Posts made by UnknownUser

Properties of each of the structures clearly highlight the semantics of the work of this structure. If some structure works with energy only, adding a `store` property containing the sole `energy` property and incapable of containing any other properties would confuse the API user. This structure just needs energy to work, it has no “storage” to store anything, it’s just an energy device. So this API expresses structure functions in a more consistent and clear way. As for the labs, they can’t contain more than one type of minerals, and this also should be evident from the API.

You just shouldn’t interpret different structures in the same way as you work with their objects. Especially because they should be handled differently from the gameplay viewpoint.

Downgrading controllers was introduced in order that the players who left the game for good would not occupy a place in the game world. If downgrading controllers in inactive rooms is disabled, very soon there won’t be any rooms for new players.

We are investigating possible reasons of this malfunction. Please report any new incidents of this kind in this thread: http://screeps.com/forum/topic/1226/Account-Breached

We are investigating possible reasons of this malfunction. Please report any new incidents of this kind in this thread.

In choosing areas for creating a novice area of this type we consider two facts: 

1. The energy harvested for the last 24 hours. If someone uses the room to mine resources on a regular basis, it would hardly be included into the novice area.
2. Reserved rooms are also excluded. In the nearest future, we’ll make it easy to reserve neighboring rooms without great costs. Do it to mark your territory.

All the rest of the rooms may be converted into novice area at any time since they are considered no one’s. We plan to continue using this tactics to avoid over-expanding the world map as there are pretty much vacant space in inner sectors.

While we indeed speak to some companies in this field, I want to point out that Screeps is not an education platform but an entertainment for already established programmers. We have never had, and we will not have any plans to add any education mechanisms for beginners, be it JavaScript or programming in general. Instead, we provide an interesting experience for application of your programming skills. It could motivate beginners in some way, but still it’s more of interest to mature programmers. Screeps and projects like Khan Academy have very different audiences.

As for the achievements, yes, we do have such plans.

Hi Dave, thanks for your feedback! We would certainly be happy if someone like Google funded our hosting so that all players could play for free, but unfortunately, we don’t have such resources at this time. It’s pretty expensive now to maintain hosting for continuous execution of all the players’ scripts, this is why we ask the players themselves to compensate for the CPU they spend. Anyhow, this is the sense of any MMO game.

As for the equal limits for all, please check this article where we explain in detail why this approach doesn't work in an open world game.

The error is fixed. However, please note that the visual effect of red highlighting of the structures will be updated only upon page reload or re-entering the room.

Power creeps won’t have body parts like regular creeps. Instead, they will get special skills called Powers. These Powers will be passive (hit points amount, carry capacity, passive bonuses to surrounding creeps) as well as active to be used via creep functions. New Powers activation and their levelling-up will be separate for each individual power creep. And yes, it will take a huge amount of power resources, as well as creating a new power creep.

Unfortunately no. We plan to open-source the game engine itself, but not site components. However, some interface customization options may appear in future.

Certainly, why not? We are eager to see what it will end up with. Moreover, we plan to expand our public documented Web API and introduce API keys for better traffic control which could be useful in your initiative too.

We want to take some time to watch how the things develop after we deployed new features from the PTR and launched power hunting. We expect that after RCL 8, the focus in energy spending will shift from controller upgrading to power processing.

My login with username/password continues to fail with the credentials used when creating the account. I managed to complete the tutorial on my 3rd try last night.

As I said, registration did not work for some time. It’s likely that your account was just not created. Please register it again. In case of further problems please submit a request. We cannot provide support in such confidential matters on a public forum.

The tutorial has one issue currently. It’s not a bug, but a small disadvantage. It’s likely that you zoomed in the game field and walked through the tutorial viewing only the central part of a room. However, after the building road step, the next move is fighting an opponent in the upper part of the room and the tip is shown exactly there (at the exit point). To see it, just zoom out the map and move your screen up the room.

I agree that this not very evident. We plan to fix it very soon.

As for the registration, we had server issues a couple of days ago, and you might be attempting to sign up right then. Now everything works well.

I want to underscore that the game has dozens of active players with successfully working scripts, and many people successfully complete the tutorial each day. If you experience any individual problems, please feel free to submit a request, we’ll do our best to address it ASAP.

Also please note that many errors reported on this forum have roots in syntax and other errors in the players’ scripts rather than the Screeps code. Unfortunately, we can’t provide full support in all such cases, but it’s exactly what the community is for.

1. Viewing the world for anonymous users was restricted deliberately in order to avoid possible abuse of uncontrolled automatic monitoring of game data by unknown persons through an anonymous web sockets connection. This could create too much load on our front-end server. Accessing the game, including view of the game world, usually requires registration in online games.

2. Yes, we plan to add this capability.

Yes, it will be considered abuse. The purpose of the Twitter Promo is encouraging users that benefit the project. Informing about the game the players who already play it is hardly beneficial.

We consider a Trial access to the game sometime in the future. But now there is no such option.

I’m unaware of any methods of disabling garbage collection during execution of a specific code fragment (if you know them, please share). You can manually execute only non-incremental major GC runs that take very long time, and if you run them after each player script is over, it can easily make ticks 2 times slower and even more.

Besides, another problem apart from the GC is runtime code optimizations that the V8 executes when analyzing code. They are very dependent on usage patterns that can vary from tick to tick, and various optimizations can behave differently.

As for the API methods relating to CPU controlling – yes, we consider adding them in the future.

The periodic CPU spikes are unlikely to combat within the current infrastructure built on JavaScript and Node.js. It’s worth remembering that JavaScript is an interpreted script language which has its limitations. It would be possible to achieve the consistent CPU usage only when all the players wrote their scripts in bytecode (or a language close to it) and the costs were measured in executed processor instructions. But in the case of a high-level interpreted language, there are multiple factors that create a considerable level of uncertainty.

However, it is exactly in order to soften the gameplay consequences that we introduced the cumulative CPU bucket and the capability to regularly use resources exceeding your limit. Thanks to it, the periodic spikes are offset in the long-term.

In any case, we will certainly keep improving our server script engine.

HI! If the controller had an unfinished progress by this moment, this is not a bug but an intended behaviour. The progress is saved after the level downgrade, hence it might be enough for a single run of upgrageController to upgrade the level back.

Yes, the Controller Level indeed decreased, and the spawn got deactivated. The absense of the returned code ERR_RCL_NOT_ENOUGH was a bug. We fixed it, thanks for your report.