a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Yeah, partial pie consumption is coming.
Turns out there was a bug in the cron jobs that were preventing the food stats from updating. It's actually working now.
Still working on the life stats...
Okay, for the food log, the server only spits out updated stats once per hour. So it's on a one hour delay. That makes it a little hard to test, but I'll make sure it's working when the next hour passes.
The life stats are definitely broken. Working on a fix now....
You're right! Will fix it.
Force feeding works in this game too!
I'm not sure about changing the way eating works, or automating it. If you are warm, you have quite a long time between necessary feedings. I think a lot of people "micro manage" it out of anxiety and keep it topped off at all times, but really, if food is around, you can just let it go down to the bottom before eating again.
Finally, I don't think I want to add ways to allow people to be AFK zombies.... The game is only an hour long. It think that people can plan around that pretty easily. And then they can be "always on" during that hour... alive and responsive. Finally, it's not like each life is incredibly precious. If you're a half hour in, you're also only a half our away from death. Getting born again is part of the game. So if you really need to run to the bathroom....
Also, this will be much less of a problem at higher populations, where single players aren't going to lose many hours of progress if they die. That's a corner case that will pretty much never happen if the game is successful. So I don't want to design around that too much.
It updates on a 5-minute delay.... hmmm.... I'm testing it now on this end.
Yeah, it should work, even if you closed the client.
BUT... it should only work if your cause of death was really OLD AGE. If you made it almost to the end, but starved, it won't work.
OH... and one other thing, it should only work if you yourself were Eve in that life when you got old. So, if you were born as a baby and lived to old age, you are part of a multiplayer civ, and progress dies with you, unless you have offspring to keep it going.
The respawn location-saving really only works in a truly single-player situation.
SO.... if all those things were true, and it still didn't work.... it's a bug, and a really troubling one.
Do you have any info about exactly when this happened? Then I can look in the server logs.
You can look at your recordedGame files (copy one to playbackGame to watch it) to figure out the timestamp.
Oldbaby, let me know if you're willing to help debug the baby movement stuff. If so, I can create a second account for you, and then you can run two clients in parallel, one as mother, other as baby, and see if you can get some short game recordings of glitches in the baby behavior. I know that those glitches are still there, but they are hard to find and fix.
Email me if you're up for it (you can make the game windows smaller to run two clients on the same screen).
I've been getting a lot of email about this.
Right now, we don't need any more testers.
The game will be released soon. Please wait until then. In the mean time, you can make sure that you're signed up for the release list on the homepage:
Interesting idea....
You'd still get older, of course.
But one side effect of this would be that you could get very low on food and then just stand there until someone brings you some food.
Also, I'm not sure how it would work for babies. If they just stand still, they will not need to be taken care of.
So, you could make it NOT work for babies, but only for adults?
Here's another thing... if you put on warm cloths and stand in a warm place, your food consumption goes way down. You can easily last several minutes without eating by doing that.
So you might want to do that before doing other activities.
Also, have you played team-based multiplayer games before, like LOL? There's no pause there, and if you run off to do laundry, you are letting your team down.
Usually, you plan on a full hour to play LOL.
Some kind of primitive food source will be added to the swamp soon.
The badlands rock biome will likely remain food-free, however.
That's a good point about multiplayer vs single player.... hmmm....
I do really hope that it will run at a solid 60fps on almost everyone's machines. It does so on these very old laptops that I have here at home....
Yeah, if you're running 2x as fast, you will arrive places way early, and the server won't let you do anything there until it thinks you've actually reached your destination.
Anyway, I think this is pretty exploit-proof, because everything is happening server-side, including move speed and timing. The client just displays it to you (in this case, displaying the moves faster and shorter than they actually are).
As far as enforcing the frame rate via sleeping goes, if vblank is really on, we DO NOT want to do that, as it introduces tearing. But here it is way off from what we think it is, so vblank at 30fps is clearly not working.
The other option is to measure again, on the menu screen.... or wait until then to measure in the first place. But it does require a few seconds for a proper measurement.
Maybe first-startup needs to be more interactive about measurement. It should say, "Are you ready for me to measure your framerate?" and then wait for you. After that, it should say, "I measured 60fps and vsync seems to be on, should I save this for future runs?"
So then later, it won't measure anymore, so minimizing and such won't matter.
