The title pretty much covers it.

I've got an iOS client for Screeps called "Observer" that I work on from time to time as a pet project and a way of playing with new iOS APIs. It was already available on iOS via TestFlight but now it is available on macOS as well.

It isn't perfect and is still a work in progress. The interface could use a lot of changes for the macOS version since it was originally designed just for iOS but I had some requests to make it available on macOS even in its current state since the official client has issues on M1 Macs.

Anyway if you want to help test it, give feedback, or just check it out, you can use this TestFlight invite link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/u4GlOWaL

Feel free to come over to the #ios-observer channel in the Screeps Discord and ping me (@Helam) with questions or requests. Since discord isn't giving channel-specific notifications for large servers anymore I may not see your message in a timely manner if you don't @ me.

Some of the current supported features:

• Combined room/map viewing with map info and map stats
• Public/PTR/Seasonal server support
• Private server support
• Profiles/leaderboards
• Console with HTML and editable command history
• Respawning
• Room Visuals
• Flags / flag interactions (create, edit, delete)
• Create construction sites
• Spawn invaders (and teams of invaders)
• Other manual interactions (suicide creep, destroy structure, safe mode, etc.)
• View list of all active nukes across all shards, with info about estimated time of impact, links to the player who launched it and the player who is targeted. Links to, and previews of, the launching room and the target room, and the ability to schedule an iOS notification to let you know when impact is soon (these notifications aren't super reliable though due to variable tick rates and the nature of estimating the time of impact)

@o4kapuk Awesome, thank you.

I’m panicking a little, so many good memories on that slack! (Even though we can’t go back and read them lol) And it is the main place to connect with the community. It almost feels like the game itself was deleted lol.

I don’t know the reason it happened or if it is recoverable, but if it is not recoverable it might be a good time to consider a different solution (like Discord) so that we can keep chat history.

Slack stopped working for me and I couldn’t get back in. When I go to screeps.slack.com it says the workspace has been deleted? Anybody know anything about this?

@artch said in Game.cpu.generatePixel change:

I still think we need a simple elegant solution here, not a whole lot of new API and inter-tick state data. Currently only two alternatives are on the table: cancelling intents or 10000 CPU cost. Let's discuss them.

If these are the only two options I personally prefer the higher CPU cost.

@artch said in Game.cpu.generatePixel change:

I don't agree this isn't a real coding problem. The limitation is artificial, but so are any other gameplay limitations in the game. This limitation forces you to think what you would like to perform on this tick - game actions or pixel generation. And now the real coding problem is how to decide this. How to predict what is the best tick to call generatePixel. The criteria was very simple before: run it whenever you have spare 5000 CPU. It's just one if condition. Now this decision is a bit more complicated and involves more factors.

This is not like other limitations in the game. Other limitations exist in the game world and the decisions involved are about what your creeps/structures should do in the game world to react to those challenges or limitations in the game world. The whole game is about writing code to make better decisions in the game world.

This limitation or “decision” you want to introduce is very different because it takes you out of the world and you are basically choosing:

1. Play the game this tick / participate in the world this tick
2. Don’t play the game this tick / don’t participate in the world this tick

This is not an interesting choice and it seems to go against the very purpose of the game.

I believe many players have written their code in such a way that something useful is happening EVERY tick. I remember watching one of @Mototroller ’s rooms a long time ago and being so impressed that a remote mining creep showed up and moved into place on the exact tick that the previous creep died. It was beautiful in a way. There are many other types of things that can be optimized in similar ways that I believe many players have worked on. Skipping ticks entirely throws a wrench in all of this.

Choices and limitations are good, but I think it is bad if one of the options in the choice is to stop playing the game entirely for a tick.

Yes we can come up with complicated ways of deciding, but it places unnecessary complications on EVERY other part of your code, and still results in nullifying ALL of your code for a tick to perform one small action.

I agree that more challenge should be introduced for generating pixels, but I wish it was challenge added into the world of the game, not an arbitrary limitation that will take away from other parts of the game.

Make us interact with something in the world to generate them, put them inside walls so we have to tunnel to it, make us cooperate somehow to get them. Give us new things to do in the game world, don’t make everything existing more difficult for this.

Or you could even bring this limitation into the game world and localize it so we generate the pixels in a room, and that room loses all actions, that way it could be used more creatively and without causing headaches for all of your code everywhere.

Not all challenges are fun. This one does not sound fun to me.

@artch sounds great! I have some questions and feedback:

Is the matching system inspired by Gladiabots? Have you played that game? It has a similar system where you play against different versions of AI of other players. I believe they call it a “ghost” of another player. Each ghost has it’s own Elo rating. It seems to work well in that game and I think it will work well here too.

I would like to suggest another feature for Arena that is also in Gladiabots. It is a single-player campaign but the opponents in the campaign would be “ghosts” or “versions” of actual player code that was used in multiplayer (anonymously). (See https://wiki.gladiabots.com/index.php?title=Campaign For some small explanation). The code used in the campaign changes every season so it has replay-ability and adapts to strategies of the players over time.

This was very fun in Gladiabots and I believe it would have a big benefit for Screeps Arena because of this:

I know many people who have tried to play Screeps but want to be perfect or “ready” before they face other players. They spend too much time trying to prepare and sometimes quit before they ever even spawn into the public server.

If there was a campaign similar to Gladiabots where you can face real challenges and progress in difficulty I think it would help retain more players with different play styles and different development styles.

Just an idea, I thought it was brilliant when I learned how Gladiabots is doing this.

I would prefer some other method of limiting it that did not result in a skipped tick. It feels like a breaking change.

Battle in progress? Losing a tick can mean death. Use % on game time to do recurring tasks on an interval? Might get skipped. Optimize your creep size and spawning to arrive just-in-time for when the previous creep would die? Now it won’t get there in time because you might lose some actions along the way.

There are probably several other cases that I cannot think of that might break from this. With this change it seems the best action to prevent breaking is to stop generating pixels completely. I realize the cases I mentioned can be coded around but it seems to be a glitchy requirement to have to consider.

Was able to get this solved thanks to @o4kapuk

So uh.. I still can't do anything. I guess I'll open a support ticket.