Posts made by ZorzZ

I've had similar issues, on multiple machines and browsers. The simulator just doesn't seem to survive running for an extended period. I didn't check memory usage, but it would always get slower and slower over time.

When a new player spawns but then doesn't do anything, they occupy a possibly in-demand spot on the map, and use up their one-time-only 3-day safety walls. This is bad for everybody.

I'd suggest that if someone spawns for the first time, but then has no creeps or structures for, say, 3 hours, they are cleared from the room, and the remainder of their 3-day safety period is preserved for when they come back and respawn. This would benefit both the inactive new player, and other players in need of a good place to spawn.

To solve the issue of newbie walls suddenly blocking paths in use by other players, what if people were both able and required to place their first spawn in a room along the edge of the playing field, that was NOT yet open to use by other players?

This would both avoid breaking the map for 3 days when a new player spawned in a room needed to get from one area to another, and it would naturally expand the playing field at a rate proportional to new players joining.

Also, new players would probably be less likely to be immediately demolished when their walls came down if they're encouraged to spawn near the edges of the map.

I think in W9N4 it was that they just happened to be passing through, and got upset when they saw your stuff in there. I believe I now have it set to ignore your creeps and structures in W9N4. Please do maintain your controller there, to avoid a newbie walling it off.

If you will stop killing my spawns in W8N3, I will add it to the list, to allow you safe passage through there.

Is it sending dudes down there that are attacking you? Right now I just see one lost guy that's supposed to be killing keepers, I don't know how he wandered down there but he shouldn't bother you. Sorry, I haven't had much time to pay attention since the weekend.

@GrandonBroseph, sounds good. I may need to make some program adjustments to allow you safe passage through W9N5. Maybe we should request a feature to whilelist another player to pass your ramparts.

Will you accept a truce and peaceably share the resources in W9N4 so that we can both stop wasting energy on this pointless hostility? I had no desire to interfere with you.

@GrandonBroseph I completely agree that everything that we can do as human controllers, our Screeps AI ought to be able to do -- including looking at map tiles we don't have a creep on, placing an initial spawn, and reinforcing spawns. The current system rewards those who babysit and penalizes those who code strategy.

To think that nobody will use extra accounts to abuse the system is unrealistic; there have already been multiple complaints about it happening. The system has to be built so as not to reward abuse.

I've seen this issue as well -- and it's a pain, because if you break out, you presumably also want your creeps to be able to re-enter, but instead they are stranded in the new room.

I agree about the issues raised around newbie rooms blocking paths -- sometimes this can turn a 5-room path into a 30-room path, causing massive problems (this in fact I believe was responsible for the performance issue in my code that caused my empire to collapse when I was off doing other things for a week earlier this month). I haven't had it used maliciously against me AFAIK, but I certainly see the potential for abuse.

I wonder if one option might be to cause newbie walls to instead teleport you across the room to the opposite exit (or another exit, if no opposite exit). Could be confusing to code assuming the grid, but since you're kind of a slave to findRoute anyway with the lack of any map introspection methods...

It would be nice if in survival mode, when you create a controller, it belongs automatically to player 1, and you can increase/decrease its level with button click like in custom mode.

I'm experiencing a likely related problem in W6N3 where findPath tries to route me through constructed walls when my controller level is only 1. Interestingly, it worked fine until I claimed the controller.

This would be a cool addition. Taking it a step further, there could be permanent but capturable defensive installations, as well.

nugarin, I notice in your example that you avoid lookForAtArea because of it being buggy, which I had also experienced -- does anyone know if those bugs have been fixed yet?

Wow, OK, yeah, doing lookForAtArea('terrain', 0,0,49,49) is super fast. Even lookAt for the whole room is much faster than I expected. Thanks!

I'm curious to hear from other players, do you just lookAt the whole room at the beginning vs. using various individual look/find calls?

If true, this is awesome! I went through all manner of contortions to try to keep everyone off construction sites while they were being built. I guess I assumed you can't build if there's someone standing there, maybe I never really tested that...doh! Anyway, either allowing building on top of a creep or preventing a creep from being there both seem better than what I thought was happening before.

I actually do store the result for cells which have been previously requested. Doing it for every cell of every room would be a lot -- 2500 cells per room, times 10 rooms..I'd have to write a procedure for spreading the init out over many ticks, because I wouldn't be able to do even one room in one tick..and then pack it into a really efficient storage format, one byte per cell max. It's all doable, but seems like an unnecessary pain in the butt. The goal is for this to be fun, right?

It would be nice if there was a fast way to determine if a room position was unoccupied (available to be moved onto). Room.lookAt() is really slow, and even just Room.lookForAt('terrain') to determine if a wall is present is too slow to use at scale for pathfinding routes even a single move long.

I assume you must have some accelerated backend way of doing this withing findPath, if so it would be awesome to expose that to the API.

If I test with this very simple script:

Game.creeps.Alice.move(TOP);
console.log("foo");
while (true) {}

It works maybe 90% of the time, but on some ticks I won't see "foo" on the console and Alice won't move. It seems to be very random when it does and doesn't work, I can't find any simple changes that appear to influence it.

With my actual full script running, I think it works much less than 90% of the time, but it's hard to measure.

I've wanted this too!!! I assume it's a gameplay balance decision, but if it's just an oversight, it would be awesome to be able to do this.

Game.rooms[pos.roomName].lookForAt('terrain', pos.x, pos.y)