Have you seen the heuristicWeight option?

@robalian said in Season #2 concept:

@systemparadox I don't see how public segments or terminal.send descriptions don't fulfill that role.

Public segments are a pain to work with. You have to constantly poll it instead of receiving an event. There's no way for the other side to know that you got the message unless you setup some sort of acknowledgment system and they also poll you.

If you've got two people closely cooperating you can make it work, but it becomes messy fast if you start to involve more people. Everyone has to parse the entire segment all the time, even if most of it is meant for other people, which is a waste, it's confusing, and there's no privacy - everyone can see everything in the public segment. If you've got a large alliance the best option is to designate some as a "master" to coordinate everything, but then that person has to poll everyone else, and you can only read one at a time so now it's really slow.

It's completely useless for ad-hoc communication. If I want to setup something where my bot will automatically negotiate and provide some service for exchange or fee, I can use controller signs or creep.say to broadcast this and public segments to provide information. The only way someone else can engage with this is to move a creep into my room and use creep.say, which is far too limited.

Descriptions for terminal.send do nothing to help this (as an aside, why can we only add descriptions to terminal.send and not terminal.deal?). Why do I have to waste terminal cooldown time to send a simple message? What if I don't have a terminal, or any resources to send, or I'm busy, you know, using it to actually trade!!? Or you don't have a terminal, or your terminal is full?

Besides, terminal.send isn't even an option in seasonal, as it's disabled between players.

@artch before you do a coop season I think you're really going to need to implement a way for player scripts to send messages to each other directly. The public segment is ok for alliances, but it's no good for more ad-hoc interactions, and creep.say() is far too limited for this purpose.

Edit: "public segment", not interShardSegment!

@artch please can we make this a priority to implement before season 2?

They previously shrank shard0 to speed up the tick rate. I seem to recall some players graciously respawned and a few players helped with an attack effort to clear the others.

The current outer rooms are a lot more dense and I don't think it's a high priority at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that they're deliberately avoiding placing respawn zones in the outer areas.

I am sure that the devs would close blocks of outer rooms if they became empty and eventually shrink the shard again. The inactive rooms and all the portals are a horrible mess and it would be really nice to cleanup shard0 and bring it in line with the other shards.

As soon as I get some decent combat code I'm going on a crusade!

One strange thing I noticed is the roads seem to be highlighted. I initially thought it was just because of alpha blending but that doesn't seem to fit as it's exactly the same colour across the different parts of the creep.

I'd argue that incentive is still there, it's just a little harder to make use of.

All you really have to do is make sure that you don't exceed your CPU allocation on the tick you run generatePixel or the following tick where you've got hardly any bucket.

Most optimisations tend to be done by remaining bucket amount, which mostly works ok if like most new players you're well under your CPU allocation on almost every tick. To completely avoid resetting yourself you'll need to do a bit of work to check against Game.cpu.getUsed() as well.

Cleanse the outer rooms!

@tdxtor said in What is up with shard0? The unfairness of slow ticks.:

has a real ego problem and might threaten you just for asking

@tdxtor I share your frustrations but that's unhelpful in the extreme. Knock it off. Let's work to build relations instead of insulting each other.

All of the email notifications from the official server have the subject "Screeps game notifications", which means that GMail groups them all into the same conversation. It would be really helpful if the subject could include the shard name so that I get a different thread for each shard - e.g. "Screeps game notifications (shard1)".

Especially with the seasonal server - notifications from shardSeasonal are really important and urgent to me at the moment, but notifications from the usual MMO shards are not so much.

Even better would be the ability to add our own text to the email subject, but splitting by shard is the most urgent requirement.