Screeps – Sandbox MMO strategy game for programmers | Hacker News Reader

Screeps – Sandbox MMO strategy game for programmers

screeps.com

31 pointsNhanH12 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8599640

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10022366

I played with this after it was first posted to HN and is quite interesting. But my problem is with the development environment, or lack thereof. I just got tired writing code like that, or nervous that it would lose my code again as it had at one point. GitHub integration seemed to exacerbate my frustration, requiring a commit and push for every minor change and it would only intermittently update to the new code.

Can anyone explain ter work flow that, well, works for this game?

They have an API now that allows you to push code into the game directly. There is also a grunt task for it, so you can just work on your local box and a simple "grunt screeps" will update the code on the server.

Cool, I'll look into that.

They have git integration, thereby giving you the freedom of choosing whatever development environment you desire and it wasn't to your liking? If you don't like your environment, then why not change it?

(I'm aware this sounds a little criticising. I'm a little pissed from another discussion, not from your comment. Please don't read it as that.)

No, my problem with the git integration wasn't the editor or whatever. It was that if I made a change, I had to commit and push it (and I'm new to Javascript, so I make a lot of minor errors) so my time was spent writing "fix typo" commit messages. And even when I did do that, it often wouldn't notice my push for many minutes on the Screeps side of things. I never really figured out how to reliably get it to pick up my changes, so I'd try refreshing the webpage, etc. to get it. I.e. the github integration was too poor to be useful, at least back when I tried it and in the way I was using it.

Plus, there was no way to go the other direction: edit something online and then push to github. You could only go the other way.

It's really freedom, friend. git is the API you'll be expected to speak for the next 20 years or more. Given some time you'll learn the advantage of having commit and push being two commands (and how to combine them if desired).

If you would edit stuff online, you would be forced to use whatever tool the developers of that web interface have chosen for you. And everything being text you can also test stuff yourself before pushing it.

More flexibility requires more power, but it's a game, right? What better opportunity to learn?

In the game, you would be writing script that controls a bunch of units called creeps. Each with limited information about the world (you have access to more, though). If you have ever played all the city building game (Zeus, Pharaoh etc), think of it as a game where you not only build the city, but also have to write code to control the behaviour of all the walkers.

It would be interesting to see a demo of some advanced colonies with an explanation of what is going on. It is not clear from looking at tutorial where to take this.

Please change URL to https://screeps.com/

That's the URL I posted. What did you see?

https://news.ycombinator.com/Https://screeps.com

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