But sheesh.... people will be annoyed by any of this stuff, because no other games are doing it.
I really think that other games are pretty much phoning it in, though...
I think that part of the problem stems from my game recording system, which depends on fixed-length timesteps.
Probably most other games use variable timesteps, and are just constantly measuring the latest frame time every frame. But when frame times slow down (like during busy scenes), I find this to be aesthetically jarring, because it results in big jumps in movement. I think slowdown is better than bigger, stuttery jumps.
Fixed frame rate helps solve tons of problems, and it also produces a more consistent play experience on slower computers (computers that lag when lots of trees are on the screen, etc.... it feels better if those parts just slow down instead of jumping to a lower framerate and back up again later).
But the question is, what to set that fixed framerate at?
Also, vsync is REALLY important for visual quality, especially on a game that pans a lot like this. If vsync is off, people are going to see ugly tearing across the middle of their screen. This is not so important on an FPS. Most people run with vsync off, in general.
So, I need some way to measure this, to fix the frame rate, and also to warn people when vsync seems to be off (which can only be fixed by them turning it on in their graphics card control panel).
That said, I do think that I can detect alt-tab, and I should probably abort the measurement if they do that, and resume once they tab back in.
But the problem is, that's only one of many things that might result in a bad measurement.
As far as what other games do.... many of them just run at max FPS, even if the monitor can't even draw the frames that fast, which is a total waste of computational resources. Or they fix a framerate to 60fps all the time, which sucks on modern 144 fps graphics card AND sucks on older, slower computers.
Anyway, I'm trying to do something a bit smarter here.... but the result is pretty fragile.
The other thing I could do is measure it once at first startup and save it into a file. I could also put a one-time message up saying, "I just measured your fps to be 60.04, and vsync seems to be off. Is this correct? Should I save this for future sessions?" Or maybe let people type in their own desired FPS one time.
But I think a lot of people don't even know their own FPS.
Like, what is your normal FPS?
The game ships with these possible options:
30
60
120
144
So, during your alt-tab thing, it must have picked 30.
But if you're running at 60 normally, that would only make the game twice as fast. Not ridiculously fast.
So maybe your normal is 120? Which would make it 4x fast, which would be unplayable.
Yeah... this is pretty normal!
The problem is that various graphics cards and monitors have different refresh rates in modern times. They're not all running at 60fps anymore (well, actually back in the CRT days, none of them were at 60fps anyway). We've now got 120 and 144 to deal with.
So, the game tries to figure out what kind of situation it's in at startup. If you mess with this process, it gets a bad measurement. I think the game was probably running at 30fps or even slower when minimized.
This isn't a bug, exactly.
If you have any thoughts about how to work around this, or how the game should behave if this happens (maybe some kind of warning page if it see you running at under 60fps)...
There's now a Home Marker object that you can create. The HOME arrow will point back to this object. The client keeps track of a stack of home markers. When you destroy the most recent marker, the HOME arrow will point you back to the previous marker on the stack. This allows for a kind of rudimentary waypoint navigation.
I'll let you discover the recipe for a Home Marker on your own. It involves very primitive components.
The new marker system replaces the old "auto home detection" that was based on click frequency, which ended up being too finicky.
Full changes here:
A small update with a few fixes.
Spell check (for review text) works now on Windows. The old camera is back. A new hunger sound.
Full details here:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/ … ngeLog.txt
This is a rather small update, mostly bug fixes.
The biggest noticeable change is an automated HOME arrow which points back to your location of highest activity. It does a pretty good job of figuring out where your "camp" is located and pointing you back there. Over time, if you abandon one camp and start working at a new one, it will gradually forget the old camp and learn the location of the new one.
A square highlight is shown when you click to drop something, telling you where your dropped item will go.
Berry bushes are 3x more common in the woodland biome than they used to be.
Full lists of changes are here:
It's fine with me.
v36 has a new bug triggered by hitting ENTER from the Email field when you're trying to log in. This ends up leaving an invisible "newline" character at the end of your email address, which causes web requests using that email address to fail.
If you're suffering from this bug, the work-around is to go back to the email field and delete the invisible character from the end of your email. You'll see that the cursor will show extra space at the end.
And be careful not to hint ENTER in that field again, for the time being. Try TAB instead, or clicking LOGIN with the mouse.
This will be fixed in the next release. Hitting ENTER in the field is normal and should work.
