a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I'll be honest. I don't play on the main servers very much at all because I'm literally on the other side of the planet and lag is a pretty big issue. I'd *like* to play the game, but even when I overcome the lag issue, I feel that quite a large contingent of the existing players don't want new players. They want to play their own way, using discord and voice chat to organise themselves. There is a kind of denial of service attack against new players, or players who want to play differently -- kill them. We could start a war with players taking sides and each side killing the other. But, of course, that's precisely the game that the denied players *don't* want to play.
This is an effective filter. There are many other games to play. I'm interested to see if a balance eventually settles here, but I've been on the internet long enough to guess what the balance will be. It's a kind of evolution. As time passes and the denial of service continues, the only players who want to play the game will be the ones who like the game as it is. That's not necessarily bad, but the game is billed as "a multiplayer survival game of parenting and civilization building". I think the game is naturally flowing to one of how to wield power in a world simulator with a thriving meta-game. Breezeknight's protest is an interesting development, but it's of the same ilk -- it's an effort to disrupt the status quo. One side kills males. The other side suicides if female.
I feel that Jason would prefer to design the game so that there is an emergent behaviour that matches his original concept of the game. I think that's fine, but I also think that he underestimates the power of this filter. Players (on average) *won't* come back. As I've said before, people are a non-renewable resource. Once you use them up, they are gone. It's easy to believe that there will always be more to replace the ones you lost... but that's just as wrong for people as it is for any other resource. The pool diminishes and once a particular culture is dominant, it's basically impossible to unseat it.
If you were surrounded by seven bears as soon as you were born as Eve, I'm sorry. XP
LOL! I didn't even last one in-game day :-) I really wondered about that. I hardly ever play on the normal server either... Not sure if it was really your doing (it was a couple of weeks ago), but if it was, that's hilarious.
It is possible that I was the first person to suggest a karma ladder. I actually kind of like the idea of the killed being demoted in a strange way. I think the key is that there aren't just 2 servers. There are 15. Let's say you are in the "heaven" of server 15. You get murdered. You go down to server 14. It's not such a big deal. You killers can't identify you. They can't stalk you and shoot you down to server 1. You're still in a heaven like server anyway. You're a bit more careful and you stay out of trouble. Eventually you go back up to server 1.
Also, just like real karma, there is not good karma and bad karma. There is just karma. Who's to say that server 1 really is "heaven"? As TrustyWay implies, what if I *want* to kill other players because that's what I find fun (sorry to paraphrase). What if I want to play on a server where killing happens more often? What's wrong with that? If that's what you like, then there will be an easy way to get there.
Not to turn this in to a religion class, but karma is the result of action. There is skilful action and there is unskilful action. We can debate in the forum about what action is skilful and what action is not, but it would be *way* more fun if we did it in the game. A good part of the conflict in the community is that some people want to play one way and some people want to play another way. There is no way to create consensus because each group spoils the other's game. We never see the outcome of these ideas.
To go back to the thread's title, I've been pretty impressed. I certainly would have done things differently than Jason. In fact, I would be a raving lunatic if I had to deal with the stuff he's dealing with. He seems to stay calm (I can't understand how -- please teach me sometime if you are reading!). He's been pretty open with the idea that the game is intended to run for a couple of years. So we're maybe 2% of the way to death robots. Long way to go and I'm super curious to see how it goes.
I'll give my 2 cents (and I have only 4 minutes free to do so, which is probably good :-) ). I've worked as a teacher before. Free speech is awesome. You want people to speak freely -- especially in a classroom. How else can they learn? But sometimes there are disruptions. Sometimes the disruptions are intentional. Sometimes they are not. It doesn't matter why the disruptions exist: if you let them disrupt the group, then the group will be disrupted.
Group dynamics are tricky and can move from wonderful to horrible in a speed that can take your breath. Some people are very good at moving group dynamics in the horrible direction. Sometimes they do it on purpose. Sometimes they don't.
You can't be fair. You can't allow everything. You must act. If you do not, the group will implode. Your chief tools are guidelines that allow people to intuit what will cause problems and what will not. You should communicate those guidelines. When you act to correct a problem, you should do so quickly, with humility and you should explain why you are doing what you are doing. That action should help you adjust your guidelines in the future.
