

Show HN: Screeps is live at Indiegogo – the world's first MMO for programmers - artchiv
http://igg.me/at/screeps/

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christiangenco
So excited for this. I got really into Starcraft last year, but eventually hit
the APM (actions per minute) wall (good starcraft players can maintain over 10
actions per second for a half hour match). I could hold my own against players
that could make ~1.8 times more actions per minute than I could, but above
that meant there was very little I could do strategically that could displace
the sheer amount of things the other player was accomplishing simultaneously.

I found myself wishing I could just tell my SCVs (an economic unit that spends
the game harvesting minerals, which are used to build everything else) to
scatter away if they saw an enemy attacking them, or to send several units out
in very targeted missions (sneak around the outside, go to this spot, run away
after killing N units or if there's a defensive unit in place, repeat at
another location), or to hit a button and run a preprogrammed set of movements
with my selected units (like scattering marines - basic offensive units very
vulnerable to splash damage - in the presence of banelings - suicidal units
with very high splash damage). Given the advantage of time and automation, I'm
willing to wager I could hold my own against some of the best Starcraft
players in the world.

After playing through the simulation playground, Screeps looks like it
perfectly scratches my itch for a game like this. It remains to be seen, as
was commented in the first announcement Screeps thread, if the "write your
code and forget about it" model will be engaging enough to be entertaining,
but I'm very optimistic.

~~~
hnmcs
Worth mentioning here, again (I learned of it from someone in the Screeps
thread a week ago) is the Brood War API project:

[https://code.google.com/p/bwapi/wiki](https://code.google.com/p/bwapi/wiki)

[http://bwapi.github.io](http://bwapi.github.io)

It let you write C++ to define an AI to control the StarCraft units.
Competitions used to be held.

And of course making something similar for StarCraft 2 would be a harder
project by an order of magnitude, as they discuss in the FAQ.

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mike_hearn
Initial thoughts: very cool, very nice API, nice minimalist graphics, helpful
tutorial. Lots of things I love about screeps so far, having done the absolute
minimum of playing with it.

Things I do not love so much: it appears to have _serious_ performance issues,
at least in simulator mode. Though the UI is responsive, my screeps routinely
stopped for several seconds with a "CPU limit exceeded" message printed to the
console. How is that possible, given that all I was doing is playing the
tutorial and I had only a handful of screeps on screen? I am hoping they
haven't backed themselves into a corner here by building on Javascript and
HTML rather than simply doing a desktop app, because the game mechanics have a
lot of promise. I tried pressing the button to double the game speed but it
didn't seem to help much (I guess that won't function when connected to a
server).

Also, no way to zoom the playing view? The screeps were tiny on my retina
macbook. I could barely see what was happening.

But biggest dislike: Indiegogo to complete the game? I'd have preferred a more
traditional model in which maybe there are fewer features to start with, and
they simply charge me a monthly subscription or a one-off purchase price.
Crowdfunding is best used IMO to develop public goods or public infrastructure
but Screeps is just a plain old proprietary game - nothing wrong with that,
but it seems somehow bogus to expect people to give you the money to finish
it, for free. Moreover it sounds a lot like they haven't actually got the
server side mode working yet. That's fundamental to the whole concept. If they
didn't build it yet, they don't really know if they can - what if the game
just doesn't have good enough performance to work well? I think I'll pass on
this crowdfunding campaign, myself.

Still, I'm looking forward to when they have the problems worked out (if they
can) and I can just pay an honest buck to play. I can imagine it being a huge
time suck :)

~~~
ultimape
Cpu limit likely means you are doing an inf loop, at least in my experience.

Its also possible that their rate limiter is not tied to the performance of
the system, but rather to the wall-clock. Given that the simulator runs in the
local browser, there would be a lot of variability in this kind of thing.

For my ant simulator, I'm focusing heavily on performance testing and
instrumentation for precisely this reason. Having to adapt to various browsers
means you need to have some pretty tight metrics.

Performance in the browser is an interesting problem. I've seen some advanced
libraries rely on Acorn.js - a JavaScript based JavaScript interpreter -
because its faster than some built in JS bits on older browsers in regards to
processing large amounts of JSON. Boggles the mind.

Once this thing gets up and running, I doubt the limitations of the browser's
runtime will be an issue since it will be relying on node.js on some type of
cluster server.

I'd really love to dig into this thing on my own. I hope they get funded and
start hiring.

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icefox
When going through the tutorial my laptop fan spins all the way up and that
tab is using a constant 130%+ of my cpu. If it is something as simple as the
rendering of the spawn pulsating or something it would be very nice if that
could be fixed as that kills my battery and I haven't even gotten to the point
where I implement some logic that could eat up cpu time.

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empressplay
I'll pass -- despite what they claim on the indiegogo page, this IS going to
be a "pay-to-win" game in the sense that in order to compete at higher levels
you have to buy a larger 'data plan'... one can argue semantics, but that's
all they are, semantics.

~~~
artchiv
Even if Screeps had one fixed plan, it would still be possible for anyone to
launch "ally" programs on behalf of several users and thus get the same total
CPU increase.

However, keep in mind, that Screeps is not about having many creeps but about
controlling them properly. More CPU, more rooms, and more creeps often don't
offer any advantage over another player if you can't manage all this.

~~~
ultimape
"in order to compete at higher levels" implies that the we are talking about
the players who can manage all of it. And if people can just 'ally' like you
suggest, then isn't that the same as paying to win?

Its not like this is EVE online where corps paying for newbies to play with
them is fun and part of the gameplay appeal.

~~~
artchiv
And how could you stop them from allying in an open world game?

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mordocai
This looks pretty cool, I went ahead and gave them some money. I'm hoping it
hits the stretch goal and gets the server side open sourced.

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blevinstein
The Indiegogo perks really need to be rethought. I want to contribute, but I
can't imagine I'll need more than the lowest ("30 CPU") level, at least to
start, so I've only pledged $1. I'd much rather pay for 6 months or a year,
and contribute $10 or $20.

~~~
sbhere
Good point; a year would be far better than better "processing".

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joaorj
Wow. First time my mouse lagged on a webpage. My computer is avareage or above
average.

I closed the page immediately as it is unusable.

~~~
artchiv
Please keep in mind that it is still alpha development version. We are still
working on it, please get back soon! :)

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joshuamcneese
awesome, i look forward to coding my invincible army!

