Introducing Competitive Multiplayer Programming | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Competitive Multiplayer Programming

blog.codecombat.com

58 pointsschmatz26 comments

This is awesome. hey @schmatz since I see your reading this. See if you guys can figure out a way to make it persistent and Massively Multiplayer. I want to write a program to defend my tower while I am at work, then hop on at night and tell my minions to attack someone else.

The Schemaverse (http://schemaverse.com) is massive multiplayer game that you play through programming, although the gameplay is no longer persistent and is now played in one day rounds. I would love to make a better persistent version one day but it needs a lot of hardware to support most users complete lack of optimization (or deliberate resource hogging attacks).

Schemaverse isn't nearly as polished as this is but if you are looking to battle some AI, give it a chance.

Why not hard limit amount of time people's algorithms can spend?

At some point there is so much data available to work with that even nicely optimized queries become too slow. This may have also been a limitation of hardware but either way the game quickly became not fun when it was persistent.

Hi dkhenry,

That would be a really fun game mode! It would require a lot of thinking about game mechanics and the technical challenges involved, but it's definitely possible, but probably not in the immediate future. I think if we implemented features like a resource system and figured out how to make the game performant, a persistent MMO would be really entertaining, something like coding the AI to a long-running Starcraft game.

Yeah, it's going to be awesome when we can do this: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Summer-Project...

It'll be hard, but not as hard as what we've already done with sandboxing and live-coding user programs, and it'll be truly epic.

Some of the things on that list actually sound like pretty cool challenges.

I'm thinking about the mobile one, for example -- since the commands players use are limited to an API, could a drag-n-drop interface for that API work? Then the only things actually requiring typing would be function arguments.

As a programmer noob, this sounds really cool. Imagine instead of me trying to get more hats in Dota 2, I'm using that same time to instead learn more programming. My motivation would be on overdrive to fight against those who are infinitely better than me.

I'm not a kid anymore, but I want to act like one.

Then get people to pay for "gems" which "speed up" construction.

Then this turns into Clash of Clans. =)

Even better, restrict algorithms to certain amount of CPU time. If you want to do more advanced stuff you can buy more computational time per cycle.

Haha if we wanted to get acquired by EA, I'm pretty sure that's a good strategy...

"CodeCombat II: Dungeon Keeper" LOL

It would be great if you could view the source for the existing functions such as getNearest(), It would save much time reimplementing modified versions of them. For example if I wanted to make a getNearestArcher() method to enable my archers to focus the enemy nearest enemy archer at certain points, I'd take the existing function and just add an additional type check rather than writing my own function from scratch.

These types of games are really interesting and having this one available in the browser gives it a significant advantage over others such as http://aisandbox.com/ which when tried was a little too complicated to setup for casual usage.

Hi @Robadob, great suggestion, thanks for pointing this out! You can actually view the code for these functions in the Level Editor, but obviously it would be much more awesome to have a way to view them from inside the game. We have to strike a balance with the UI to make the learning curve less steep while at the same time providing a wide range of features. I'll bring this up and see what the rest of the team thinks.

(AISandbox was available for download at one time, but it appears they have since gone back into a semi-closed Alpha)

I like this, it reminds me a little bit of corewars. Is there a way to get an enemy's type when programming from the base?

Thanks AUmrysh! If you use `this.getEnemies()` it will return an array of enemy objects, and each one of these objects has a `type` property.

As if programming culture wasn't hyper-macho and competitive enough.

That's a really valid concern, although we were surprised by how many of our users specifically requested this feature set.

Well it looks like a cool concept, and all the best!

Certainly, thanks for checking it out. I hope it goes without saying, but if you find anything that's terribly, broken, or in need of improvement, shoot me a line at george@codecombat.com and we'll get it resolved for you.

Measuring your skills against others and peers could be a great deterrent for impostor syndrome.

Actually, in my opinion, this could actually increase the feeling of impostor syndrome. Because no matter how good you are, there will be many people better than you. So any forum which puts your skills up against a random selection of others skilled in your craft will clearly show how far from the top you are. Unless, of course, you are consistently the best, but then it really stinks for everyone that you beat.

This reads like it has an assumption that people's programming ability is some hidden constant that gets compared. In reality it depends a lot on the task, motivation, current physical health, and mental exhaustion.

This will be a very interesting thing to study. Our leaderboard rankings tend to be extremely fluid, and I wonder what the net effect tends to be in terms of impostor syndrome.

This looks awesome(if a bit slugging right now, probably because of HN).

Reminds a bit of my darker days working with Macroquest.

it'd be cool if you made it so I could customize the characters eyes ... then I could make my guy look like a jawa.

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