One Hour One Life Forums

Yeah, I'm thinking about something like that.  Oldest in family line, or something.  So in a multi-Eve situation, both get the hints.

Also, I'm really worried about the way this system encourages matricide or fratricide or gran-matricide or uncle-cide or apple-cider.

So, I've got to figure out how "keeping your elders alive to learn from them" is encouraged, as opposed to "bumping them off so you become king."

Though maybe the generation war is interesting....

Anyway, making it "the oldest person on the server" changes things, because if your village has that elder, you want to keep them alive.  The next oldest person could be in the other village.  You monopolize the knowledge as long as you keep your elder alive.

Eves could always get the knowledge automatically, regardless of who's oldest on the server.

Another idea to discourage elder-cide:

When an elder dies, their "possible time left," if they're under 60, is set as a "cooling off" period before anyone else gets the knowledge.  So you have to wait until the last elder's 60th birthday, whether they are alive or dead, until a new person becomes the elder.

Thus, if you kill them or neglect them so they die, it creates a knowledge gap, whereas if you support them until the end of their life, there's no gap, and the next elder ascends right away.

Anyway, this would work for family lines just fine, giving each village an elder, or maybe even a group of them, depending how the families shake out.  Need to think about it more.

And yes, that book has been on my list for a while.  You just reminded me of it.  Will fetch from the library today!

Good analysis there.

Yeah, I'm pretty solidly against hints for reverse engineering being in the game, for all the reasons that you mentioned.

Also, I do love that after civilization gets advanced enough (people don't even have fires anymore, because they have electric heaters or whatever), they can collectively "forget" primitive survival skills.  When civilization collapses, they'll be back to figuring the basics out again, just like we would be if we needed to make thread from scratch.

Really, in the current state of the game, you ALL are in a situation where you've forgotten your primitive skills.  The struggle with the bowdrill comes mostly from not knowing how a real bowdrill works.  You can't smother the tiny ember.  You need to pick it up with a leaf and put it on TOP of the tinder.  For real.

All that said....

Unlike CM and TCD, this game is supposed to work for any size player base.  1 player, 2 player, 10,000 player, and here's hoping, 100,000 player or even 1,000,000 player.

It's also supposed to be immune to "permanently dying out."  Right now, lets say the base rate of TCD acquisition is 1 new player every four days or so.  Lets say there's a spike because of some coverage, and we get 3 new players on one day who start playing together.  Because the game isn't so great with 3, they don't stick around for four days, so they're no longer there when the 1 average-rate new player joins.  So the game can't regrow from a small seed of players.

I want this game to be able to regrow itself at any point.  If you discover the game 5 years from now and try playing, even if you're alone, you should be like, "Wow, this is amazing!" and play for an entire week.

I don't know how to balance these two requirements.  The game should be magical and encourage communication in the case of a large population of players, but not leave a small population of new players completely in the dark.

It's almost like the hints should be dynamic.... like, when you pick up a sharp stone, it figures out how long it's been since a hatchet has been made.  If it's more than 1 hour, then it gives you a hint about sharp stones being used to make hatchets.  If it's less than one hour, it expects you to learn from someone else?

Or maybe only Eve gets hints, ever?

This is only enforceable client-side, by the way, because the client has the full transition list.

I wonder about hiding the transition list on the server only, but that flies in the face of open source, PLUS the client uses the transition list to "pre-load" sprites in the background for objects that are one step away.  There's no way the graphics card has room for 30K sprites, so only a fraction are kept loaded at any one time, based on what's reachable in the transition tree.

But anyway, imagine THAT version of the game, where the tech tree really is a secret.... absolutely full of surprises.  Hmm....

I suppose that the tech tree could be encrypted with a key that only I and the server have.  Then it could be stored in the public repo.

That still doesn't help with the dynamic loading, though...

Obviously, the client would still have the full object list.  Pushing all of that stuff server side would be really messy and eat bandwidth.

Well, the problem with doing it "on top" is that both the client and the server need to do it exactly the same way, because the server will be sending map chunks to the client containing some of these dummy, induction-generated objects.

Let's say the max real object ID is 395.