Time up :-)
Just to give a bit more detail (since I've had to build payment systems before): credit card processing companies require that personal information as part of their fraud prevention. The idea is that it is easier to get the card details than your other personal information. So if someone manages to steal your card, they won't be able to make a purchase. Well, that's pretty crazy, of course, because most credit card thieves steal credit card information from computers these days and they get all your details. So I'm with you that it's completely unnecessary. Of course having a key-less payment system is completely bonkers in the first place and so we have to doubt the sanity of banks to begin with. But the fact remains that they want it.
Having said that, you should pay attention to who is getting your information. You will notice that it is fastspring.com that is asking for the information, not the bank. Visa has their "3D secure" program where they get your personal details. I think other credit cards have similar things, but it's been a while and I'm not sure. There is no reason for a payment processor to take private information. Fastspring's privacy policy is here: https://fastspring.com/privacy/ Paging through it I notice that they sell information for their "Ecommerce Network". So you are right to be concerned.
I have noticed that they intend to be "fully compliant" with the GDPR on May 25th. They claim that they will add opt-out buttons and clear terms and conditions, but it's unclear to me whether or not it will be generally available or only to EU customers. You might want to wait until then.
I've been kind of avoiding the forum because it seemed a bit stressful, but lately it seems to have improved quite a bit. I'll try again :-)
I don't want to speak for Jason for a variety of different reasons (he can speak for himself, there have been a lot of assumptions about what he has been thinking and I think it has caused problems, etc) But I also want to respond to you breezeknight because I feel for you and I don't think you have as much to worry about as you might think. While I have no idea what Jason is thinking, there is a very common theme in all of his work: he likes making the games himself. In his previous games he has gone well out of his way to implement stuff from scratch where he could have easily used a library. Everything he does is stamped with his own personality and I think he likes it that way.
So, I don't think that he's necessarily avoiding similar functionality, but I also don't think he will accept *anyone's* patches for new functionality. That's just not the way he works. It's funny because he has a couple of pull requests on github that he has neither closed nor accepted and I'm always curious what he's going to do with them. I suspect he doesn't really know himself :-)
The other thing that I think is important to recognise is that Uncle Gus is doing a fantastic job. He's already found a couple of bugs and his comments are really insightful. *Especially* with such an experimental game, the concept of free software is super important. Many people have mixed emotions about the game, but the awesome thing is that you can do anything that Jason can do -- he has given you that power. Of course, not everybody has the technical ability to do those things. And that's where people like Uncle Gus come in.
For me, if Uncle Gus were to stop working on his mod because Jason included his code in the main code base, we would all lose something. Jason's game is Jason's game. But software is jazz -- you get to riff on the theme. When you do, that riff will be heard and it will be echoed -- not in it's exact form, but altered, modified and expanded. Every contribution is in itself an invitation to contribute. I have been keeping tabs on Uncle Gus's work without ever using it, because his work makes me happy. I hope he continues for a very long time to come.
OK. Fair enough. If I can squeak in one more piece of feedback before I go: it can help in moderation to help people understand basic guidelines. Common sense is tricky in an international forum because common sense is often very culturally based (I once did a workshop about culture in Japan. I had people hold a debate about methods of bathing, just to show them how tricky cultural issues could be. I actually had to break up fights :-) ). I can see that you are a no nonsense moderator and that's always nice to see. However, it makes things much easier to understand if you calmly explain what's going on (explain it like I'm 5 is a nice meme to follow). I will admit that I have difficulty with this forum's culture and it makes it hard for me to contribute. I suspect this is true for other people as well.
I honestly thought it was a respectful discussion geared towards helping people enjoy their time better on the forums. I'm a little bit taken aback by the moderation. Certainly there are differences of opinion, but I've got to say that in my opinion everyone listened and reacted thoughtfully. I certainly respect that there are rules for the forum and I will try to respect them, but I would ask that if there are such rules, can you please let me know where they are (or lacking such rules, please post some in a conspicuous place). I'm sure there's a lot more context that I can't see, but just on the face of it, it seems a bit arbitrary.
