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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.