4. Better API Support for Portals

Better API Support for Portals


  • Portals are becoming more and more important in the world of Screeps. Recently there are 100x more of them on shard0 than there used to be due to empty sectors being wreathed in them. Also in the near future the portals between shards will open.

    The API for portals is under developed. There are several annoying things about them:

    1. No API to find out where they go (but info visible on map. scouting only possible once they stabalize)
    2. No API for figuring out when they stabilize or decay (but info visible on map)

    I think that many players who use portals often are scrapping the map and building their own API for these things. Without the ability to build a jump-map to figure out if X is in range of Y, pathfinding is hard.

    In general I feel like there should be no advantage to scraping screeps.com and all of the information people need to program their AIs to be competitive should be available.

    What do people think?

    Portal wreathing for those who haven't seen it: 0_1504283880065_8a36c242-907b-4157-a4cd-bba3ccb39261-image.png

  • int_max

    No API to find out where they go, No API for figuring out when they stabilize or decay

    http://docs.screeps.com/api/#StructurePortal It shows destination and ticksToDecay

    In general I feel like there should be no advantage to scraping screeps.com and all of the information people need to program their AIs to be competitive should be available.

    There will always be an advantage to scraping screeps.com just as there will always be an advantage to babysitting your AI. Such as: Babysitting: Someone manually chooses orders for market, Scraping: A bot chooses orders for market that AI uses.

  • Culture

    I agree. If it's available in the map (which it is) then it should be available in an API. Attaching it to Game.map seems like the best choice.