Live data from Hacker News

Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers

screeps.com

71–80 of 83 posts

Re: Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers

#72
post #54

I hope this allows children to play as well. For example, javascript battle does not, as far as I can tell, because it requires a GitHub account which requires being 13. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I'm sure you realise that you can lie about your kids' age on the Internet. I could understand if what you're after is a way to block chat or something like that but ticking a box is not a barrier to entry.

Re: Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers

#73

would love to know how you sandbox and isolate the user-uploaded JS that runs serverside. how do you manage to do that safely? how protected is it against malicious js?

Every user script is run in isolated nodejs forked process with disabled global vars and with a limit for CPU time and memory used.

Re: Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers

#74
post #69

I love that you are working on this and hope for great success. I have doubts though. I worked on http://www.globulation2.org which also has some higher level of command interaction. "No micro management" is one of its core ideas. While I love it, I guess people just don't get hooked that much to it than to those other games that mainly live from your click rate or your repeated attention. I also worked for 2.5a at T…

The good thing about Screeps is that online users counter means nothing here. You could build a large empire with a complex network of roads, sourcing, mining, manufacturing, border defense which would live on its own, while you would occasionally drop in from time to time just to check the situation and polish your scripts, if needed.

Well, a game that only occasionally gets your attention is kind of less fun than one that gets your every day every hour attention, all other aspects aside.

If you do this for profit, you will not run a game that gets the user's attention only once a year no matter how much joy this user draws from knowing that he will get a mail if his tribe needs him.

Re: Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers

#76

Related, but with spaceships and written entirely in Postgres: https://schemaverse.com

are scalar functions able to update data in tables in Postgres? "SELECT CONVERT_RESOURCE('MONEY',balance) as Converted FROM my_player" seems to have actually updated the value in the table.

Re: Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers

#77
This looks awesome. Being able to program your own civilization without doing all the time-consuming micro-management is a wonderful idea. Almost every multiplayer game in this genre just costs a lot of time (for most games you have to log on every day or so because then certain actions are completed), and I always wanted to be it more strategical while not sacrifiying the possibilites that each "creature" has.

Some people point out that code sharing might be a problem, but I don't think it is. People have to adapt the code to their own environment and as the creator of this game pointed out [1] AI's will have to be efficient to not exceed resources. That will also limit the possibilities of just pasting some nice scripts.

I hope this game will be as awesome as it looks like and I'm excited to try it out!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600284

Re: Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers

#79
post #72
post #54

I hope this allows children to play as well. For example, javascript battle does not, as far as I can tell, because it requires a GitHub account which requires being 13. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I'm sure you realise that you can lie about your kids' age on the Internet. I could understand if what you're after is a way to block chat or something like that but ticking a box is not a barrier to entry.

It is a little different if you are going to advertise this to students in a school who can only take advantage of it by breaking the law.

Re: Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers

#80

The problem with games like this is that players can share code. Decent scripts will be available for everything which takes some of the fun out of the game and makes it less fair to people who do it by themselves.

Well, maybe - people are gonna want to win, right? I don't see how this is much different to any game where players can share strategies and tips.

When you share strategies, you still have to manually execute them. Not just copy and paste them into a bot and have it play the game by itself with no interaction.

What fun is a game about coding if you don't actually have to do any coding?

Post reply on HN