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Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

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Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#51

Post by stcredzero »

valarauca1 wrote: post #12
lawless123 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would also make the game cheaper if you figure out less computationally intensive algos to win.

it would also make the game cheaper if you figure out les[s] computationally intensive algos to win. Yes but a player who was an absolute shite programmer could just throw their bank account at the problem. 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_…

While my O(n) solution maybe eloquent

Screeps has a speech API?

Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#53

Post by KirinDave »

stcredzero wrote: post #51
valarauca1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would also make the game cheaper if you figure out les[s] computationally intensive algos to win. Yes but a player who was an absolute shite programmer could just throw their bank account at the problem. 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_…

While my O(n) solution maybe eloquent Screeps has a speech API?

Holy crap if Screeps allows webhooks to generate events to your modules you could easily use api.ai to do just that!

Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#54

Post by snerbles »

ggrochow wrote: post #39
timvdalen wrote: post #2

Really liked playing the beta (or was it alpha?) of this when it came out, but the pricing didn't really make sense for me. 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).

Something worth mentioning, they recently introduced a "Subscription Token" item that you can purchase for real $, and sell on the market ingame for credits. That also means you can essentially purchase game-time for in-game credits 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…

This is the same concept as EVE's PLEX item, which was introduced to combat TOS-violating real money transactions. In-game prices are subject to in-game market fluctuations, which are relatively stable.

Ever since then, any headline involving EVE player shenanigans and a dollar amount is derived from this one-way exchange rate.

Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#55

Post by stcredzero »

KirinDave wrote: post #53
stcredzero wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While my O(n) solution maybe eloquent Screeps has a speech API?

Holy crap if Screeps allows webhooks to generate events to your modules you could easily use api.ai to do just that!

Cool, but my comment was really a veiled correction to the previous comment's English.

Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#56

Post by tedivm »

timvdalen wrote: post #2

Really liked playing the beta (or was it alpha?) of this when it came out, but the pricing didn't really make sense for me. 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).

Yeah you're definitely thinking of the old pricing model, which turned off a lot of people. The new model is a flat per month fee of $8, and you can't spend more money to get more CPU.

Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#57

Post by hoodunit »

KirinDave wrote: post #52

This looks like a very fun opportunity to really bite into PureScript and use it in unusual contexts!

Yes, it's fun. I wrote a wrapper for playing Screeps with PureScript and a blog post about it here: http://blog.ndk.io/purescript-ffi.html.

Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#58

Post by tedivm »

matty22 wrote: post #37

To anyone who plays, what's the ramp up time look like? It seems like such an interesting concept, but I often find that games like this have so much of their own vocabulary that it often doesn't feel like I'm writing JavaScript (or insert language here), it feels like I'm writing ScreepsScript. Same with Code Combat and some other coding games.

I've been playing for over a year now and the ramp up really isn't bad at all- there are a ton of new players starting all the time, and the map continues to expand so new players aren't right up against old ones.

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.

Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#59

Post by tedivm »

libc wrote: post #26

A lot of comments here are focusing on the pricing and ignoring the 'sandbox' part of the game's description. There is a leaderboard you can try to climb but it is reset monthly and isn't really shoved in your face. Beyond that you're free to set whatever goals you want and go about them however you wish, with the principles of other strategy games (harvest resources, build things, attack enemies, etc.) to give you i…

Honestly I don't use the game client at all for coding. In my experience you're better off using a simple grunt task to push code to the server, and otherwise developing locally and keeping everything in git. The in game editor sucks, and you can do some fun post processing things with grunt.

The game client is pretty awful performance wise, but they're doing a rewrite that looks like it will be awesome.

Re: Screeps – An MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers

#60

Post by tedivm »

libc wrote: post #49
NhanH wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have well supported API to push your code into it (alongs with gulp/ grunt package to do so, I think). So you can work in your favourite environment and just "deploy" the code as normal, or am I missing anything?

I admittedly haven't explored it in great detail, but when I've asked on their Slack channel a lot of people seem to just use the ingame tools which are "good enough".

I think there may be a misunderstanding there. The community has built a ton of third party tools ( https://github.com/screepers ) and even has it's own alliance tracking site ( http://www.leagueofautomatednations.com/ ). I can't imagine anyone just using the ingame tools.
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