Introduced new room visuals mechanics. They provide a way to show any visual debug info in your rooms. You can use the RoomVisual object to draw simple shapes in the room that are visible only to you. Learn more in the RoomVisual object documentation.

Tell us what do you think about these upcoming changes in the comments below!

There's definitely a lot of uses for it, especially for visualizing data we've stored. That'll go along way to help with debugging.

Took about a minute or two to figure out and get working. Kudos for keeping it simple!

Syncaidius, glad to hear that! By the way, it is easier to do that using the built-in Room.visualproperty:

for(let rn in Game.rooms) {
  for(let i=0; i<10; i++) {
    Game.rooms[rn].visual.circle(10+i, 15, {fill: '#00ffff'});
  }
}

 EDIT: Knocked up a quick (fake) wall planner with visuals:

module.exports.loop = function () {
    let fakeWallBoxSize = 20;
    let inc = fakeWallBoxSize - 1;
    let startPos = {x: 10, y: 10};
    let endPos = {x: startPos.x + fakeWallBoxSize, y: startPos.y + fakeWallBoxSize};
    
    // Draw a rectangle made of dots. Fake plan of some walls just for testing!
    for(let rn in Game.rooms){
        let room = Game.rooms[rn];
        
        // Left-Right
        for(let x = startPos.x; x < endPos.x; x += inc){
            for(let y = startPos.y; y < endPos.y; y++){
                let tileStuff = room.lookForAt(LOOK_TERRAIN, x,y);
                if(tileStuff[0] == "wall")
                    continue;
                room.visual.circle(x, y, {fill: "#00FFFF"});
            }
        }
        
        // Top-Bottom
        for(let y = startPos.y; y < endPos.y; y += inc){
            for(let x = startPos.x; x < endPos.x; x++){
                let tileStuff = room.lookForAt(LOOK_TERRAIN, x,y);
                if(tileStuff[0] == "wall")
                    continue;
                room.visual.circle(x, y, {fill: "#00FFFF"});
            }
        }
    }
}

I've also left you a comment at the commit regarding the choice of design, would be great if you could answer my question here or directly in GitHub.

From a user's view it would also be great if we can get a variable for currently viewed rooms (VIEWED_ROOMS or Game.viewedRooms), so we only generate Visuals for rooms we're actively watching. Would this be possible to implement at all?

This looks great and we’re already actively discussing in slack on how we are going to use this addition. May I ask what made you decide to attach the functions (addVisual, getVisualSize and cleanVisual) to console instead of RoomVisual (the constructor, not the prototype)?

It was done due to internal mechanics, since console object is shared between runner and runtime spaces, but RoomVisual is only visible to the runtime space.

From a user’s view it would also be great if we can get a variable for currently viewed rooms (VIEWED_ROOMS or Game.viewedRooms), so we only generate Visuals for rooms we’re actively watching. Would this be possible to implement at all?

I can’t see any viable way to implement this right now.

I arguably don't know enough about how the different processes interact with each other and which context objects they share yet.
If it's possible I'd prefer the functions to be removed from console, so they can be implemented at a cleaner place (Game.visual(s) comes to my mind), before people start using that in their code.

@Artem Why the limit on 20 rooms?

Otherwise you could create a RoomVisual for every single room in the world, post hundreds of visuals to it and crash the server.

Wouldn't we get an out of memory before that? (created one of those once, sorry)

Could we tie this to GCL? I'd love to have my home rooms visualized when I'm online without having to alter my memory:

Memory.enabledVisuals = {};
Memory.enabledVisuals["E5N7"] = true;
Memory.enabledVisuals["W3N9"] = true;
Memory.enabledVisuals["E3N8"] = true;

This way we won't have to override the visuals methods to "mock" or "ignore" those visuals. Math.ceil(GCL * 1.5) seems like enough, with a base of 20.

EDIT: @Artem but that's just as good.

Client side

https://github.com/Esryok/screeps-browser-ext/blob/master/visible-room-tracker.user.js

Server side

https://github.com/Esryok/screeps-browser-ext/blob/master/agent-modules/VisibleRoomTracker.js