This is a stab in the dark, but I'm guessing that Kali is using SDL2 and installing the headers in /usr/include/SDL (or you renamed the directory in order to try to fix the problem). The game uses SDL version 1, so you need to install that... Given that Kali is a Debian derivative you should be able to find a deb somewhere I guess... Here's a starting point: https://packages.debian.org/search?suit … ds=SDL+1.2
I hate conversations like this one (so I shouldn't participate, should I ;-) ).
Did I see it here? (my memory is terrible): Society flourishes when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in -- Greek proverb. Pretty much what this game is about. One of the best parts of this game, IMHO, is death -- it forces a sense of detachment. Why are you building a city when you won't be around to see it? Especially, you are so busy in this game that even when you have a great city, it's hard to find time to enjoy it. I think it's actually a shame that many players try to be reborn in the same village over and over again. But I understand how hard it is to let go.
I find it interesting, though slightly uncomfortable, to see many parallels in the game to real life. I'm willing to wager that I'm older than the vast majority of other players of this game. I've had a number of experiences and my naivety is long gone. Even still, I cringe when I see threads about granting life only to children who know the secret code. I am unsurprised, but saddened, when I see frank comments about murdering fellow villagers who don't do as they are told. When resources are scarce and risk is high, we can't afford to feed players with whom we disagree. As an aside, I'm not entirely in sync with Jason's belief that only by making survival more difficult will we avoid griefers -- because it is only excess which affords society mercy. Indeed, it is only idleness that allows us to think, enjoy time, research and grow. Without idleness, none of us would be playing this game.
Getting to the point (finally), the forums are a community. It is a real community, not a game. It is easy to think (and to act) as if you have no time, no energy, no ability and no desire to accommodate other ways of thinking. My time is precious to me and I do not wish to waste it on fools. If I won't even give you a carrot in the game because you have a different point of view, how much less likely am I to give you my time? And yet why should an old man plant a tree?
Deciding on an acceptable form of etiquette is no different than deciding not to let carrots go to seed. Each person is a resource and our resources are finite. If you waste them, they will not come back. Eventually our community will die, just as surely as it does in the game. Acting skillfully, we can build something bigger before we all die (as we must). It is not through ruthless action to minimise use that you will succeed, but rather by creating excess.
I understand the preference for female children, but I don't think males are useless. As soon as I'm able to feed myself, I can pretty much take care of myself (you need to get a little lucky striking off and finding a berry bush and then some way to make a basket). As a male, once you get that basket and a berry or two, then you've got the ability to start running around getting resources that the eve can't get too (because she's too busy starting the farm). The added advantage is that you never get kids to slow you down, so you can always go on a long romp to find far away berries/cactus fruits.
It's inherently risky, but raising a male to bare minimum age and saying: Go into the wild and fetch me things seems like a viable option. I think the key for a startup village is that you can't support anyone but the Eve. However, 10 years later, someone returning with a basket of threads is going to be massive. Not only that, but they will know the lay of the land. I think it's doable if you have a mind to risk it.
Not sure if you've fixed the server, but I had the same problem: In the directory where you start the server, you need a file called "dataVersionNumber.txt". It should contain the version that you require (73 is the current latest version). If you run "pullAndBuildUpdates" it makes that file, but crucially it does *not* rebuild the server (another way to have server/client mismatches). The easiest way to build is to use "pullAndBuildUpdates", then go into "OneLife/server", run "make", then "cp OneLifeServer ../..", "cp settings/* ../../settings" and finally run the server from the directory abover "OneLife". Crucial: If you have been running the server from the "OneLife/server" directory, don't do this. The DB cache, etc will be in the wrong place. Instead go into "OneLife/server" and "cp ../../dataVersionNumber.txt .".
I'm sure that's clear as mud, but I suspect you'll figure it out if you haven't already.
The thing that scares me about the apocalypse is that I noticed that *my* server checks for remote apocalypses! Interestingly, my server was down when the apocalypses happened, so it didn't affect me, but that option is well worth turning off on a private server. I need to check the source code because I was tempted to try to do an apocalypse on my own server, but I'm a bit afraid that it will trigger the same on other private servers that don't have the option turned off...
