announcements

At long last, clan rank colors can be customized!

There's not much more to say about this one. The same picker that appears in the workshop now appears on the clan permission matrix page, which clan owners can use to modify clan rank colors.

"Fun" fact: This has been a TODO ever since clans first launched during closed beta. Looking back at the legacy announcements page, that was 2011-02-25. Better 4,520 days late than never...? :\

In addition to the main change, a few other small things changed:

• Color picker upgrade: The buttons for changing colors are bigger and easier to see, as is the selected color. Buttons get disabled when you reach the top/bottom ends of allowed colors. Rapid clicking will no longer trigger double-click browser text selection. This applies to both the workshop color picker and clan ranks color pickers.
• Clan owner permission clarity: It's always been the case that the permission matrix row for the clan owner rank cannot be modified (other than the name, and now the color). For instance, you couldn't remove "kick" permission for the clan owner. However, the form didn't make this clear - the fields were modifiable (which maybe even looked a little scary). These checkboxes are now disabled on the clientside to match the serverside behavior.
• Clan non-owner permission clarity: Non-owner clan members now see a warning popup on the permission matrix page informing them they have read-only access, just to make things a little more clear.
• Allowed colors bugfix: Speaking of serverside and clientside differences, I noticed while working on these changes that the serverside was more permissive (allows down to #222222) than clientside (allows down to #444444). This means that a clever player could actually get their username to basically disappear if they were to bypass the clientside check. I didn't query the database to determine whether anyone has actually done this, but in any case, #444444 is now enforced serverside too.
• Default clan rank color changes: I debated whether to even include this one, but in the interest of being complete, I changed the default clan rank colors to be within the color pickers bounds (i.e. greater than #444444). In practice, the changes are impercetible (e.g. #00ff00 -> #44ff44 ...see? you can't tell!)

P.S. Repeating disclaimer: There are more updates to come, so if this one doesn't excite you, hang tight. I know a bunch of different ideas have been brought up in the What do you want to see done for the game? thread (if you haven't shared your own perspective there yet and want to help shape the game's future, go ahead and do so!) and I know that everyone has different opinions on what order they should be worked on in. Rather than try to bundle up changes into larger updates, I'm currently planning to post user-facing ones as they're completed so that new stuff goes out sooner.

Cheers

Woohoo thanks ender :)

This means that a clever player could actually get their username to basically disappear if they were to bypass the clientside check.

Years before I played bots2 I played another text-based game. That game didn't really sanitize any input, I even managed to change my name to an empty string. So when I attacked people they couldn't attack me back, because the link to do that literally didn't exist.

Then I also changed my password to an empty string, which made logging in super easy, but I lost the account soon after that...

Cheers

Ha that's funny Emanuel - IIRC you probably found some similar issues in the early days of bots4!

The only really memorable problem I found in this game was probably the energy underflow, where I managed to consistently coordinate attacks to remove more energy than a bot had, causing them to gain ~4 billion.

Oh, and then there was that thing where I could bypass the captcha by queueing solutions ahead of time, but that wasn't really your fault :P

offtopic, but Emanuel you still have that train simulator around that you had in bots2? It was awesome! Couldn't find it in the utilities/extension thread.

Ah yeah, that energy underflow bug was wacky. I remember doubting that you could consistently recreate the race condition to trigger it, yet somehow you kept doing it and proving me wrong. I think there was a forum thread about it somewhere, but I can't find it now (also off-topic: forum search for old threads seems totally busted now, maybe Google doesn't keep track of our old threads anymore or something...maybe I'll roll my own forum search at some point).

Carnivore: Not sure if it's what you're referring to, but I found this from 2011 that simulates fights against all trainbots and tells you which one gives the best xp/h. It's, uh, a mess, so I'm providing it as-is.

Ah could be it, I can't get it to work though, I recall it being an .exe or something, once you opened it there was a "command prompt" where you set up your bot, picked a trainbot and selected how many trains it should simulate.

Oh, man, that was a looong time ago, 15 years to be exact. You'll find it here.

The other one is a bit more convenient though, it's a userscript for Tampermonkey.

Cheers, that is the one.. those 15+ years went by fast :)

The tampermonkey script is nice, and seems somewhat accurate.. though it makes the Bots4Statistics script not work, it only shows the overview but not trains/figts statistics. :)

That's... a can of worms I'm not willing to open atm :D

(Ender plz fix built-in statistics 'n' stuff)

if i remember correctly it only works with greasemonkey the botstatistic one i could be wrong

Hmm, haven't used Greasemonkey in a long long time, I got the botstatistic to work with microsoft edge, can't remember how.. but now I doesn't work anymore after fiddling with the tampermonkey :P