One Hour One Life Forums

The OHOL+ client from Awbz has superseded this effort, and is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

https://github.com/Awbz/OneLife

Nope! It's just what I assumed based on something Jason posted once about the Linode server reflector.

Cool!

... the tracking part, not the sick part. Sorry to hear that.

The chart looks compatible with what I assume the balancing is: there is a pool with active servers; new connections are evenly distributed between servers in the pool; when there are more than X connections to each current server, a new server is added to the pool. And at some point when there are fewer than Y connections to each current server, the highest-numbered server is removed from the pool and receives no new connections.

The chart doesn't show a perfect balance across the servers, but you'd expect some variation, I think, due to people dying at different rates and times on the different servers. If one server has a lot of Eve camps with people dying early and another server has a lot of high-tech towns with people dying of old age, but each server gets roughly the same number of new connections (i.e. births) then the early-death server will have fewer people on it.

Plus maybe some people made manual connections to specific servers? E.g. Server 3 from before it was added to the pool at 4:48.

That makes sense, if the balancing works the way I think it does. When a server gets added to the pool, the spawn rate will drop on the rest of the servers while their death rate stays the same. That means a drop in population, a drop in fertility, and an increase in lineage collapse due to infertility on the existing servers. Meanwhile, there's a population explosion on the new server.

The opposite will happen when overall population is falling and a server is removed from the pool. The other servers will see a surge in births while the removed server is rendered sterile.

But those are one-time events as servers are added and removed from the pool. During the course of a day, a rising trend will boost population evenly across all the servers in the pool, and a falling trend will kill off lineages evenly across all the servers in the pool. It's only when the server-count thresholds are crossed that the number of servers in the pool changes, thereby temporarily imbalancing the populations.

Things get roughly equalized within a generation, after which each server has about the same population (and hence about the same death rate) to match their equally-distributed birth rates. You can see that on the chart as well: after about an hour of skyrocketing population, Server 3 has a roughly stable population and is roughly equal in pop to the other two servers. Roughly. Ish. More or less.

This is all guessing on my part, but here's what Jason has said: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … p?id=6&p=2

This is the most evil thing I've seen in this game to date.

Kudos.

No, that's not correct. The only difference is that, for every shorn sheep you are required to feed in order to recover your lamb production (because you sheared too many and don't have enough unshorn remaining to produce lambs), you have to spend an extra bc bowl and you gain an extra fleece.

Consider this slight change to your scenario:

Start with one wooly sheep and two bowls (instead of only one as in your example).

Scenario one:
Shear the sheep.
Feed the shorn sheep.
Wait for a lamb.
Feed the lamb.
Shear one sheep.

Result: One wooly sheep, one shorn sheep, two fleece.

Scenario two:
Wait for a lamb.
Feed the lamb.
Sheer one sheep.

Result: One wooly sheep, one shorn sheep, one fleece, and one bowl.

Extend this example to any number of sheep and lambs and bowls, over any duration, with as many instances of shearing-the-last-sheep as you like, and you will discover that the only difference is that every time you shear the last time and are forced to feed a shorn sheep to recover lamb production, you will have one additional fleece and one fewer bowls of berries-and-carrot.

That's not "way more output". It's the exact same output, except that now and then you trade one more bowl for one more fleece.

Not shearing the last sheep is purely a matter of inventory management. It's the same kind of problem as having at least one ripe wheat field to produce wheat seeds (but it's easier to fix than wheat if you screw it up).

This is already the case. Lineages have an effective size range. The maximum is the number of people resulting from every woman having as many births as possible, limited only by the birth cooldown (which is on average one birth every 2.5 minutes). The minimum is two births per woman on average, which results in one girl per woman on average, which results in the lineage just barely continuing (assuming everyone survives to adulthood).

When the game population is growing, lineages grow to the maximum population (as many births as possible, limited by the cooldown) and then beyond that maximum Eves start spawning.

When the game population is shrinking, births become less frequent and the lineages get smaller. One by one each lineage reaches the minimum population, then goes below that minimum and dies. Each lineage that dies means that the remaining lineages will get more births and thereby postpone dying out... but if the population keeps shrinking, the births will keep falling and the lineages will keep shrinking and then dying out one by one.

This is also the case already. The most successful lineages will be the largest, which means they have the most women, which means they have the most births, because births are evenly distributed across all women.

In other words, the more successful you are already, the longer you will last before dying out when the population is shrinking. If you're big enough, you can outlast the nightime's population drop and make it through to the next day's population growth.

That's correct. He isn't a griefer. He's just an asshole.

And the people he killed aren't griefers, they're just not very good at the game. That is not a crime and should not receive the death penalty.

"No girls" is simply a side effect of "not many children". Even if the male-female ratio were changed to NO boys and ALL girls, that would merely postpone the demise of a lineage, not prevent it.

The population in the game has short-run rises and falls due to the real-world day and night cycle. This will never change. When it is rising, more lineages will be created (i.e. more Eves). When it is falling, more lineages will die. This will never change.

I believe that the only solution to this is what Jason has already done recently: he moved the Eve spawns closer to each other, so that new lineages have a greater chance of coming across an old, dead town and bringing it back to life. Lineages will die off and that can't be prevented, but civilizations can thrive even after a lineage dies because the infrastructure you leave behind will be rediscovered and reused by someone else - just not by your own descendants.

Hopefully as the tech advances and the tree expands Jason will find ways to balance the whole thing so that surviving at every level is always a challenge.

Right now start-up is hard, but once you hit a certain level it's nearly foolproof (I say "nearly" because the way most lineages die (besides infertility) is through foolishness - fools are not to be underestimated).

I think this is what Jason had his eye on with the iron nerf, although I don't think that quite did what he wanted. It made start-up harder without really affecting the long run. Getting the balance right will require a lot more than just tinkering with iron levels. And, of course, I'm sure Jason knows this.

I'm looking forward to seeing what he does next.

Iron is not yet and never has been a constraint. We should ignore calculations centered around the goal of optimizing iron.

Efficient continuation of civilization is not the goal of the game. If it were, then we would make a cow and a bucket and then sit there doing nothing.

Kerosene technology should be built simply for the sake of building technology.

Art should be made for the sake of art.

Towns rapidly reach the point where resources such as food and equipment and storage and transport are abundant. Abundance exists to be used... and to be used as you see fit.

Chances are good that the iron was gotten by someone who is already long since dead, and now you have as much claim to use it as anyone else.

In truth compost uses four shovel units, because idiots pick up the compost in the pen and then put it down someplace else instead of leaving it in the pen until they have a compost pile to use it on.

[ gripe gripe gripe ]

Besides ryanb's detailed guide...

I've been trying to figure it out myself exclusively through in-game methods, and there's a lot to grapple with. But I know that people have gotten it all worked out, because I've seen the end results in many towns: additional steam-driven machines, oil wells, kerosene distillers, and kerosene-powered water pumps plus assorted accoutrements such as fuel tanks and machine parts.