If I understand Jason's latest post, Eve's are spawned farther apart now, so I think this suggestion is more relevant than before. You can't really rely on raiding old civs to boost your economy, so the only way to keep everything rolling is to have babies. If there are no males close to the females, then new players will spawn as Eves -- far away from civilisation. If there are males close to females, then babies can be born.
I would personally avoid the baby making smooches, since it will just complicate things. Proximity should be good enough -- and I don't think there even needs to be *any* UI feedback other than babies being born.
I have to admit that I've had the same problem with Jason's previous games. I've never been able to pay him. I couldn't get a credit card because I'm a foreigner. Lately credit cards are easier to get here (and I also got married, so could use my wife's card). But I've literally been waiting 10 years to send Jason money.
However, I also completely understand the rationale in not releasing on Steam. Releasing a game of this nature as a solo developer is ridiculously hard. Releasing it on Steam would be insane. I wish I knew of a good solution :-(
I actually had low enough latency from Japan to play on the official server today. I had a blast. I was happy to be a man because I don't really know what I'm doing. I spent my life wandering the wilds making baskets and taking back thread and cactus fruit to the village. I was astounded how fast the village grew in my life time. It was really amazing. At the end, though, the water skins seemed to disappear and then the farm looked like it was doomed. I went exploring to find more thread to make water skins, but got stuck in a big desert and starved. Such is life and death. I hope someone managed to sort it out in the end.
I have not been on the official server except for a few seconds. I live in Japan and the 300 ms lag each way pretty much means that the game is unplayable. I started using my own server and playing all by myself... which seems strange (and it is), but it's actually pretty fun. I can tell you that learning that you restart at your old base if you die of old age as an Eve made the game much more interesting ;-)
I've finally convinced my wife to play with me and so tonight we'll give it a go just the two of us. To be honest, I don't have much time to play games, so I'm strangely happy to dabble a bit and follow the saga on the forums. But I'm getting the feeling that this game really benefits from custom servers. If you get a group of like minded players, I'm sure it can be a lot of fun. At the same time, it seems to be a lot of fun dealing with the drama on the official servers. I'll be honest, though, I don't think I'd want to have that be my only exposure to the game.
This game (and every other game that Jason has written as far as I know) is free software. That doesn't mean free of charge. That means freedom (the old free as in freedom, not as in beer). I think what Jason is doing on the official servers is super interesting, but I also value the freedom to forge my own path. I know that not everybody has the technical knowledge to comfortably set up their own server, but there are already several unofficial servers out there that you can visit if you want. In all honesty, there is no real barrier to learning how to set up your own server either -- it is in your power. If you run into trouble, there will be people to help (and I will try to help as well to the extent that I can).
Providing feedback like you are doing is a great thing. I'm a software developer and the kind of message you wrote is like pure gold to me. I don't want to discourage you from doing that kind of thing. But I hope that you'll get some ideas for shaping the game exactly how you and your friends would like to interact with it -- because that's a thing you can do.
I'm not really making this a suggestion, but I think it's an interesting idea. In the game you die and are reborn. For the most part you don't have control of where, or in what situation you are reborn. In your next life, you inherit the consequences of other people's actions. So if the previous people were peaceful and productive, then you can advance the civilisation. If the previous people were involved in violence, or "unskilled action" (for example, stealing, etc), then you have to deal with the difficult consequences. This is karma. However, in many religions the concept of karma includes the idea that if you engage in "unskilled action", then *you* will suffer the consequences of your actions in your next life. One hour does not model that kind of karmic reincarnation.
Given that there are multiple servers anyway, I wonder what it would be like if there was a way to tag people with "karma". If you kill someone, your karma goes in one direction (negative?). If you piss people off, they can perhaps tag you with "negative karma". Similarly, if people are happy with your behaviour, or you build something, then your karma goes in the other direction (positive)? Next, when people are reborn, the server you play on is determined by your karma level. All the people with the lowest karma would play on the lowest level server and all the people with the highest karma would play on the highest level server. You could bump people up or down a level or two randomly, just to make it hard to game (i.e., being a saint in one game is not a guarantee that you will be bumped up -- you would have to play "skillfully" consistently for several lives to ensure that you end up in the upper servers consistently). Similarly, "karma bombing" someone with negative karma won't permanently keep them off a server.
