Posts made by artch

@mr_zgot

We are going to test this new Discord server and its custom functionality with a limited number of early adopters during some short period of time, and then launch it for public in a week or so.

Hello everyone! We are happy to announce that we are going to migrate our official chat platform from Slack to Discord!

This is a quite big change for everyone, both community and us, and we want to explain the reasons behind this.

Discord is community oriented. After all these years with Slack we have clearly seen that communities are not their priority. Slack is a business app for teams, and it severely lacks many features like persistent chat history or moderation tools. Discord, in contrast, is designed from scratch for communities. They even have the Partner Program for best communities, and we hope to achieve this level with your support.

Screeps franchise now consists of two games. Arena is under active development right now, and this will be the second game in our franchise. However, we still want to have one community of Screeps players that includes both games. A new player should become a part of this community whatever game they play, and interact with players from the other game. And dedicating just one channel for Arena is not very fair, we love this game very much and want to give more living space to it. Discord has many features to create a complex and powerful structure and navigate users to correct places that would allow to cover both games and not split the community into two parts.

Discord has in-game integration features. With the Rich Presence API it is possible to show your in-game status in Discord. It could show what game you are playing and what part of the game is active right now (for example, which arena). It also allows to create interactive features such as share, invite, or observe games. With Arena all these features will be in high demand and seem perfectly logical, and Slack does not support any of it.

UPD The permanent invitation link to the Discord server: https://discord.gg/RjSS5fQuFx

Welcome!

Closed Alpha has started!

https://screeps.com/forum/topic/3173/arena-closed-alpha-has-started

We have just launched the Closed Alpha stage of the Screeps Arena project! All Closed Alpha owners should be able to download the game and start playing immediately. There is a private discussion forum on Steam aimed especially at the game owners where you can participate. If you are an owner, start with reading this post:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1137320/discussions/2/3132793555949735254/

If you are not, you can join our Closed Alpha by using Access Keys. Welcome!

We're almost done with the playable alpha of Screeps Arena. More news soon!

As much as that saddens me, I must admit we have failed our timeframe Q1 2021 for alpha. Sorry folks. But we are working really hard on this. We have been doing good progress on every aspect of the development: UI/UX design, frontend, backend, and game engine. We are doing our best to show you the first playable prototype as soon as it's ready.

Here is just a video of a real battle on a very simple arena 13 vs 13 creeps. The blue player wins in 467 ticks. This game has been processed in 13.2 seconds, it gives us 35 ticks per second here.

Season #2 spawning starts on February 15. The season start is March 1. Get prepared!

We will announce detailed rules and release the documentation on February 15.

@w4rl0ck No ETA yet. We are doing our best!

@w4rl0ck You can do non-rating games, but you cannot choose opponents unless it's your friend that accepts an invitation.

@tehfiend No, I don't think so. We would like to have real gaming experience instead of test-driven development and hardcoding against specific conditions and opponents. You will be able to repeat the previous game, but only once.

@gravencrown There will be no "local" execution of arena code at all. It doesn't make much sense to bother with it in the arena setting. You will be able to run matches that last a few minutes (or even seconds) and have all debug info you need.

@w4rl0ck Room visuals are of course supported.

@doctorcat92 Unfortunately, such ideas are more like separate mini-games that would require way more development time than we can afford within the current budget. The Season World is meant to be just a separate world with GCL 0 every time and a pinch of new mechanics just to give it a unique flavor. For something completely different and new, I would recommend to wait for Arena.

@tehfiend This is a great idea, we will definitely consider it.

@w4rl0ck You will be able to watch console logs during the match in real time, and download them later too. However, you cannot change anything during the match, so small iterations are not possible indeed.

@w4rl0ck No. But you will be able to run non-rating games to test your code.

@tehfiend No plans to use built-in lodash at all You can import your version at your own convenience.

@thmsn During the alpha and the first season it will be full vision, but we will experiment on it later.

@qzarstb said in Season #2 concept:

@artch Chronicle would still show total score (but perhaps periodically cached values in stead of real-time). The type-specific amounts could be shown when you select the deposit structure.

We cannot display properties of a player in the info panel of an object. Actually, we don't have a place in the UI to display these separate score, it would be accessible only through the API (like Game.symbols).

Sharing score with room owner/depositor does not fully prevent in-alliance boosting but it would at least be limited. The "boosted" player would only get half the score from everything he deposits in rooms owned by his alliance mates. This would also result in the small players getting score on the board if an aggressive neighbour forces them to give their score (like what smaykit and I have this season).

What about scoring in my own rooms?

@qzarstb said in Season #2 concept:

If you keep the score separately for each type, you could sort them by value DESC. Each index would increase the multiplier to reward having score equally in as much as types possible. Example: Player AggressiveNoobSlayer wipes everyone and gets 1k score op type A. His score is 1000. Player FriendlyNeighbour works together and gets 500 A, 250 B, 150 C and 100 D : 500 * 1 + 250 * 2 + 150 * 3 + 4 * 100 = 1850.

So this is only the final result, but how do we display the ranking during the season? We somehow should display score for every symbol then.

Have you considered sharing the score between the room owner and player that turns it in? This would prevent an alliance boosting a single player which is the biggest concern with enforcing team play IMO.

How exactly would it prevent that?

Please don't forget about the players which actually want to see FFA gameplay, maybe alternating the seasons with FFA and teams?

Absolutely. We have just started to experiment with different ideas, and future seasons will introduce more such experiments. For example, we might want to try some global co-op mechanic in Season #3.