Development update: August 5th
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Hey guys!
Today we're launching development updates thread to improve connectivity between the development team and game community. This is not a replacement for changelogs, major updates, and other things being posted to Screeps blog, this is an additional information source. Development updates supposed to be much shorter than posts in the blog but also come out more often. I'll also post the updates to the #dev-updates slack channel.
This thread is dedicated to updates itselves, please use this thread for discussions. The same is about #dev-updates; please discuss updates in #announcements-any.
Here are the things for the game engine in progress:
- Persistent game object
- Event logs (draft and discussion here: https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2118/draft-room-event-log)
- Power creeps raw object and API (draft and discussion here: https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2233/draft-power-creeps-api)
- Various smaller improvements in the game engine
As for UI, there are also some things in progress, such as:
- Re-designing many game interfaces (visit updated order page to have an idea how it will look like). This is not visual changes only, we also plan add improvements here and there; for example, it's planned to add a list of community driven private servers to the login page of steam client.
- Reworking game map using pixijs to improve the performance of map view
Also, we continue to add NPC events to the game world, the next thing to implement is NPC Strongholds. I'll create a separate post about Strongholds as soon as it's enough details to discuss.
Some features worth separate mentioning despite it's still early concepts; for example, the concept of graffiti - something to add a custom image to a room. Details is being descussed yet; again, I'll create a separate post to discuss it.
We expect to have PTR update later this month. It's hard to say the exact date of the update, and it's also hard to say which features will be stable enough to be included to this update. I'll post another 'development update' once I have more information about it.
Last but not least is about team optimization: some time was spent to create internal tools (primarily, to speed up and achieve more automatization for everyday tasks like world management) which allowed us to save some for implementing features, bugfixes, and reviewing pull requests. These tools will be improved in future to save even more dev time.
