Ability to display custom info in the creep sidebar
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If I click on a creep, I see something like this appear in the sidebar:
Owner: wtfrank
Name: Inmate-724722-bd2
Position: 29, 17
Hits: 3000 / 3000
Fatigue: 0
Time to live:685
It would be great if I could somehow add information to this list. Examples:
Destination: [room_name]
Target: [enemy structure]
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I've thought about how nice this would be as well. But I couldn't see how to implement it without requiring an intent (the data would need to be stored in the DB). And you'd need to pay that intent each tick for every creep whether the data was used or not.
The other option is less interesting, The sidebar could show the contents of a special section of the creep's memory. Then the client would only grab the memory view while a creep was actively selected. But even then I don't think it would acceptable to have the client poll the creeps memory every tick. That would be too much added server burden. The client stream protocol would have to be updated to for the memory, with special care taken to now allows a user defined structure to over burden the delta calculations.
TL;DR: Unless someone has a really great idea on how to implement this cheaply, I think the ROI is pretty low and the feature will never quite bubble to the top.
An alternative that might work better is to have the client send some info the simulation. Something as simple as Object X is selected or screen position Y was clicked. Then we could do something like what you want with the existing room visuals.