One Hour One Life News

A funny thing happened on the way to viewing last month's sales data. One Hour One Life sold 36 copies in the nation of Argentina. This is the fourth biggest country in terms of units sold in one month. However, all of these sales only brought in $27 total. Because prices were set long ago, they haven't been adjusted based on exchange rate changes over the years, and Argentinian residents can currently buy the game for 78 US cents per copy.

You might think that is bargain basement price is driving sales over there, but I suspect something else is afoot. US residents who want multiple accounts are buying them in bulk by using VPNs and tricking Steam into thinking they live in Argentina.

And why would one person want so many low-cost accounts?

Because they are using the accounts to grief, and quickly getting cursed by other players, and their accounts are getting stuck in Donkeytown over and over. They escape Donkeytown via the purchase of a new account, which gives them a fresh start.

Of course, the price in Argentina can be adjusted, but this discovery highlights a deeper issue:

The curse system is great, insofar as it allows you to say, "I don't want to play near this person anymore," and have your wishes respected. Each person gets to decide what counts as "unacceptable" on their own, without needed consensus from others. Maybe one person doesn't like swearing, and another person doesn't like berry munching, and a third person really hates bossy players. Some people might like the drama of a murder or theft, while others might hate it. Curses allow us to avoid defining global behavior rules that must satisfy everyone.

The problem is that curses only work if you've encountered that particular player (or account) before. When dealing with a brand new, unknown account, they don't help you differentiate that account from other uncursed accounts---even accounts that you've enjoyed playing with many times in the past. Essentially, all the uncursed accounts are lumped into the same category: they are all unknown variables.

The new Trust system inverts this, allowing you to whitelist accounts that you feel belong to "good" players, from your perspective. By saying "I TRUST JANE SMITH" or "I TRUST YOU" to the closest person, that player is added to your eternal trust list. You will then see "+" symbols around their speech, and this effect persists across lives, with no time limit. This doesn't allow you to track specific players across lives, but rather shows you the growing group of players that you generally trust.

The other accounts in the game are either cursed by you---in which case, you've specifically caught them doing something that you dislike---or unknown variables---in which case, you can proceed with caution until you can determine their trustworthiness.

Aside from marking trusted player's speech, the Trust system has no effect on birth placement or other gameplay elements.

Cursing someone, of course, removes them from your list of trusted players.

This update deals with one of the last sacred cows left over from historic One Hour One Life design decisions: truly-permanent structures.

There were two player-built items left in the game that could not be moved or destroyed: ancient walls and the bell tower monument. Both of these things were added long ago, before property fences and many other things. They each required ten hours to soak before they became permanent. Ancient walls were originally meant to be discovered when exploring abandoned towns---perhaps the last remnants after everything else had decayed away (back when I was thinking that most things would decay away in time). And the bell tower was meant to be a major community accomplishment along with a navigation beacon between towns, back before there were other navigation aids in the game. If you managed to build the bell tower, which required cooperation across many generations, you would be able to keep it forever.

The problem with permanent structures, of course, is that they are permanent. If they are somehow built in annoying places, they will be annoying forever. The idea was that people had plenty of time to notice the annoyance before permanence set in. The problem is that you might not notice the annoyance until later, especially if the permanent structure is built far away and permanently entombs something that you might really want to access, like an almost-completed End Tower.

So, you can deconstruct both ancient walls and bell towers now. If you care about your bell tower, you can always protect it with property fences. And ancient walls will still appear in ancient towns, but their fragile beauty now be protected with a careful husbandry.

There have also been a bunch of issues fixed with property gates. You can no longer be assigned ownership from great distances, and destroying an in-progress gate now correctly clears ownership status. Finally, in line with the above discussion about permanence, you can no longer build a long string of property gates right next to each other, since these were effectively impenetrable walls as long as you and your heirs remained living. This was being used to work around the intended removeability of property fences that are supposed to work in conjunction with sparse gates.

Still working through the list of reported issues this week.

The biggest and most time-consuming fix was to the aiming system for the in-game photography camera. It worked perfectly... on a 1280x720 screen, which was the only thing I had ever actually tested it on. Due to scaling issues on other screen sizes, the position and size of the photo that was actually taken was way off from the white aiming line shown by the camera. This has been fixed to work on all screens, big and small, and to produce the same 400x400 photograph on any screen.

There are many transitions in the game that require an unused version of an object (for example, a brand new chisel or a full bowl of berries). The hint system now includes information about this with the new (FRESH) and (FULL) tags. Before, you might try to use a partially-consumed object by following the hints, and there'd be no explanation of why it failed. Your bowl might be one berry short of a pie.

For content fixes, you can finally eat chopped onions, tomatoes, and garlic from a plate without following through with a recipe that uses them. Boards can now be piled up. And an empty plane is no longer stuck on the landing strip until refueling. You can now tow it off for deconstruction without using more fuel.

I'm taking next week off from updating for a family vacation.

I've finally made it through all of the submitted code issues this week, and I've started on the content issues.

You can now put a temporary buffer stop in the middle of a rail line as a stopping point for rail carts, allowing you to stop and load a cart before letting the cart continue onward. Buffer stops can also be used as safe temporary end-caps for partially-built rail lines, allowing you to build a long line slowly over time while still using the completed portion.

Some finicky issues with rail construction have also been improved.

Automated road pavers now behave sanely when they are on their last (of 24) uses. Before, they would stall and get stuck. Now they can be correctly deconstructed into an empty plow.

There's new support for specially-containable items so they can go into more than one type of specialty container. Currently, this only affects the bowl of water, which can now go onto both the Lab and Food tables, since it's used for both chemistry and food preparation.

And the mysterious and rare horse-cart duplication bug has finally been fixed. Lots of people helped by providing pictures and videos of this bug occurring, so thank you everyone.

I have finally made it through all of the reproducible code issues that have been reported. There are two big changes that you will notice.

First, the web-based photos interface now allows you to go back through the entire history of 3425 photos that have been taken by players over the past four years in the game. You can browse these photos here:

http://photos.onehouronelife.com/server.php?action=front_page

Bear in mind that taking a photograph in the game is no small feat, since it involves building a camera from scratch, which includes glass blowing, tempering spring steel, and silver-nitrate chemistry.

Second, there's a new /PROPERTY command, which you can use to cycle through arrows that point to each property gate that you own. This is especially useful if you inherit distant property, because the temporary arrow that you receive goes away after 60 seconds. But this will also be useful for managing property generally.

There were several other small fixes, including some missing curse logging when not cursing by name, and a long-sought-after fix for mouse positioning on ultra-wide monitors. If you have suffered from fullscreen issues on an ultra-wide monitor in the past, it should be fixed now. Please let me know if you're still having trouble.

There is one remaining open code bug, for a horse cart duplication issue that I haven't been able to reproduce yet. Hopefully someone can shoot a video of this happening.