I think the nice thing about this kind of feature is that it sorts people by their preferred playstyle automatically. Players who wish to model a more dynamic range of human experience can treat each other like crap and have fun doing it, while those who primarily want to live in a garden of eden can do so. I also think that bumping people around occasionally to show them what another world looks like would be interesting.
Edit: I actually thought of an implementation that would probably work, so this is more in suggestion territory. Create a "karma server". The server logs karma changes on the karma server (primary key in the DB can be the access key for the server, you can do it asynchronously because you don't really care about consistency). Each server has a "karma threshold" -- the minimum amount of karma necessary to play on the server. If the player is below that level, then they get punted to the next server (which can be random). Each server also has a "karma difficulty". The higher the difficulty, the less likely the player can play on the server. However, the higher their karma, the higher the chance. The lowest level server has a zero threshold and a zero difficulty (anyone can try to get in and their success chance is 100%, no matter their karma). Other servers may have a higher threshold, but allow everybody in (only "good" people can play, but once you are vetted, then you are in). Still others may have a difficulty that governs the chance to play ("good" people have a high probability to be able to play, while "evil" people have a small chance to play on that server). The difficulty could even be made dynamic for load balancing purposes (all the hellish servers are full, so you allow a few more players to play in heaven).
I live in Japan and the official servers are too far away from me to play (too much lag). I've been playing solo on my own server and it's actually quite fun. I can verify that the respawn in the same place works (I'm guessing that's how Jason did his initial testing). If you want to play solo I highly recommend it (you can find some instructions on setting up the server in one of the stickies, though it's a bit technical).
TrustyWay, I think Bob has it right: The differences in the votes are because Reddit never shows you the correct total. The reason is to stop people from doing what you are worried about. The idea is that if you down vote an issue and the number doesn't change, you don't know if: 1) You are shadow banned and so your vote didn't count 2) You down voted and somebody up voted at the same time 3) The vote counted, but you Reddit showed you the wrong total.
Imagine that you have 10 fake accounts and you use them to up/down vote things. They might all get shadow banned and you won't know it -- so you keep trying to up/down vote things and don't try to make even more fake accounts.
The strange one in your batch is Transition between biomes, which seems to have *about* 5 votes. In one case it showed zero which is quite a bit less than it actually had. I went to look at how Reddit implements their display and it appears that something of that size *can* happen (an example they gave was that you won't know if something has 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, or 32 votes). Apparently if there is a lot of action on a particular item they increase the amount of difference that they show -- just to make things even more difficult. I would love to point to something official from Reddit that explains this, but unfortunately they don't have anything :-( They are afraid that if they explain what they are doing it will help people cheat. However, if you do a Google search for "reddit scoring", you should find a lot of information.
One last thing: don't make second accounts and play with upvoting and downvoting. Because you probably have the same IP address and you are upvoting and downvoting the same issues, your accounts are likely to get shadow banned -- and then you won't be able to vote any more (even though you won't notice it).
Reddit has some pretty sophisticated voting safeguards in it. For example, if some kind of coordinated voting appears to be happening, your account can get shadow banned (it appears to allow you to upvote or downvote, but in reality nothing happens). I'm not saying that it's impossible to cheat, just that it's pretty difficult. I'd like to see considerably more evidence than "My suggestion is good and it isn't voted high enough".
I couldn't find any suggestions with the name "TrustyWay", but I found several from a person named "HighWizardofTheSun" which includes a suggestion not to rig upvotes. One thing that might need explanation is that the default view ("Hot") uses an algorithm to rank posts. It's basically the upvotes divided by the amount of time that the suggestion has been active. In that way, new post start off at the top and slowly fall down over time. I wonder if this is what you (or "HighWizardofTheSun") is observing.
The total number of upvotes/downvotes is listed on the left hand side. To sort by that, you can click "Top" just under the "OneLifeSuggestions" title and then select "past week", or whatever time frame you want from the drop down that will appear on the next page. If you look at the "Top" suggestions for this week, you can see that HighWizardofTheSun's suggestion for "WheatHat" is highly scored and is in the top 15 suggestions. Some of their other suggestions are near the top of the "Hot" section, but are not popular and are falling fast. The "WheatHat" suggestion is *not* high up on the "Hot" list -- not because it has been downvoted, but because it isn't being upvoted any more. That's just how "Hot" works.
