One Hour One Life Forums

In Rust, last time I played, you can craft as many sleeping bags as you want, and put them wherever you want.  For example, you could put ten of them in your safe room.

When you die, you get a menu of sleeping bags and get to pick one to respawn into.

You only lose what you were immediately carrying when you die (it's left on your body).  But respawn is instant, assuming that you have a sleeping bag ready.

After using a sleeping bag, it goes on cooldown, so you can't respawn again from the same one for 2 minutes or so.  Obviously, this can be overcome by just making a bunch of sleeping bags.

I think that in a more recent update, they gave each sleeping bag a radius, and when you respawn from one, all bags within the radius go on cooldown.  Not sure how the latest version works.

ANYWAY, the result of this---of instantly spawning back in the safety of your base with all your stuff---is that there's essentially no cost to trolling.  Run out with a cheap spear, or a bow, and bug the heck out of people.  If they catch you and kill you, you respawn back in your base.  Run right out and do it again.  You lose a cheap spear each time, but it's worth it.

In OHOL, your life is unique.  Where you were born, what you were born into, what your parents gave you, and how well they took care of you.  Getting to the point where you CAN start or resume trolling takes loving parents, and most importantly, time.  You have to grow up again.

So, if you troll and are dealt with by an in-game police force, you can instantly respawn.... as a helpless baby with none of your stuff halfway around the world.

Which is why, even if reincarnation was true, we wouldn't have a problem with real-world trolling.

Yes, it's possible to respawn near your stuff (out of sheer  luck, or if there are very few players---your mother is likely to be near your stuff if the world is small), but you still can't instantly regain possession of it.  You're a baby again, and you can't even feed yourself at first, let alone pick up your bow.

So yes, you lose only an "hour of work," but you ALWAYS lose an hour of work, every hour, in this game.  It's not "work" for yourself, ever, but work for future generations (which may include you), but there's no well-defined, long-term possession by individuals.

Maybe people will wait to troll until they are old and have nothing to lose.  But hopefully, after an hour of playing, and watching their great grandchildren growing up, they'll be somewhat invested.  I guess they can troll their great grandchildren...   It's thematically consistent.... losing your mind with senility.

1) Signs are interesting.  But I find that they lead to pretty horrible clutter in Minecraft, so I hesitate for that reason (and it's why I didn't put them in TCD).

In this game, who are you explaining things over and over to?  Remember, you only live one hour.  It's not "your server" or "your village."  You're just kinda passing through.

How do we communicate with future generations?  With signs?  Like, "Whoever uses this shovel must clean the mud off and put it back in the shed."  That's a more immediate form of communication, meant for a community where people come and go (like a communal farm).  You wouldn't think about leaving a sign like that to control your great grandchildren's use of your shovel.  Primarily because you wouldn't care how they used it!

The main "new" people that we're interacting with in the game, where immediate communication is required, are our children.  They are helpless at first and at our mercy.  They can primarily just watch us do things.  We can talk to them, but we don't have to.  They can learn by watching us do stuff (see us put the shovel away each time).  But talking to them isn't so bad either.

There aren't really "groups of players" like you're describing, at least not long term.  Everything in the game is really trans-generational, because lives are so short.  It's more about families.  And in that context, oral tradition is way more interesting, to me, than written records.

I have thought about enabling signs using A+B=C+D crafting, where you have to craft each letter separately using bits of wood and glue or whatever, and then arrange them on a sign, which could be a container for letters.

It would then be so much work to make a sign that people would think very carefully about what they wanted to say.  That feels better to me than a cheapy "type anything" sign that you can just throw up everywhere with whatever random joke on it.

2) Yes, what you're describing with "stacks" of items is possible.  I'm already using it in some places (like making a coat out of rabbit fir requires that you first stack up four pieces of fur together).

Harvesting machines are possible.  I suppose they could be installed on an ore vein of some kind, and then fill up some kind of bushel over time.  Encoding very deep stacks and splitting is pretty tedious on my end, though, so I need to think carefully about this stuff.  For example, if a bushel of ore contains 100 pieces, You probably wouldn't be able to take out one piece at a time (since that would require me to input 100 A+B=C transitions).  So a bushel would probably be indivisible and used as a unit (and maybe the centrifuge to refine uranium would only operate on bushels for input).  Powers of 2 splitting is possible, but also somewhat tedious for me.

As a current example, you can pick one berry from the bush at t a time, which can be individually stored or eaten.  Or you can use a bowl on the bush, picking a bowl full and leaving an empty bush.  You can make a pie from the bowl-full, but you can't currently take one berry at a time from the bowl until it's empty.  The bush is infinite for single berries, and I suppose the bowl could be as well.  But I'm not going to encode 60 transitions to enable you to empty the bowl (or bush) one berry at a time.  A bowl and a single berry have different uses though, so there are reasons for harvesting berries in different ways.

