@artch I agree about the isolated shard. I already don't interact meaningfully with 99% of the players on shard0 and shard1, so I don't know that it would really be that different to play on a 100 person shard. The new shard1 => shard0 portals are so dense that I have lost track of who is potentially an inbound threat. It's basically random.

Please share your experience of what you were able to build using WebAssembly.

Sorry, missed the request. Some words about WA experience:

Being inspired by Screeps, I was looking for a scalable, high performance and virtualization-friendly solution for Screeps-like AI environment. The candidates were Lua (provides high performance virtual machine and a simple script language) and WA (extremely high performance + built-in virtualization by design). Well, Python should be mentioned here: it's very difficult to build a bulletproof VM for it, and its performance without dirty hacks is really bad. I realized that Lua is not popular enough to be a main language for AI describing and developing, so WA was chosen.

There were several underwater rocks while implementing scalable architecture of shared AI sandboxes:

It was difficult to find a compromise between API flexibility, performance and environment restrictions ("Game map as a shrared mmaped raw memory? Awesome, but memory protection? Map updates? Synchronization?") For now it's still not very comfortable to perform IPC with WA (message queue layer was written as dirty mix of WA API, JS and native C++ -- this layer and its endpoints seems for me overcomplicated, but all the workarounds are using pretty same API calls, and I've found the performance of portable robust solution is not very nice due to tons of unnecessary memory copying). Memory mapping and sharing (mmap or shmem etc.) are sometimes broken due to unexpected Node or WA restrictions. Due to environment restrictions, it's very difficult to debug native modules or write correct test suits. Moreover, I'm not sure about C++11 exception support by WA nowadays. So, it's extremely easy to hang or drop native module... or even write a malicious code due to leaky Node + WA API and permissions vulnerabilities -- it still seems not safe enough.

Because of points mentioned above, I've found WA modules are very useful for "dense" computational (some difficult algorithmic code with few inputs and outputs), but not flexible enough to be a full replacement of JS in most egine's cases despite on performance benefits. For now my project is frozen, but I've got tons of experience, and gonna return to it later with new vision and experience (and may be some followers:).

@artch: Thank you for reply!

It's an option to write critical code natively to increase your script's performance.

Nice idea, imho. Endpoints and synchronization problems are still difficult (see above), but it can really increase performance.

All APIs in the WebAssembly namespace are exposed to the user space in full.

It's a disputable point due to safety problems, but still nice for beginning. Offtop: Screeps community is really very nice here to not to abuse or even looking for vulnerabilities, and report them:)

Actually, WebAssembly object is exposed by default on Node 8.x, so I don't think it is really that breaking.

Oh, it's nice, but I'm mostly about safety underwater rocks (and, as you pointed out, about rewriting critical code).

Experimental WebAssembly support has been enabled just now on the PTR.

@kitkatod I'm also getting strange construction behavior, but only as of the last few hours. Can't remove construction sites with the UI, working with code however.

edit: 3hrs later, remove construction site working with UI.

In my case this is a fresh install and so I haven't ever opened any files inside steam/screeps directories. I also tried to find open files with lsof, I only found handles which steam was holding... I'm trying to wait for the loading screen to finish - whatever it's doing I got a screeps steam client update, so I'll give it a chance to load I also tried to find some useful log files, but didn't find those. I bet there is a way to increase log level, but I don't know how to do it...

Same problem with a container in W1N28 on Shard 1.

Room was reserved at the time of going negative.

I unclaimed an adjacent room about the time it went negative. This is probably coincidental but thought I'd mention it in case they become a thing that needs to be debugged later...

Thanks Dissi, it wasn't a mineral thankfully, but just like 20 road sites I had to walk over manually to disappear them before my guys started building them.

@jeb Looks like it was a Steam issue. The appmanifest file that gets created for installs and updates is missing for Screeps at around the time I performed the update. My guess is that the Steam client retried the download for you sometime later whereas I was way too impatient for it. lol

@dissi-mark

One of the big problems with using the creeps lost statistic is that most of the creeps lost are due to invaders in remote rooms.

I think a much more useful statistic would number of structures destroyed.or damage done to structures

@artch Got it. Thanks!

It's rather annoying, I'm trying to limit my stuff when my bucket gets low but I still end up using 10 ( while limiting to 8 )

That would require a significant additional efforts. Not sure if it worth it.

Pff, you guys make it too complex, just use GitHub and gulp-screeps, done

Changing servers is as easy as flipping config values.