Decorations update



  • @artch said in Decorations update:

    With this launch we announce a time-limited promo: you can get 2,000 pixels for free if you simply click on the button above! This promo will last for 30 days.

    What button? I clicked on the picture and it redirects me to my Screeps inventory with 0 pixels.



  • Ok. I got my free 2000 pixels. I noted my 2 sub tokens are gone, replaced with 120 mini-tokens. There are 2 new methods in Game, "Game.cpu.unlock()" and "Game.cpu.generatePixel()."

    Ok, that's self explanatory. As a grandfathered in Steam sub user, I still have an active sub... it will auto-renew on 8-2-2020 if I do nothing. Ok. Fine. My plan was to use one of my tokens before then, extending it to 10-2, then again before that ran out.

    All very fine and good. Here's my problem:

    I can't tell what my sub status is from the API. Ok... This isn't the worst thing, I could just automatically pop a mini-token once every 24 hours, incrementally extending it even though the cut off is still over a month away, or I could start doing that at a point closer to the date.

    But I have no apparent way to determine what the remaining time is. I can't send myself a message reminding myself to get more time, or that I'm going to run out tomorrow. I don't want to just dump the mini-tokens in, I want to "Ride the buffer" of whatever duration I set, like (If time left < 1 month... pop token.)



  • @zortea This is my fault, had old code that would increase the price too much! Increase in price is due to users, isn't due to devs.

    0_1592582204675_9f0efc37-97bc-407c-b8a2-ca569f053978-image.png

    @Wall_E You need to transfer items in inventory to steam inventory via inventory screen.



  • @smokeman did you see Game.cpu.unlockedTime?

    I think this should give you your remaining time, at least when using CPU unlocks.



  • @likeafox Oh really? Since it doesn't say who is the player dealing the CPU/Subscription order, I assumed it was dealt by the mostly by the highway terminals defined by the devs. OK lets see how the price adjusts over time.



  • @nobodysnightmare That's the time until your CPU fullUnlock RETURNS after it lapses. It's undefined if you either have time, or are subbed.



  • The "Alpha" map being absolute junk aside (very haphazard use of the term Alpha but whatever)

    The floor/wall textures make some rooms literally painful to look at. Everything else is cool and lets the player customize, but the ability to change floor and wall textures doesn't seem like it was very thought out.

    ☝


  • A small suggestion:

    make pixels into 100x or 500x packs in the steam market. Instead of selling one by one, because the minimum price for community transactions is 0.01$.

    👆👎👍


  • Would also love to see my structures in the Choose room dialog, makes it a bit hard to recognize my rooms when its only displaying the terrain in the selection dialog

    0_1592726028654_54c8d0f2-8d67-49d7-81e5-71f1062ebe83-image.png

    👍

  • Dev Team

    We are glad to announce that we analyzed recent pixelization statistics and changed some parameters. As a result, Rarity 5 decorations will now drop much more frequently. Enjoy!


  • Culture

    Awesome! That's a good change. Would it be possible to add a counter of how many items are visible? I can do math but it gets quite old quite quickly:

    0_1593198719326_f06bfef6-5e86-4367-8282-056bd6048f34-image.png

    Something like this

    🤔


  • @o4kapuk For wall/swamp textures can we have it so it can override what is currently in that room.

    Can you guys look in to way to stream line and assist with textures, it's not very easy right now to manage lots of textures.


  • YP

    @o4kapuk said in Decorations update:

    We are glad to announce that we analyzed recent pixelization statistics and changed some parameters. As a result, Rarity 5 decorations will now drop much more frequently. Enjoy!

    After everyone's dumped their initial pixels income.. great.

    I'm sorry but this feature is a dead horse.. the 'decorations' have no context, meaning or value... they're just random (not very good) vector drawings with absolutely zero relation or value to the game in any meaningful way...

    I was hoping we could add at least our own flare, i.e. a number of pixels we earn = LITERALLY a number of pixels we can make a drawing from or something.. not these quite frankly (parden the language) shit vectors...

    it's like someone scanned a book of clipart or something, I don't wanna bag on whoever designed these, but they just feel so completely out of touch with the entire theme of the game?

    Where's the master list of possible image rolls? (so I can at least limit my shit rolls to a theme to limit the shit rolls)

    Where's the chance-to-drop-chart?

    Are these even legal in most places?

    They're basically lootboxes and BAD ones at that... I've yet to find roll a single half-decent image that has ANYTHING to do with screeps...


  • Dev Team

    @subodai Thank you for your feedback! It looks like your point is only about graffiti. Indeed, graffiti is the least valuable decoration type by design. We encourage you to try get other types, such as fully customizable landscapes visible on the world map, creep skins, user badges. And in the near future - structure skins and action animations.



  • Why is it so expensive to restrict to a particular theme? It's 500 pixels for a random decoration, but it's 2000 pixels to limit it to a particular colour scheme. 4 times the price seems rather excessive - it's not like we're any more likely to get rare drops by restricting to particular theme.

    There isn't really a reason for it to be more expensive at all, but if there's going to be an extra cost, it should be like 10% or 20% extra at most, not 300% extra.



  • It's expensive on purpose, it's a design choice to ensure that there are always pixel sinks. If it wasn't extremely hard to get the pixels you want then within a few months the world would be saturated and demand would be tiny. As it is people will always be trying to reroll to get that one thing they want, in the color they want.

    Gives players a market to sell pixels, gives devs a way to earn cash, and helps servers by providing CPU sinks so players have reasons to optimize their code and ways to spend their bucket without additional server strain. Downside is that it sucks as an experience to use, but over time it'll suck less as the world becomes more saturated and demand falls. I hate lootboxes but in this case given there isn't another way to take pixels off the market it makes sense to gouge on creation.



  • Any chance we can get an option to disable display of decorations? It's such a cacophony of colors or otherwise poorly contrasted it hurts function. To each their own really but please don't force me to look at this, my eyes hurt!


  • Dev Team

    @tun9an0 This is indeed an interesting question. We considered such an option, but decided not to implement it. If you don't want to get your eyes hurt in your rooms - just don't use decorations in your rooms, or use those pleasing for your eyes. But if you "visit" someone else's room, than you are supposed to see what the owner want you to see, even it you dislike it. Its their right to have their room look like that.


  • YP

    @artch said in Decorations update:

    @subodai Thank you for your feedback! It looks like your point is only about graffiti. Indeed, graffiti is the least valuable decoration type by design. We encourage you to try get other types, such as fully customizable landscapes visible on the world map, creep skins, user badges. And in the near future - structure skins and action animations.

    You're welcome but you side-stepped a lot of my questions. from my experience of the rolls so far 90% just seems to be "filler". You skipped over legality, chance of drops, the list of what's droppable (this feels like a 100% requirement, otherwise we're literally buying blind, which is unnacceptable).

    I'll just be skipping this feature in it's entirety I think.

    These items being tradeable from a blind lootbox doesn't feel legal in the EU to me at all.


  • Dev Team

    @subodai All images are legally licensed to use for this puprose. Please don't worry about that.

    As to revealing the full list of decorations, chances of drops - I understand that you would like (and even demand) to get this info, but we believe it's more fun if players discover new decorations on their own. It makes it to feel like discovery instead of shopping cart.

    Overall, I'm sorry that you feel so disappointed about this feature. But it's very optional and you can continue playing Screeps without touching decorations if you dislike how they are implemented. We receive a lot of positive feedback about it, so probably it's just not your thing after all.