3)  Here's the deal with scaling:  I think the server, given the bandwidth available, can currently support about 200 simultaneous players.  I'm using Linode to spin up overflow servers, though.  When 100 players are on the main server, the reflector automatically starts sending half of newly joining players to a second server.  When that second server has 100 players on it, a third server will start getting used, etc.

Each server has a separate permanent map and timeline.  They are each isolated worlds.  This isn't ideal, but it's the only simple way to make this work.  In the context of this game, where each life is unique and there's an interesting game to play at every population size, I think it actually fits pretty well.  Being a 10th-generation baby on the ancient-civilization main server is very different from being Eve on the untouched overflow server.  Both are interesting and add variety to the game.

But there won't be any glitching or teleporting due to scale issues.  Each life is atomic and will pass entirely and consistently on one server.  That's another nice property of this game for scaling purposes:  we can safely make load balancing decisions at the moment of your birth.  There's no expected continuity across lifetimes, so we don't even need to move your inventory over to the overflow server.  You just get born there.

Well, the initial private testing will be starting very soon.

I've got one more week of content production and final code tweaks, and then I'm off for three weeks on a trip with my family.  I don't want to start the private testing before I leave, because I won't be very responsive while I'm away (it's an official no-work break).

So, a week or two after I get back, the plan is to get the game out to the private testers.  The week of June 12 or June 19.  They'll be looking for bugs and platform issues at first, and after that, I'll start weekly content updates for them, just to make sure that's all working smoothly too.

At that point, if everything's working smoothly, the plan is to go into paid public alpha, probably with a slow roll-out to people who purchased my previous games, and then a carefully-scheduled public launch, with media previews and such.

After that, the plan is to do weekly content updates every week for about 2 years.

The game will change a lot after private alpha testing is over.  Obviously, loads of content will be added, but I also anticipate some code and gameplay changes, as I see how large groups of people behave together.

Yeah, I calculated it yesterday, and it's 31 million times bigger than the surface area of the earth.  Does that count as HUGE?  As in, all-caps huge?

There's no plan to spawn multiple Eves in separate places on the map.  Eve0 is at (0,0).  Subsequent Eves spawn somewhere on the outskirts of the last civilization.  To place a new Eve, which only happens if everyone dies, I find the radius of the known, human-modified world, then walk in from there, as close as you can get to (0,0) without getting blocked.  (You don't want the next Eve spawned in the middle of a prison by accident.)

However, as people spread out, there will be isolated pockets of civilization.  If you're a female character, you can create one of these yourself whenever you want, simply by walking into the wilderness and surviving out there until you have some babies.  You just created a new remote outpost that could potentially continue and grow indefinitely.  Someday, the residents of the outpost may explore and discover/meet the residents of the main civilization.

As for why I made it so big....

First, from an engineering perspective, It would have been way harder to make it smaller.  X and Y coordinates are signed integers, and it's easiest to just let them span the whole possible range (-2 billion to +2 billion, roughly), and let them wrap around the way they would naturally on a computer.

Second, our Earth world is so big that it feels infinite.  Walk in any direction, and it just keeps going, and you'll never run out of new stuff to see.  So I certainly wanted to make it big enough to feel that way too.  If I'm going to make it THAT big, so that you can never walk to the end of it, why stop there?

(Also, I'm not sure what actually happens if you walk all the way to the edge beyond +2 billion.  I'm assuming that it wraps around back into negative coordinates, but I've never tested it.  I don't need to test it, though!)

And finally, conceptually, I'm fascinated by "practically infinite" things on computers that are still very finite, but mind-bogglingly big.  The full 4-billion by 4-billion cell map is entirely predetermined, even though most of it has not been computed yet, or will ever be computed, or will ever be seen.  But I can teleport you instantly to any far-flung coordinate of it and you will be able to see what's there.  You could even build a little house out there.  And if anyone ever made it out there ever again, they would see the same little chunk of map that you saw, and see the remains of your house, too.

That's one of the "magic" things that computers can do.

And when I describe it to people (a huge world that's 31 million times bigger than earth), it sometimes elicits a mind-boggled "whoa!", and that makes it worth doing.

But dealing with numbers this big is all in an ordinary day's work for 32-bit computer programs...  We just never stop to realize how amazing it really is.

Well, I'm going for a kind of "doodled," thrown-together aesthetic.  The idea is to get interactive stuff into the game, and have it look good enough to be visually recognizable (that's definitely an ax!), not to create a masterpiece for each one.

I agree that the drawing still will inevitably change over the course of the project, but the change will be gradual and subtle.  It's also not hard to go back and replace particularly egregious drawings later.  Like, "I added a bunch of new content this week, and I went back and re-did the horse---what do you all think of the new horse?"

The point is that the entire process can be kindof ad lib and incremental and local.  I can put a new object into the game, and hook it up with what it interacts with, in relative isolation from everything else.  And thus "grow" the content base up to 10K objects organically.

And you're right that the drawing style may progress along with the tech!

But I'll also be adding natural objects the whole time as the biomes expand.  I'm really trying to avoid the temptation of going back and redoing old stuff, though.  The visual style will necessarily be something of a mish-mash, and I need to accept that.