Personally, I find reddit's UI *incredibly* confusing, so I don't blame anyone for getting confused.
Having said that, given the vocal presence of griefer protection suggestions on this forum, I was a little bit surprised that they aren't voted higher on reddit. The one thing I've noticed by reading the suggestions and comments is that there appears to be little consensus on the correct way to improve the situation and so, while there are quite a few suggestions, none of them are being voted up.
It appears to be alternating rows of empty baskets and carrots, with the left most column of carrots being left to seed. Around the outside of the box is as written. The key to the chart is a bit hard to notice, but essentially anywhere you see "-3" its an empty basket and anywhere you see a "5" it's a row of carrots. I'm most curious about the significance of -3 and 5 and what it has to do with the Minoan culture...
Edit: Ah -3 indicates it can hold 3 things and 5 indicates there are 5 carrots. I get it now!
While I can understand how people could be confused, personally I had no difficulty understanding that the game is not finished and that it is evolving. Having said that, I fully believe that everything in that trailer was coded into the game to make the trailer. It's not coded in a way that you could use in the game, but it's also not just put together with Blender or something. I say that having played a large proportion of Jason's other games and having read a lot of his source code. He likes to write code and often writes a lot of code that he could easily get out of a library somewhere. Who knows, I could be wrong, but...
Now, I'm going to say it up front: I'm a super huge Jason Rohrer fan boy (even though I'm about 10 years older than him ;-) ), so you can take my comments with a grain of salt. I view Jason's games more like performance art than I do games. I think he is a great artist and his games reflect that. However, the game side sometimes takes a back seat to the art. Cultivation is my favourite game up until this point and I highly encourage people to play it -- the utter frustration of the ending is both maddening and wonderful (and yes, I hacked my own ending because I like to live in happy-ville :-) ). Passage wasn't even fun for me. But it's brilliant. (Go on, play it -- it's worth it).
But this game is different: We must rebuild civilisation. Seriously, what are the challenges for rebuilding civilisation? Don't constrain yourself to the game mechanics that you are looking at, because I am 100% positive that Jason isn't. The whole *point* of this game is the evolution and not just upgrading a few sprites or using ever more recipes. The game evolves, the communities in the game evolve. The communities playing the game evolve. The players evolve! Give the programmer a break -- he has to evolve too. He can't figure it out all ahead of time. ;-)
I do also appreciate the frustrations as well. FWIW, I think this game uses death as a way to bring rebirth and hope. I don't know how the game will turn out in the end, but I really do hope. Will it work? It would be amazingly fantastic if it did, and so far it looks pretty promising to me. I literally haven't been so excited for years. If you can find a way to have fun, I think it will be more than worth it!
Source code is available ;-). Here are the items: https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeD … er/objects
There currently appear to be 660 objects in the game. I'm quite sure he meant that there will *eventually* be 10,000 objects. The point of the game is for people to play the game while he watches and adds relevant content every week. In that way he gets to see what people will value rather than guess ahead of time.
Also, WRT "I killed myself to learn this and ignorant newbies ignore me while ruining everything" is literally my life as a senior programmer. I will guess that it is pretty much true of many aspects of life. Solve this problem and you will "win the game". I'll just point out, though, that Jason wrote this game and yet does not accept patches for anything except bug fixes. Going away and playing on your own server, where you can vet the other players is a completely reasonable strategy. Even playing by yourself on your own server is quite fun (that's what I've been doing!) Possibly the difficulty level of playing in the wild is too high and you need to control a few variables. Personally, I think this is completely reasonable. But I'll also say that there is fun to be had subjecting yourself to the barbs of society. Consider asking yourself what the purpose of the game is? To learn how to efficiently build everything in the game? Or to learn how to cooperate with a bunch of random people, each having a different set of experiences and goals?
Just judging from the pace of content being added, I guess he intends to extend the game for a few years. He has control over that aspect of the game, but I suspect he is most interested to see how the *players* evolve over that time period.
I wonder if it would be useful to build a docker image instead. The advantage would be that you can automate all the setup more easily. If I get some time, I'll try to do it, but anyone feel free to beat me to the punch because I'm notoriously unreliable ;-)