For the berry bush, 10 dummy objects would be generated:  396, 397, ... , 405

The client needs to generate these in the same way, or else the wrong object will be displayed.

They're both doing it with the same code, and they both should always have exactly the same "real" objects, so it should aways happen exactly the same way, in the same order.  It just seems very fragile to me.... maybe I'm overthinking it.

Okay.... well, I'm not sure I want to hand EVERYTHING to you.  I still want some mystery.  I still want you to ask another player how they made something.  I still want a village that figures out how to make cars to be the ONLY place cars exist in the world.  Maybe they sell them!  Yes, of course I want some people to sell the more hard-to-make things, or maybe even keep "trade secrets."

The point of the bottom-up hints is literally to help a beginning player actually DO something, anything at all.

I expect more dedicated players to study out-of-game databases and such.

Think of it like Minecraft:

There's no crafting hints at all in that game, neither bottom-up or top-down.  In fact, in that game, you cannot craft much of anything on the built-in 2x2 grid until you "bootstrap" yourself by making a crafting bench, gaining access to the full 3x3 crafting grid.  So you might even try to make a hatchet in Minecraft, and simply not be able to do it until you figure out that you have to make a crafting bench first.

HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that there's nothing for a beginning player to do.  You dig into the ground with your bare hands.  You gather resources.  You can stack them up and start building stuff.  You can play Minecraft for several hours, trying to survive the night and such, just doing the "mine" part of it without ever touching the "craft" part of it.  Then, when you decide to go deeper, the Wiki and the Guides and the How-To-Videos are there waiting for you.  But you don't need those external resources to get started.  To play and have an interesting time.

So, my game needs an entry point like this.  You just bought it, you know nothing about it, but there should be several hours of pretty interesting game waiting for you.  Then, if you want to go deeper, the external resources exist to help you.

Also, I think some opaqueness helps with the cultural "stickiness" of a game.  All those wikis and articles and guides and how-to videos build and bolster the community around Minecraft.  Friends help each other get started playing, etc.

That said, I don't think a game can be totally opagque, because then it will never get off the ground.  Or should I say, I'm too chicken to make a totally opaque game.

Minecraft also had the non-opaque part (digging around and building stuff).

I do worry that a complete, game-wide bottom-up crafting hint system gives too much away, and makes it too transparent.  I may implement a cut-off at some point, based on how high in the tree you've climbed.  Like, hints are only given for stuff that's 5 transitions away from a natural object...

But, for the time being, I'm implementing a full bottom-up crafting hint system and seeing where it takes us.

Okay, take two:

After talking about the food system literally for 6+ hours with different people yesterday, the current plan is this.

Call it, "Food of all forms is constantly running out, unless you do something about it."

--All food goes back to stacking.

--Berry bushes have a limited supply of berries (10?), and they take forever to regrow, like 20 minutes or something.  Each berry fills you up +4.

--Same with wild carrots, wild rabbits, etc.  They regenerate too slowly to be sustainable fixed-location food source, even for one person.  If you want to hunt/gather, you need to keep moving to new areas.

--Each berry can be eaten, but it can also be turned into a seed and planted.  Same with the carrot (some seeds can be gathered.)  Same with rabbits (they can be caught and domesticated).

--New berry bushes and carrots  are also really slow to grow, but some  low-level tech (tilling, watering) can dramatically speed up the growing process.  Feeding domestic rabbits makes them breed faster, etc.  You also have the economics of scale.  Planting 10 slow-growing berry bushes, all in a nice row.

--Your success at farming (and other more advanced food production, processing, storage) will naturally determine how big of a population you can sustain in your village.  If you don't produce food at all, you have no village, because you have to keep moving to find new wild food.  If you are producing food, and you have a baby boom, and some people help less than others, you won't be able to sustain your larger population.  Successful villages will grow bigger and bigger, because more of their babies will survive, eventually leading to even more fertile-age women, and thus an even bigger share of incoming babies, while people who don't produce food as well will have shrinking populations, fewer women surviving into adulthood, and thus a smaller share of incoming babies.