It will still have a unique look, with all this hand-drawn, hand-colored stuff.

Ugg... I just tried sending a password reset to my gmail, and it went through fine.  What a mess!

Welcome back, ..!

Regarding the extra time, working with someone else itself takes up a lot of time... so it shouldn't take all that long this time around.  I also figured a lot of stuff out the first time around.

EMAIL

Man, this has been a terrible thorn in my side.  Forum email is being sent through Postmark, which I'm paying for..... they're essentially acting as a trusted email relay.  But apparently it's not working.

Did you tell gmail that it wasn't spam?

And jeez, I wonder if my domain now has a bad reputation.

Tons of spammers have been signing up for my mailing list using other people's emails, and some of those people have been flagging the confirmation messages as spam.

Well, the entire rapid content editing system is based on scanning pen and ink drawings from paper, so in general, the end result will look somewhat similar (drawn and colored on paper---watercolor backgrounds, and such).  It will just be drawn by a different hand going forward (mine).

If you're interested in helping to alpha test, please email me:  jasonrohrer AT fastmail DOT fm

Well, I need people with a variety of different computers.  I need some Mac testers, some people with different Window computers, different graphics cards, etc.

I also need people who are willing to chase down bugs and glitches and find ways to reproduce them.

Each year passes in one minute.

When you're a baby, you really depend on your parents for survival.

Each object in the game has an age that you have to be before you can pick it up.  Newborn babies can't pick up much, but as you get older, you can start helping out more.  By around age 4 or 5 (4-5 minutes), you can feed yourself.  There will be some thing toddlers (age 2-3) will be able to pick up, so the parents can give them some stuff to do (husking corn, planting seeds, etc.)  Maybe also some baby toys, eventually.

But newborn babies can't pick up a weapon or ride away on your horse.

What's interesting about being a baby is the situation you find yourself born into, and communicating with your parents about your survival needs.  If you have bad parents, your life will be short.

When you get old, you still can DO everything, but your stomach shrinks.  You don't need someone to feed you, but it might help if someone brought a bunch of food to you.  This stage of life is interesting as you watch your children around you as adults now, and see your grandchildren being born.  You may want to "tidy up" whatever project you were working on in your life, and pass it on to your heirs, because after you die, you'll likely never see it or them again (you'll be reborn somewhere else in the world).

When you're old, you can SPEAK the longest thoughts.  Each year gives you one extra letter per chat message.  At age 60, you can chat 60 letters at a time.  So, you can also guide your family.

There is NO built-in incentive for taking care of your baby.

However, you only get old enough to HAVE a baby if someone else took care of you when you were a baby (just like real life!).  Remember those kind parents who sacrificed so much to keep you alive?

Also, since you only live one hour, what you are working on in your lifetime only has meaning in terms of how it will benefit future generations.  Your baby IS that future.  If you never have a baby survive until adulthood, you are living in isolation and cutting yourself off from the greater story and meaning that is possible in the game.

Obviously, you can chose to live this way and play alone.

But I think most people will take care of babies.

1.
In the ideal case, every player who joins the game joins as a baby.  On the other hand, we NEVER make a player wait to join the game.  Everyone should join instantaneously.

Here's how I balance these two factors:

Every female character in the game who is of fertile age can have at most two young babies at any one time.  If a given female has two living young babies, the next baby born will go to some other female.

In the rare case that EVERY female has two living young babies, the next player to join will spawn as a new Eve character, elsewhere on the map.  Eve is zapped into existence fully grown up and fertile.

Thus, if there's a sudden surge of new players, there could be a bunch of Eve's spawned to cope with the surge.

But each Eve can have 2 babies, so even during a surge, 2/3 of the surge players will be babies, and only 1/3 of them will be Eve's.

2.
Everyone is hungry all the time.  There's a bar on the screen that shows your stomach and how full it is.  Babies and elderly people have very small stomachs, meaning they need to eat more frequently to survive.  As you grow up, your stomach gets bigger, allowing you to go on longer journeys without risk of dying from hunger along the way.  Toward the end of life, your stomach shrinks back down again.

3.
I've thought about this, but I'm not sure.  One idea is that way high in the tech tree is "the button," a doomsday machine that will reset the world.  People in the game can then fight over whether or not to create or use the button.

Of course, during testing, the world may need to reset from time to time, but so far, we haven't reset it.  The goal is to never reset it for development reasons if it can be avoided.

We may find that the game is more interesting with some kind of regular reset schedule (for example, once a week or month).  The game is VERY different at the beginning of civilization than it is at the end.

However, players looking for a "simple" life can always wander away from the center of civilization into the wilderness.  There are no fixed "ages" in the game, and different tech levels can exists simultaneously in different pockets of the map, just like real life.

And the map has plenty of room for this.  It's larger than 30,000 times the surface area of planet Earth and would take more than 34 continuous, real-world years to walk from one edge to the other.

Well, if you have any questions for me, fire away.