sample: timeout on first turn in “last battles” : https://www.codingame.com/replay/464942809
Exact same game replayed in the IDE : https://www.codingame.com/share-replay/464944668
I tried on several of my timeout games from “last battles” and most of the time I can’t reproduce it in the IDE. Only once I reproduced it and I had to fix a bug on this specific configuration.
I’m using scala, wondering if this has something to do with JVM warmup
It happens rather randomly: 4 times on my first 10 matches, then on 18th, 20th, 31, 33, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 69 …
On game 41 I timeout at turn 7 https://www.codingame.com/share-replay/464946378
and I don’t reproduce either in IDE https://www.codingame.com/share-replay/464946930
The Silver boss (Clyde) generated a timeout error.
Replay reference: https://www.codingame.com/replay/464984142
I’ve got the same “timeout” issue for 2/3 days.
I imported some games in the IDE and made some tests. If I print out the input data on the standard error output right after the inputs, I see that the last inputs are missing.
It seems random for me too, it appears like 1 time every 10 games.
Very frustrating !!!
Hello @TwoSteps,
After some investigations, it seems that huge data structures may randomly give timeouts.
I’ve removed such huge data structure from my code, and I don’t get random timeouts anymore.
Hope it would help other players.
Laurent
Thanks for this hint, for a long time I have been getting timing errors and always thought it was my poor code and just left longer in the loop so I don’t get many timeouts, sometimes it appeared I was using more than the available time, and I have just ignored it. This seems to have helped, In Smash the code my bot jumped from 92nd to 39th with just this change, the extra 3-5ms making a big difference.
Can I Still play the game once the competition is over. I would really love to continue as this is really exiting and, I really wish to learn more. unfortunatly I joined late and I couldn’t go beyond Bronze league bcos of time constrains. Could you please help me on how to run the game on my local machine. I just wish to finish the game and compete with the boss.
Game will be released as a multiplayer asap.
@AndroidGoku yes, we’ll release the game soon
@Bernard_Marx in Python, you need to flush the standard error else it stops after reading the inputs
@tyrcho @PawelLabaj I’m sorry, it seems we still have a few issues with JVM-based languages. We’ll look into it
@PumpkinFire After your submit matches, your bot will continue to play against other players who submit so it’s possible to be promoted after the end of your battles.
FYI, we’ve removed a few bots from the top of the leaderboard. They were either:
alt accounts. We decided to keep the main accounts though.
bots who shared the same (or very close) code. We decided to keep only the highest ranked players.
Might be too late for that since it’s out as a multiplayer. But something I felt was lacking from the viewer was an easy way to tell if you were looking at the turn with an input or the “extra turn” of the speeding pacs and it’s important since Pacs don’t have line of sight in the “extra turn”, so watching game, I would often wonder why did my bot behave a certain way while they should have seen the pellets or the enemy pacs, but no since it was the “extra turn”. Not sure what would be the answer to that, but some kind of visual feedback to tell if you are watching the first or second movement of a turn would be useful.
You are late indeed.
or blind apprently 
Was it there all along ?
lol, no way. I didn’t notice this either 
No, that was newly added. Thibaud announced the planned change somewhere after the contest. I can’t find the comment anymore.