One bad generation can completely destroy a functioning village, which means that civilization success is a long-term group project.  Keep this plane in the air, folks, we worked hard to get it as high as we've gotten it.  Separate villages are also in a kind of meta competition, guns, germs, and steel.

Anyway, I never wanted this to be an open-ended crafting game where you just freely explore the tree of content to your heart's delight.  It's supposed to be hard.  You're supposed to claw you way up to each accomplishment, and barely get there. 

Like, I finally got a steel ax in my lifetime, but I neglected my babies along the way, so I died alone, and the ax that I made was lost in the wilderness.  Next time, I'll be even better at managing this process, and there will be a future generation to pass my ax onto.

All that said, hard and tedious are two different things.  Tedious, to me, is being forced to manually execute a rote, seemingly-automatable process, with no important decisions along the way.

Eating from an infinite berry bush every 24 seconds is tedious.  A robot could do it way better than you can.

I don't think it's simply a matter of "eating isn't fun, but crafting is fun."  Eating isn't fun if it requires no thinking.  Hard eating---eating as an eventually-impossible time and resource management puzzle, is as "fun" as any other challenge.  I just need to figure out how to make it so.

Wow, sweet!

Ain't javascript grand?  Too bad its too slow for more elaborate games...

Well, those numbers look reasonable to me.

I do want the majority of players to have a "full server" experience, and have the "desolate server" be a more rare experience.

In your last case, where the population falls to 513, we have 72% of the player population on very full servers, 14% on an almost-half-full server, and 12% of players on desolate servers.

An even spread across all 7 servers would put 100% of players on an almost-half-full server.  But trying to maintain an even spread no matter what would mean that sometimes the entire population of players experiences more and more desolation.  In the case of a dip in population, we really want to consolidate somehow and bring the remaining people together onto the same server.

The reflector currently has two main parameters;

startSpreadingFraction and stopSpreadingFraction

The first is the fullness threshold on a given server where we start spreading it's players 50/50 with the next server on the list, and the second is the fullness we need to dip below to stop the 50/50 spreading (in which case, servers further down the list would get no new players).

Can you run your sim with various parameter settings and take some measurements?

Like, number of lone eves?  Number of times a server gets cut off from new babies and dies off completely?

Currently, the reflector is using 50% and 10%.  Maybe other settings are better.

Also, if we count the number of servers that are currently being spread to, we can spread with different splits along the way (instead of 50/50 at each step).  Like with 7 servers, the first server should send 6/7 to the next server, and that server should send 5/6 to the next server and so on.... I that should put 1/7 on each.

Yes, the front server starts with a higher pop, so during a boom, it will keep a higher pop, but only for an hour max, until those people die.  After that, each server will have 1/7 of the population.

We could still keep the stopSpreadingFraction, and once the 1/7 amount dips below a threshold, we start letting extra servers die off and focus new players onto the remaining servers.

But I'm not sure if that's better....  maybe there's something good about keeping the top servers more full.

We can either give most players the better experience, at the expense of some players having a less good experience, or give everyone the same mediocre experience.

The equality version obviously can't be gamed as much through custom server picking (i.e., ignoring where the reflector tells you to go), because all the servers are more equal (though the main server will still have the oldest civilization, always).

Can you try the old version too?

I think you can get to the login screen before it downloads an update.  Like, back to the raw v20 download that's still available.

Also, make sure you install v20 in a different spot so that whatever compatibility settings you sent won't apply.

Put your system-wide scaling back to the default, where you had it before.

So, what exactly is the difference in behavior between these two versions?

Maybe you can run them both in Windowed mode at the same time and take a screen shot?

Maybe turning "useLargestWindow" off in the settings of both would help with this.  Then they will both try to open 1280x720 windows, and it will be easy to compare them in your screen shot.

For what it's worth, I'm now calling SetProcessDPIAware, if it's available.  It's a Vista thing, so I thought it would be the most compatible way of doing it.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar … s.85).aspx

Though maybe the "unexpected behavior" in later OS's is real!

Well, this seems to be working for now.  Hopefully the bot will stay online for a while.

If it ever goes offline permanently, I could potentially install it myself from source on my own server.  For future reference:

https://github.com/synzen/Discord.RSS