One Hour One Life Forums

This game is to a large extent based on the works of Jason Rohrer. He allows the reuse, but is not affiliated with us and isn’t taking part in the design and implementation, nor in the operation of our servers.

This looks like a major, MAJOR gameplay improvement to me. Hope and expect to see many more buildings in the settlements, as well as less naked people.
I understand that there was a lot of work required, but I think it was better invested here than in any other aspect of the game.

Maybe it will turn out that something is unbalanced and needs to patched, but the foundation is much more sound than it was before. I’m very hopeful

Good job!

A lot can be said about the temperature features. I have looked at it in depth a while ago, and these are the easiest problems to tackle first in order to get a substantial improvement:

1. Replace the heat map calculation
The math model used today is modeling heat transfer in solid materials, e.g. if you put a part of a metal rod into flame, how does the heat transfer within the rod? It is invalid for air temperature and heat from sources like fire. Air does not conduct heat well, that's why we use it as insulation in building materials, in 2-glass and 3-glass windows, down jackets, etc.
Instead you could calculate air temperature for a character's tile much faster and more accurately by doing a quick weighted average over a few of the neighboring tiles, let's say a 3x3 grid. Or use the single tile's biome data directly if you absolutely don't want averages (but there are other ways to make sure that no tile is perfect - air temperature is not the only one, see bullet 3).

2. Heat sources like fire radiate heat. The amount of heat that a person picks up from a fire is a constant divided by the distance squared. E = C/(r*r). This is if there is direct line of sight. If there is a wall between, then E=0. You could easily evaluate the tiles in the line of sight and find walls. You could also decide that some objects are partially blocking if you want.
Tip: deduct 0.3 from the Y coordinate of a fire source when evaluating r. Then r will become 0.3 for a character standing in the same tile as the fire and 0.7 for a character in the tile directly below the fire, which seems reasonable.

3. Think in terms of protection - not simply temperature.
- In a desert, you will die quickly without shoes, because your feet will melt from the sand. The air temperature is not a problem for your survival (unless you are sickly), but if you don't have clothes the sun will kill you by heating up your skin to the temperature of the sand and by evaporating your sweat before your body heat can do it (thus robbing you of your body's cooling system). Walls can block the sun more effectively than clothes can.
- In snow, you will also die without shoes, because touching ground or snow will conduct heat away from your feet. The air temperature is mostly a problem if the air is moving. Air conducts heat poorly, but it can transport heat (convection). You need clothes and/or walls to protect from this as well.
So treat shoes separately from other clothes. Have them be more effective in the extreme cases.
Also have a Sun and Wind effect in addition to Temperature. They don't need to be shown separately - just be part of the equation that determines how far from a perfect state you are.

4. Create an "indoors" state
Check if someone is indoors or not, i.e. protected on all sides by walls, by checking line of sight within a certain radius (5 tiles?)
If you are indoors, you gain protection from negative wind and sun effects, even if the temperature is the same.
If you want, you can also evaluate how indoor heat sources raise the temperature above the outside temperature. Delta-T = a constant * energy output * R-value / wall area. (Heat sinks work the same way if you invent an AC later)
People should also get the direct heat from fire (bullet 2), of course, no matter if they are indoors or outdoors.

Thanks for reading!

Yes, as the move speed is three tiles per second, one minute's radius equals 180 tiles radius, which means a surface area of 100,000 tiles. Running through all of them would take about 10 hours. Let's say you actually only need to run through 1/10 to get a look at all tiles (probably too optimistic), then it's a 60 minutes non-stop, no-eating run to cover a circle with 1-minute radius. A 5-minute radius circle would take 25 hours.

There are no absolutes here, maybe this is "the correct" difficulty. My personal hunch is that surface iron was reasonably sparse before (and is too sparse now), whereas the vein iron needed a nerf of some sort.

I like the ideas of making it cost more work to get each piece of iron out, essentially creating a "miner job" for some players. Surface iron was often much richer in iron than mined ore is, so adding some more steps for making iron ore into iron makes sense to me.

I get the impression that you might have misunderstood the purpose of the weapons in the game. From what I have read of Jason’s posts, the primary reason for their PK ability is so you can get rid of griefers (people who play counter to the game’s intentions).

In addition to this, I have read about weapons being used for large armed conflict and even for gladiator challenges, both of which gave the participants lots of mutual enjoyment. (On the mobile version, we are even planning to host a gladiator challenge event in the future, and I’m sure that many people will enjoy it)

And then there’s the (mis)use of the weapons themselves for griefing, which like trolling gives one person enjoyment through causing irritation for others.
There are more people than you who enjoy playing with the weapons. Find such people and challenge each other. Don’t use them on people who don’t appreciate it. Where’s the fun in that, if you really think about it?

My two cents

I think there's a flaw in the logic: You don't need 15bits of meta data for each object ID, you merely need N object IDs that are associated with N meta-data IDs, where N could be very large.

Have your regular objects occupy IDs 0-99,999, your auto-generated ones occupy 100,000-999,999 and start objects with meta-data at ID #1,000,000. To find the corresponding meta-data container, deduct 1,000,000 from the object ID.

The current way of starting auto-generated object IDs directly after the highest "base" object ID, is actually a potential bug source every time the data version changes. Keeping a lot of room between the types and not having to move the boundaries ever again, seems like a good idea to me.

I don't think there's a reason to inscribe carrots or piles of soil, etc. This is primarily a graphical game and not a text driven one, so text should probably be reserved for dedicated objects, such as parchments, books and rune stones (maybe grave stones?).

When you implement text, I hope you will consider using unicode, so different languages and symbols could be supported.

Cheers!

The game is released now. Look here for more info: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 785#p27785

Thanks a lot!

Sounds like you worked out a very good custom made solution to the problem, which everyone will benefit from. Great job!

Sounds very promising!

What is the number of records on server 1, btw?