Crazy idea:

Make a shard where it is easier to attack than defend and let people who want a more dynamic game spawn there. Could be fun.

Who cares 2GB is nothing.

If any perf work is going to be done, I would focus on the responsiveness of the client, not how many resources it uses.

my 2c

Wouldn't hurt if someone wanted to document Game.map.findRoute a bit more though.

Does it always return a path if one exists?

It would also be cool if PathFinder.search had an option to use findRoute first for broadphase, since the 16 max room limit is low for some searches.

Also it would be helpful if PathFinder.search gave me a reason why my path find fails when it returns an incomplete path. Did it hit maxRooms? maxOps? Are there other reasons it can fail?

It doesn't really help that all the information I need to know to successfully path from any A to any B is strewn across 4 different places:

• Game.map.findRoute (seems to always find the room route from A to B )
• PathFinder.search (works for 98% of A to Bs, but that last 2% is a pain and no help in the docs for that)
• CostMatrix (sometimes breaks the above if you don't know what the defaults are)
• Room.findPath (seems to have 98% overlap with PathFinder.search with some extra options. Is it a functional superset of PathFinder.search? Can't tell. Does it matter which room instance I use? Seems like this wants to be a static method like PathFinder.search, since it's not I'm left wondering how that is going to effect my code)

It seems like all this stuff really wants to be in the same place.

Never mind. Found it here.

http://docs.screeps.com/api/#PathFinder-CostMatrix

The PathFinder.search function hints that there is a default cost matrix used if I don't specify one.

I would like to know what it is.

For instance, does it include my buildings? Creeps?

@gankdalf

I don't understand how this cache works just by looking at it, do you? I don't even understand what "this" is in this context.

@artch Dissi posted a while ago asking about things that are hard when you are starting out playing Screeps. The .find() function is key to doing literally everything and this is the sum total of all the documentation about it:

Yes, I can figure it out for myself with enough time, but if I have to get too into the weeds it starts to feel more like work and less like I'm playing a game. Even just adding some hyperlinks to those FIND_* constants and the possible return types I'm sure would help a lot of people who are trying to get started.

@Gankdalf

Yes, that link goes to the lodash examples for filter, which I have to consult constantly when I'm coding screeps, partly because the 3 provided examples in the wiki don't cover every case.

Having a polymorphic .find() that returns a different type depending on a constant you pass in is very odd (if you program in other languages). It's worse because it does no validation on the input and doesn't give helpful errors when you invoke it incorrectly (it fails silently, which, if you program in other languages is also odd). The article in the wiki doesn't even link to the return types that it can spit out (for example, the Resource object in the case of FIND_DROPPED_RESOURCES). Boo urns.

On top of that, it is fairly opaque to me what, if any, caching .find does and the docs don't talk at all about that. Is it worth putting my own cache in front of it? I have no idea. What kind of .finds are cached or fast? Which ones are slow? I have to imagine that depending on the FIND_CONST you pass in, it is very different.

@artch

Since the invocation required is so idiomatic to javascript/lodash, I'm sure it would help a bunch of players to have a couple more examples of all the ways you can call .find in the docs. I've been playing for two years and I still have to look it up every time and I still have bugs where I use .find + filter incorrectly pretty much constantly.

@gankdalf you know, looking at it again, I'm pretty sure it needs to be

But damn some more examples in the docs would have made this a lot more fun.

@gankdalf it's possible I've just been staring at it too long, but I can't tell why this is an error when there are no dropped resources in the room.

The next line of code prints out [] if you remove the filter.