Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers
screeps.com
screeps.com
Paying per compute time works for businesses looking for flexible cloud solutions, but as an individual this makes playing the game much less fun (because you're constantly paying attention to the cost).
it would also make the game cheaper if you figure out
les[s] computationally intensive algos to win.
While my O(n) solution maybe eloquent, they can afford O(n^n) so provided our _players_ make the same outcome the algorithmic complexity is irrelevant if you can afford it.
The game uses a soft turn based _ticks_ timer. So provided your O(n^n) solution can execute in 1 tick. Their is no difference.
I don't think you're giving your hypothetical shite programmer enough credit here.
Seems to model reality fairly well.
Screeps has a speech API?
It worked on you!
There aren't (yet) any public codebases which have a handle on endgame combat. It's still more or less competitive after 2 months of play.
CPU-Wise, if you pay the compute time is tied to your account level, with a hard-cap if you're level 30 (there are still only a few players that have achieved this, it takes many months)
Any algorithms that players come up with will almost certainly only be useful for playing the game.
In any case, the pricing model has changed and it is $9/month flat rate, so that concern is obsolete now.
This is $84 a year for the high-end subscription, including Steam discounts, which isn't really that much money. I don't know if the game is any good, but if you're the type of person that considers it to be, that is the sort of money that can be well worth playing for the feelings of accomplishment the game provides.
That's why games can have monthly costs that are similar to Netflix, with much less content - Netflix doesn't provide the same sort of sense of accomplishing something. (Let's ignore the fact that nothing in the game world might actually matter - it's the feeling that is important.)
People should be able to price at what they want to, without getting HN flak.
I purchased the game, 2 months of subscription, and have been using ingame-credits to fund my sub for the following 5 months ( I've currently got an additional 4 months of time in tokens that im trading on the market as well )
While it did take some time to get ramped up, and I am in a safe area with my alliance. A player can, with a little market interaction, not pay IRL money for the game. (you will have to survive long enough to get there, expect to get killed off a few times before you figure out defense)
Ever since then, any headline involving EVE player shenanigans and a dollar amount is derived from this one-way exchange rate.
It was a really neat way to learn the language and highlighted the security of the interpreter that they could sandbox your code.
I'm sure there must be precursors to even that, probably written in Smalltalk or Mumps or something.
1) Invest in good art
2) Tell me how long it takes to get up and running. Is there a walkthrough that can get me on the leaderboard in 10min? If so, I want to see it (and I don't want to pay).
With these you can get started grinding and within 30 days if you invest your own time into code you'll more or less have access to endgame strategies (if someone with 6 months on you doens't wipe out yout).
Same with Code Combat and some other coding games.
The API you use at first is quite small, and takes care of some things like path-finding already, so you don't have to re-build that, though you totally can if you want. Heres[1] an example of some logic to get all your creeps mining from their closest source. Not use-able in a real-world script as the actual logic is awful, but the fun comes from figuring out what does work.
You can check out the API here[2]
[1]https://gist.github.com/ggrochow/db8986d2627d02c992f65cc0cce...
[2]http://support.screeps.com/hc/en-us/articles/203084991-API-R...
You can probably get a basic one room AI going in a weekend, and then continue to expand it over time. The great thing about this game is that if you "die" you still have all the progress you've made with your code, so restarting doesn't hurt too much.
With regards to the "ScreepsScript" idea- there definitely is a small amount of that but it's pretty minimal. There is also a huge community on the screeps slack network that makes it a lot easier to get into the game.
Screeps is definitely worth trying, if for no other reason than to learn javascript at a deeper level if you don't use it extensively. I do have a couple of issues though:
The first is that it is quite resource intensive considering its simple 2D visuals, both in the browser and the standalone client. I'm not sure if it is just poor optimization or the javascript runtime but it shouldn't make my machine hot. It'd be nice if this were addressed.
The second issue I have is the workflow, which doesn't lend itself well to source control. The ingame editor works well enough, but its idea of a "branch" is just a named copy of the code directory. I think there is a way to integrate with github but I don't want to upload everything to the cloud just to be able to track changes. It would be nice if this area were looked at and made more flexible so we could use our tools of choice.
So you can work in your favourite environment and just "deploy" the code as normal, or am I missing anything?
The game client is pretty awful performance wise, but they're doing a rewrite that looks like it will be awesome.
ingame live map, sadly requires signup (free account will do): https://screeps.com/a/#!/map
shows alliances (player made, not part of the game, js heavy): http://www.leagueofautomatednations.com/map
another alliance view: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cz1HZrEUcAExwYa.jpg:large
Thoughts?
Thankfully tons of stuff transpiles to JS easily, and off the top of my head, I know theres a python starter somewhere, and im sure you could find some for other languages
I remember hearing about starfighters.io sometime back and putting on my ever-growing tab of "Visit on freetime", but now it's--in all likelihood--gone forever.