3. PTR Changelog 2020-06-05: Decorations

PTR Changelog 2020-06-05: Decorations


  • @Smokeman good point about the steam marketplace. I rarely use it and completely forgot about it.

    I'm less sure about steam economics. I'd rather pay the devs $10 for some decoration than pay another player $10 on market place and hope some of that makes it back to the devs. But it's really up to the devs to make sure the steam marketplace transactions pay off.

    1 Reply
  • Dev Team

    Thank you all for excellent feedback with math and everything!

    UPDATE

    We have tweaked some algorithms, formulas, distribution chances, and reset the PTR. All previous decorations have been deleted. Everyone received 20,000 pixels again.

    Restricted by theme pixelization now costs 2,000 pixels.

    Creep decorations are now fully functional and can be activated.

    Rarity is now related to higher configurability of the decoration. For example, more rare landscapes will have an ability to control brightness of various elements, and even set custom colors in the most rare ones. These "rarity features" are now described in the decoration description. Here is the full list:

    Graffiti

    • Rarity 1: None.
    • Rarity 2: Lighting animation
    • Rarity 3: Visible on the world map.
    • Rarity 4: Visible on the world map. Lighting animation.
    • Rarity 5: Choose your own color. Visible on the world map. Lighting animation.

    Wall/floor texture

    • Rarity 3: None.
    • Rarity 4: Controllable brightness.
    • Rarity 5: Choose your own color. Controllable brightness.

    Creep

    • Rarity 4: None / Lighting animation.
    • Rarity 5: Choose your own color. Lighting animation.

    Badge

    • Always rarity 5.
  • Dev Team

    @jerdaz said in PTR Changelog 2020-06-05: Decorations:

    What happens if you get a duplicate decoration? Can you 'auto-dust' all duplicate decorations back to pixels?

    Why would you need that? Several instances of the same decoration is a valid use case too.

  • Dev Team

    @deft-code

    I'm less sure about steam economics. I'd rather pay the devs $10 for some decoration than pay another player $10 on market place and hope some of that makes it back to the devs. But it's really up to the devs to make sure the steam marketplace transactions pay off.

    If you buy a decoration from another player, you can be sure that the devs already received their profit since this decoration is generated either by CPU or via purchasing pixels.

    We are strongly against selling decorations from the official store directly.

  • Dev Team

    Updated rarity features in the top post.


  • How do I get onto the PTR to try it? It says "New accounts are blocked" but that couldn't be literal. I clicked the activate button it said to click, and entered credentials through steam... but was told my account is not synced with PTR.

    1 Reply
  • Dev Team

    @smokeman Please don't use Steam auth on the PTR. Only login/password auth is allowed.

    1 Reply
  • Dev Team

    All active decorations have been deactivated, since we added more brightness controls to some of them. You can reactivate them again.


  • @artch

    "New account registration is disabled on the Public Test Realm server."

    It's going to be difficult to do that. And even then, I would technically have 2 accounts.


  • I was testing the creep decorations yesterday and I find I a bit too static how it is if I got it right. Here is my idea how to make the creep decorations more dynamic and improve the usage of different decorations:

    A decoration should have a name instead of the name regex as it is now. Then it should be possible to add a decoration to a creep by code e.g. creep.setVisual([decorationName]) or something similar. Or maybe just set a value in the creeps memory.

    This would enable us to change the creeps appearance on the fly. For example from the winter theme to the same visual but the fire theme if it is in attack mode or change the visual corresponding to the task the creep is doing.

    This way it would improve the usability of multiple creep visuals and make it more interesting to use them in the first place at the same time.


  • Picking your creeps decoration from Memory isn't a good idea, if other players can see it. Besides the performance nightmare of accessing Memory every tick of every player drawn on the screen, you also have the issue that now there is pathway in the server that allows other players to peek at your memory, don't cross the streams Ray.

    The core idea isn't bad though, something akin to Creep.say that you can set to the id of the decoration you want applied.

    👻
  • Dev Team

    Exposing decorations in the API does not match our design concept. We are not going down that road in any of its form. Decorations is a fully client-side feature.