a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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What if only one person could fit in a tile?
Griefable by blocking, I think.
Roman numerals?
I’d imagine people would start chatspeaking more if we allowed numbers and the standard keyboard set
Inb4: gtg dont w8 4 me
Games and the Internet also have a fundamental degree of anonymity.
Due to the anonymous nature of online interactions, people are comfortable saying and doing stuff they wouldn't ordinarily do in real life.
It's a benefit in terms of free speech, but a detriment with regards to cyber-bullying/racism/other nasty stuff.
People's sense of fun is different in a game vs. real life.
Shooting people with guns is fun in games.
Shooting people with guns is not fun in real life (at least, I presume).
In games, people just wanna have fun~
I'm sort of back-of-envelope calculating this, but...
10,000 total player births, 50% of which are /DIE babies (so not real lives).
If births were "free choice", let's assume most people wouldn't /DIE anymore and now we have 5,000 real lives.
Except now we'd be back to 1200+ eves, so a minimum of 1200/5000 (25%) of lives will be eves.
So at any given moment when 100 players are online, ~25 will be eves, and if we approximate fertility rate as equal between families, the ballpark probability of being born to any given family drops to around 1/(N+25) where N is the original number of families. IDK where to take this from here... For reference, after ClutterBeGone, we initially only had 2-3 families, then number of families increased to SERVERPOP/15 families (N=~6-7)... so this is 33% => 16% => 5%
you already got the tutorial breakout
if someone cant do that with al lthe resources, then what kidn of Eve will he be?
like is bare minimum to make bowls and a farm, maybe the tutorial should include that with some egg cooking and pottery
then they get some options if they die
Oh I think this is a cool idea!
Maybe expand the tutorial with more torches; lighting more torches unlocks more features.
You could effectively make this into a single-player "campaign" mode (or "challenge" mode) to the game, which I think some players would really appreciate the option of having. When I just started out, I really wished there was more opportunity to practice stuff by myself (and some of the forum members here basically learned how to play OHOL on mods like the OneCity mod that were good for practice). .
I really like how pein's idea ties together teaching more (optional) content in exchange for a reward.
Make it could be Steam Achievements style -- like unlocking "50 achievements" in this tutorial/singleplayer mode unlocks the Eve button on the preferences menu.
Examples of achievements:
- Bring a (XXX - like a domestic sheep skin) to Torch XYZ.
- Create a signpost that says ABCDE next to Torch UVW
- Trap a wild boar in a shrine (lol)
And perhaps players could wander around and attempt the torches they think they know how to do.
If it were riddle style, it would be even cooler, haha. XD
Also, I'm starting to question my decision to reduce us down away from 1200 Eves per day. I'm guessing that at least some of those were accidental.... people who did DIE so much, looking for their favorite town, that they ended up as Eve.
If I have a birth choice screen for advanced players, I might as well put an Eve button in there and just let the chips fall where they may. There are only so many non-Eve babies to go around, and competition will be extremely stiff, but so be it, right?
I guess -- I don't have the confidence to support one system or the other here, so ultimately I'm neutral. XD
If births were entirely "free-choice", my prediction would be that we'd see even more than 1200 Eve's per day -- players (like futurebird) who like to Eve but don't like to /die for it get added to the equation.
Fertility competition would be crazy hard, yup. And we'd probably be back to the shallow generation depths after the pump update (the generation depths increased again after the ClutterBeGone Eve-restriction update -- there was 101 generations with Jane family 4 days ago).
The question, really, is what Jason prefers.
I don't even know what I prefer, haha. XD
It can be a problem with your network too -- if there's any break in any server/computer in between you (client) and onehouronelife.com, you could get a 502. So it could be Jason's server, Jason's proxy server/cloudflare (if he's running one), jason's ISP, jason's DNS server, your ISP, your router...... or anything in the middle.
Usually it's just a temporary hjinck that will resolve well you refresh a few times.
That said, I haven't gotten any with OHOL's forums personally.
Just FYI: this is a bit challenging to implement, given the current engine, and would require pretty hefty code changes.
Jason did say he would implement baby carts eventually though, so maybe revisit that this topic when it seems like the baby trains are on the horizon.
If that’s the case, I don’t get why Jason is so attached to having the /die command link to the selection menu.
It would be just as easy to have a secret keystroke sequence from the main menu that takes you to the special selection menu — it saves the trouble of the initial /die to get to the preferences menu to begin with
So, they'd pick a family name from the list, knowing that they can't be Eve, and then /die? Why not just wait a bit and pull that list up again later to see if there is an Eve slot free?
Well I mean, under Jason’s proposed system you have to been in the game to /die in the first place, consequently you wouldn’t have any way of knowing an eve slot is available until after you /die.
People who really want to Eve would still /die spam until an Eve spot pops up.
lychee wrote:I’m kind of worried about players being incentivized to /die if it unlocks that menu.
It would be really strange to see /die increasing in this system; players who aren’t currently /dieing (but still want to express their preferences) would be encouraged to /die with this kind of mechanic.
Yeah, but they would /DIE once an hour instead of 225 times a day (20 times an hour, even if they play a full 10 hour day). That will be 20x fewer /DIE babies, taking us from 5000/day down to 250/day.
And it could be even better than that. The client could remember that you used /DIE this session, and then always show you the choice screen for the rest of your session. So you'd only /DIE once a day, instead of 225 times a day, for a 200x improvement.
The choice screen could also have a "RANDOM" button on it, which would let you go back to the normal birth assignment.