BigCursor support, for high resolution displays, was using a 40x40 cursor image.
Turns out Windows doesn't like a cursor bigger than 32x32, and this causes a crash.
The big cursor is auto-loaded if your screen is larger than 1920 wide or 1080 tall.
This has been fixed in source by reducing the big cursor down to 32x32, and the fix will be included in the next binary release.
In the mean time, you can work around this crash by moving bigPointer.tga from the graphics folder. The game won't be able to find the cursor, so it won't try to load it, and thus won't crash.
Yes, it really has been three months of solid work on this update. So many things have been tweaked, fixed, and overhauled that it's hard for me to even remember all of them.
The most important thing to pay attention to is the new review system. You can type a review of the game right in the game itself, either from the menu or after dying. Your review is posted directly on the home page. This is similar to the way that game reviews work on Steam. I'm hoping that a bunch of folks will write some reviews to kickstart this system. I'm not asking for forced positive reviews, but honest reviews. Would you recommend someone buying the game in its current state? You can always update your review later, or even remove it, as often as you want to.
The clicking UI has been improved a lot, with target cell indicators when you're mousing to put something down.
In terms of content, some new systems, are in place, including floors and sub-containers (loaded baskets can be carried in carts, for example). Making wooden floors and carts as examples for these systems required a whole sub-tree of woodworking tools. You can now use steel for many more things than just the ax.
Walls have been moved down so that they don't cover the tile behind them.
Full details are here:
The live server has been updated with a new Eve placement algorithm.
Note that Eve placement in general only matters during times of sparse player population, because with a steady flow of players, the family tree will grow without any new Eves being spawned. However, making this base case work well is really important.
The old Eve placement method tracked a global list of the most recent 100 objects that humans changed in the world, and use that list to determine the epicenter of the largest cluster of this activity, and then placed the next Eve in a radius around that epicenter. This resulted in the next Eve starting roughly where the last Eve was working.
The old method worked great if you were a lone player coming back over and over, since you could keep working on your mini-civilization without starting over from scratch with each new life.
It did NOT work so great if you were a brand new player, as you found yourself starting out in the middle of someone else's camp, robbing you of the experience of trying to survive from scratch yourself.
It also did not work well if you played as a solo player and then came back later. If an intervening Eve wandered away and started a new mini-civilization, you might end up starting there when you came back later. Where's my old camp?
But in general, I think that focusing all Eve activity in one place makes things less interesting. If there's one pocket of civilization instead of multiple pockets, once one pocket gets the ax, everyone has the ax forever, and so on.
SO... the new algorithm maintains a database of civilization epicenters associated with each account. New Eves are spawned out in a random place in the wilderness, but on subsequent solo-Eve lives, they are put back near wherever they have been working.
So, you essentially get to work on your own, personal civilization across multiple solo-Eve lives. You can still cooperate with other players, but only if they are playing at the same time as you. No more asynchronous cooperation by default.
The other civilization pockets ARE out there, however, waiting to be discovered. And, at least with the current settings, I'm not flinging new Eves ridiculously far away from each other, so discovering another civilization is possible.
And again, this has NO effect on playing together. You'll still get born as someone else's baby, right next to them, in their civilization.
There's a new hourly food logging system in place which helps us to understand where people's calories are coming from. The report is live here:
http://onehouronelife.com/foodStats.php
If people are leaning on one food too hard, this log will help me notice that and adjust food values to compensate.
This update focused on further tweaking the difficulty of achieving a steady-state from wild food or basic farming. I've tuned the game to a point where surviving to age 60, starting from scratch, is an extreme challenge for me when I'm playing my own game. Wild food sources around me are running out, and I need to carefully plan how I use my time to bootstrap to the next means of obtaining food before the last one runs out.
Living to age 60 should now be a significant accomplishment.
Interactions with babies are now more meaningful and less throw-away, because nursing them now transfers food from mother to child. Spam-nursing now wastes a lot of food, and communication between mother and child is crucial. Childbirth itself now leaves a mother famished, meaning there's a big investment in each baby right from the start, and spam-rebirthing also has a big cost, where it used to not really matter if a baby died and was reborn repeatedly.
Finally, moving animals have been added. The current ones are pretty rare and skittish, but you may catch a glimpse of them in the mountains.
Full list of changes here: