One Hour One Life News

Another week of glorious bug fixes. The list is still pretty long, but I made a dent in it.

Over the past few weeks, I've been watching the server-wide arcs rise and fall. More recently, the arcs have been getting shorter and shorter. The arc currently ends when there's only one family left, and families have been dying out very quickly.

For example, here's the family population graph of a recent arc:



Total server population is on the Y axis, and each family's portion of that total is represented by how thick their color band is. For example, the forest-green band represents the Kelderman family, which got thin after about an hour and a half, and then made a bit of a comeback after that before finally dying out. But what actually happened to the Keldermans? To help us answer this, let's take a look at Wondible's amazing family tree visualizer:

https://wondible.com/ohol-family-trees/#server_id=17&epoch=2&playerid=2076067

Some of their fate was player-driven, and that's fine. In fact, that's partially the point of an arc end condition: to put the fate of the server into the hands of the players. But we can also see a lot of rectangles at the end of their family tree. Rectangles are boys that cannot have babies themselves. Thus, it's possible for a family to die out simply due to a random fluke of genetics.

While this may be true in real life too, and is somewhat interesting, over the long haul, this particular fate is likely to befall every family eventually. When an assortment of families is what's keep the arc from ending, this kind of randomized attrition doesn't feel right, because it's completely outside the realm of player control.

So, among loads of fixes and improvements this week, I adjusted the gender distribution algorithm to force girl babies if a given family has less that three potentially fertile females left alive. With this change in place, we'll see how long the arcs last, and what the family population graphs look like, over the next week.

You can see the full list of server-side code fixes in the change log here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/documentation/changeLog.txt

This week's content fixes can be viewed here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/commits/master

I'm back from PAX West with a bunch of bug fixes and improvements. The arcs have generally been pretty stable during this time, lasting one to four days before we get down to a single family. I'm still not fully satisfied, and I'll be putting a lot more effort into making it even better in the future, but this is a good place to turn my attention to other matters, namely the enormous list of user-reported bugs that have built up. This week, I got through all of the reported and reproducible code bugs. Next week, I'll be tackling the list of content bugs.

The biggest change this week is the war report feature: mousing over someone from another family will now tell you if you're currently at war or at peace with that family. War status changes should also let you know, but what happens if you're born into a war or peace that was declared generations ago? Now you have a way of finding out.

The road-following code was also overhauled, and it now works perfectly in all situations, including diagonal roads that join other roads, double-backs, and so on. If there's a viable road ahead, you will follow it.

Other small fixes:

--Parked horse cart no longer overlaps weirdly with the object to the left

--You can paste text into chat with ctrl-v (requested by a player with brain damage who has trouble typing)

--Single-click set-down on surrounded tiles.

--No more ghost monument locations after an apocalypse.

--Fixed a glitch that allowed children to pick up swords and cars via swapping what they're holding.

I write to you from rainy Seattle.

If you're at PAX West, please stop by and say hello. I'm in the PAX Rising area, and I've got:

--500 Limited Edition OHOL purchase cards with unique QR codes (on sale for the first time at 25% off for PAX attendees only)

--Mofobert stickers

--Sandara posters

--Diamond Trust of London









The update went out on Wednesday evening, before I left, and it includes several improvements, which I will simply list here:

--Eve window remains open for 8 hours.

--Arc ends if we ever get down below two families.

--The bug causing the apocalypse whiteout to stall has been fixed, so families can easily survive the end of the arc now.

--Fixed a imprecision accumulation in server walk speed code that could potentially allow WASD mods to walk slightly faster.

--You can spend YUM to do hungry work, and you must always have a 5-hunger buffer when doing hungry work (for safety, so you don't starve immediately after).

--After the Eve window closes, babies are distributed to families round-robin, to prevent one family from getting baby starved.

--A new family population log has been added, so I can make nice graphs of families over the arc.

--Pine trees are no longer hungry work (softwood, naturally)

--You can eat carnitas straight.

--You can eat onions and tomatoes straight.

--You can deconstruct the track cart kit.


Hope to see some of you at PAX West!

Jason

On the heels of my return from vacation, there will be no gif this week, but there's still an update.

During my vacation, as many of you might recall, the arc wore on an on and on for something like 8 days, and none of the end conditions were triggered. Meanwhile, the space inside the rift became an over-griefed hell-scape. I had to kill that arc manually from vacation, and disabled the rift barrier temporarily until I could return home and tweak things.

So, this week, we take what we've learned from the arc runs so far and tweak a bunch of stuff that needs tweaking. Keep in mind that this game has been live for 18 months at this point, and we just learned about new problems that never mattered too much before. Bears have been in the game for 18 months, and it never mattered that their caves respawned new bears every 24 hours. I didn't even recall that it worked that way. But inside the rift for 8 days, this suddenly mattered. There were hundreds of roaming bears by the end.

The point here is that an infinite map kinda "solves all problems" magically. If something is broken, you can always walk away from it. If something runs out, you can always find more of it further out. I can't even really answer a question like, "Is there too much oil in the game?" How much oil is in the game? An infinite amount. What if I cut the oil spawning rate in half? Then there's still an infinite amount. We have to talk about resource allocation in terms of what's within a reasonable walking distance from a given town. But towns can move and spread over time, so any distance becomes reasonable, given enough time.

I can find answers to questions about a finite map, however. I can cut the oil spawn rate in half, and there will be half as much oil.

The biggest thing we're testing this coming week is a new arc failure condition: when we get down to less than 5 surviving families, the apocalypse happens and a new arc begin. In conjunction with this failure condition, new Eves only spawn for the first 2 hours of the arc. After two hours, the families are fixed, and the arc will last as long as at least 5 of those families last.

The great thing about this failure condition is that it puts the arc end squarely in the hands of the players. Do you want the arc to keep going a bit longer? Then help that struggling family stay afloat.

The other interesting thing is that the arc end does not kill anyone. Every living player survives, which means family lines can outlive the arc. In fact, with these changes, there's nothing stopping a family from living forever.

We're also testing a new curse system. The old, global-tally Donkey Town has been removed and replaced with a personal cursing system that lets you determine, unilaterally, who you no longer want to play the game near. Once you curse someone (you get one token per hour), that person will not be born within 50 tiles of you for the next 48 hours. If someone is cursed by so many people that there's nowhere left for them to get born, then they do go to Donkey Town, but there's no longer a fixed-length sentence there.


Finally, a bunch of little issues that came up during the last long arc have been fixed:

--The default state between families is neutral instead of war. To use war swords, an elder must declare WAR in the target family's language. Elders cannot hold swords themselves, though, blocking solo crusading.

--Cross-family curses can now work without saying it in their language.

--The shortcuts CURSE YOU (closest player) and CURSE MY BABY have been added.

--Babies now keep their family name even if adopted.

--A bunch of things that were blocking and unremoveable (Newcommen towers and looms) have been made deconstructable.

--Chopping all trees, including juniper, is now hungry work.

--Fences now orient themselves relative to other fences automatically. No more ugly fences.

--Wildcard phrases for gate ownership, like MY OFFSPRING OWN THIS (all living children) and MY FAMILY OWNS THIS (all living family).


There will be one more update next week, and then I'm off to show the game at PAX West.

I'm still out of town on my family vacation, but it was clear that life inside the rift had gone completely haywire in my absence, mostly due to newly-discovered forms of griefing that I cannot fix until I get back. We have a lot of great data an ideas to work with, though, and the path ahead is clear.

In the mean time, so I can enjoy the rest of my vacation worry-free, the Rift is disabled, and the ever-growing Eve spiral is back in action, with no forgotten-area culling.

Thanks for hanging in there during these rocky times, and I'm looking forward to getting back in the saddle next week.