I don’t know. To be perfectly honest, I still think this is overly optimistic.
When you consider the pre-Eve changes, we were having upwards of 1000 eves per day — and I think that’s a fair approximation of the number of people who were /dying to Eve. I think it’s important to keep in mind that people /die with specific goals in mind, and if they don’t reach that goal even with the “preferences” specified, they will still continue to die (this is probably especially true of the players who SIDS 200+ times daily).
Consequently, even if you implement a “preferences” screen yet maintain the hard limit on the number of Eve’s, I would still expect players who didn’t receive their exact preference to continue to /die until they got the exact preference they want.
In this sense, if you really wanted to combat the /dies yet still limit Eves, it may make more sense to implement a “queue” of some kind. Players who want to Eve would enter a “waiting to be born...” queue that they stay on until an Eve slot opens up. At least this way, they’re not continually dieing until they get their Eve preference.
I’m kind of worried about players being incentivized to /die if it unlocks that menu.
It would be really strange to see /die increasing in this system; players who aren’t currently /dieing (but still want to express their preferences) would be encouraged to /die with this kind of mechanic.
I personally come from a test-driven-development world where unit testing is heavily emphasized, so there’s a greater tendency for us to break things up into modules that can be independently tested.
I actually feel really insecure when I don’t have test coverage on my applications haha XD
But I can understand the gist of what Jason is saying.
I'm not really a C++ developer, so I can't really compare to the industry standard, but Jason tends to roll his own versions of everything from the lowest level rather than using libraries (I think he restricts himself to code that is nearly in the public domain). Consequently there's a level of complexity involved in reading his code -- and it takes a hefty amount of dedicated time to study his personal "minorGems" library.
It's great from an educational standpoint, but the barrier-of-entry is quite high for someone else to tackle Jason's code.
I wouldn't quite call it "spaghetti code" -- that's sort of a misnomer, and Jason's minorGems are very well documented. However as an analogy, whereas lots of programmers these days would buy a uniform pencil (standardized, 2B hardness) from Walmart to draw a picture, Jason makes his own pencil from scratch to draw a picture, which means Jason's pencil might not have the exact same behavior as everyone else's standard pencil.
Oddly enough, Jason has had so much experience making games that he's developed his own framework to developing games -- which impacts readability in its own way.
And to really understand Jason's code fully, you actually have to understand his entire framework -- which is a lot more complex than the typical indie developer's game.cpp main() function where everything lives.
What the heck!
One idea is to draw edges between each parent-child pair.
Would end up appearing as a dendrogram, and you’d see how players are migrating.
lychee wrote:futurebird wrote:But that's the part I like most...
It’s a little hard to track if there’s a divorce or remarriage or mechanic anything like that.
We haven't reinvented the lawyer so at this point it really is until death do us part.
XD
In all seriousness, I think it’s a cool idea — although maybe it might be better to try it as an official mod or fork of the game?
It’s a pretty hefty change if you’re serious about it, so rather than taking OHOL through a rollercoaster of crazy things, I’m sure you’d find a bunch of players willing to test out an unconventional mechanic.
If it seems to work out well, maybe roll it after that point?
Repost
I'm fairly fond of this general idea (and the other variants that have been proposed in the past). xD
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((Don't read beyond this point if you have better things to do)):
I've always been sort of intrigued by the premise of what if the objective of OHOL was the complete opposite of the way Jason designed it. Like: the *only* way to play the game is to be reborn as your own grandchild++. If you failed to have any descendants, there'd be no way you could spawn into the multiplayer server until after some time period reset (in the mean time, you'd have to kill time on a local singleplayer server or a "chill donkeytown" server, maybe with a better "campaign" and some "AI"), after which point you'd never ever see that old family/town again.
It wouldn't be like "Minecraft" (as Jason often says he'd like to avoid) because having a living chain of descendants is pretty hard (in OHOL, lots of family branches die out all the time) and takes a lot of time/energy to raise a kid. In all likelihood, your chain will die out sooner or later.
Instead, there would be a powerful motivation to ensure that your kid(s) do well. You would *want* to teach your kids everything, from avoiding mosquitos or standing on items during a bear attack, how to run a diesel pump, or how to make pads. You'd *want* to help see your son get married, you'd be happy to see grandchildren, and you'd *want* to leave some kind of inheritance/property to your kids and grandkids.
You'd probably want your own kids to do better than your cousin's kids.
If a town is going up in flames, you might put your own family ahead of the rest of the town. Maybe you'll take a wagon and jump ship before it's too late, and look for greener pastures along with your kids. It'd just be you, your spouse (same objective/goals as you), and your children in a household.
It'd be a different feeling to the game, I wonder?
Valareos wrote:1: No need to track spouses in family tree. Just linking a child to two different parents.
But that's the part I like most...
It’s a little hard to track if there’s a divorce or remarriage or mechanic anything like that.
lychee wrote:Oh I like Valareos’s thought process.
Interesting approach!
Needs some balance to ensure there isn’t just that one guy lurking by the fire claiming all the BB’s, but it’s a cool idea.
Easy enough to add a timer. claim recharge at 5 min or whatever, to ensure you only get 1, and its age 5 before getting another
It would be amusing if moms could assign fatherhood too.
“Adam Pu is your dad.” XD
Oh I like Valareos’s thought process.
Interesting approach!
Needs some balance to ensure there isn’t just that one guy lurking by the fire claiming all the BB’s, but it’s a cool idea.