New Eve placement algorithm

jasonrohrer · 2018-04-24 20:14:04

The way Eves are placed has a substantial impact on the feeling of the game. Whenever a player joins the server when there is no suitable mother for that player, that player spawns as a full-grown Eve instead of as a baby. Eve serves as the potential root of a new family tree, and her placement determines the opportunities that are available to that family.

Originally, Eves were placed at random inside an arbitrary radius around the world location (0,0).

This worked fine for a while, until that area began to fill up with civilization. Eve is supposed to feel like a fresh start, with maybe a small chance of stumbling into the ruins of a past civilization, or eventually bumping up against a living, neighboring civilization. As the center of the map got full, Eve was always just a stone's throw away from a village. Furthermore, with everyone so close together, there was no danger of losing a village if it died out. Thus, keeping a village alive meant nothing. We could always find our way back to revive the ghost town tomorrow. Even worse, as these areas got ravaged by human activities, the resources that a new Eve needs to bootstrap became more and more scarce. Eve does need a somewhat green pasture to found a new civilization.

The next Eve placement algorithm involved a random walk across the map, looking at the last Eve location and making a random jump 2000 tiles away to place the next Eve. There can be some randomly-occurring back-tracking with this method, which means that Eve can sometimes end up near the ruins of old civilizations, but we expect such a random walk to eventually explore the entire map, so we will also get farther and farther from center over time. And with many Eves dying without founding new civilizations, and also perhaps due to biases in the random coordinate generator, we quickly walked our way from (0,0) out into the 50,000's. This meant that villages were generally too far apart to interact with each other. Still, Eve was usually in an untouched area full of natural resources.

The next Eve placement algorithm was radial, placing Eves randomly at a radius of 1000 from a fixed center point. This put all villages within trading distance of each other, and offered plenty of untouched space for Eve---for a while. But soon, the "rim" of the wheel filled up with civilization, and we were back to where we started---Eves placed in a crowded area that was stripped bare of natural resources.

The latest Eve placement algorithm was suggested a long ago by Joriom and maybe a few other people, and involves an ever-growing spiral around a fixed center point. This guarantees that Eve is always in an untouched area, but also that she is never too far from some recent civilizations, so trade can happen.

While a server is running, the placements look like this:

You can see the three initial Eve placements at the center, which the server permits at startup to ensure that the first few Eves can have a chance to bootstrap a village in that spot. After that, the spiral ensues, and would keep going as long as the server was running.

What happens when a server shuts down though, as it does every week during updates?

First, the death location of the longest-lineage person during shutdown is remembered. This is used as the "center" of the spiral at the next startup, and after startup, the first three Eves are placed near there. After that, a new spiral grows around that new center point, like this:

As this new spiral grows, it will cross through the previous spiral like so:

That is okay, because any of the other civilizations that were active at shutdown will potentially be rediscovered by Eves, which makes for an interesting Eve variation. Still, future Eves will not be trapped in these already-developed areas, as the spiral will continue further out into untouched areas again.

Also, some of the older, long forgotten villages in the old spiral will be wiped when the server restarts due to the 24-hour abandonment cut-off. Thus, the new spiral will cross through many now-wild areas, even as it overlaps the old spiral.

As the new spiral grows bigger, it will eventually engulf the old spiral and move beyond it, but the overlapping area will always be substantially less than half of the new spiral. Thus, even if 100% of the old spiral contained active villages that were not wiped, more than half of the Eves in the new spiral will be placed in untouched wilderness.

Xuhybrid · 2018-04-24 20:25:22

This is pretty awesome. I'm glad you found a good solution that supports both preferred playstyles. I was apprehensive about the Eve's spawning so far away at first but it definitely grew on me, having untouched land to develop and support my family. Definitely an improvement, looking back. Shame i can't really enjoy the current content but this spawning system is great.

Potjeh · 2018-04-24 22:56:10

Just what we needed, soil was getting really scarce.

HumanMindFly · 2018-04-25 02:27:27

What happens after third iteration (or after you apply another update). Does it make sure the next three Eves spawn on the outside of a previous circle? If you applied an update during the last picture, then the third iteration would almost be the same as the first. I don't even know if that would be a problem, I am just wondering.

Avalikia · 2018-04-25 07:40:18

HumanMindFly wrote:

What happens after third iteration (or after you apply another update). Does it make sure the next three Eves spawn on the outside of a previous circle? If you applied an update during the last picture, then the third iteration would almost be the same as the first. I don't even know if that would be a problem, I am just wondering.

I'd imagine that by the third iteration the first would be largely irrelevant. Because by then whatever had happened in the first would have either been incorporated into the second (i.e. someone finds an old village and reinhabits it) or it would have been abandoned for so long that it was wiped.

Xuhybrid · 2018-04-25 09:30:35

Well if you think about how huge the circle is going to be after 1 week, you'd have probably hundreds of Eve spawns in that radial graph.

Last edited by Xuhybrid (2018-04-25 09:31:36)

Turnipseed · 2018-04-25 16:05:15

I thought spawning as eve was supposed to be a fairly uncommon experience. In the whole time ive played it seems like a third or more of my lives im eve.

jasonrohrer · 2018-04-25 16:16:41

Eve is supposed to be uncommon, but on the other hand, I have not control over how common it is. Players control that by how many babies they allow to die. If too many babies die, then there will be more Eves. Each woman can only have so many babies in a given time period due to the birth cool-down. If you die as a baby repeatedly and keep respawning, eventually you will run out of mothers to spawn to, and you will spawn as an Eve.

Turnipseed · 2018-04-26 01:37:34

jasonrohrer wrote:

Eve is supposed to be uncommon, but on the other hand, I have not control over how common it is. Players control that by how many babies they allow to die. If too many babies die, then there will be more Eves. Each woman can only have so many babies in a given time period due to the birth cool-down. If you die as a baby repeatedly and keep respawning, eventually you will run out of mothers to spawn to, and you will spawn as an Eve.

i would disagree.
by making carrots harder to store, and towns harder to maintain you have allowed fewer towns to thrive, and more opportunity for new players to ruin a towns progress.

while letting most of your kids die is a factor have you realized the monument count has not risen since decay update?

Ayala · 2018-04-26 02:25:20

Just thank you, man. Being honest, when civilization was all around, I got sick of it fairly quickly, running away to create a new village always felt useless with so many around. The update after that I literally played over 10 hours without finding a single village and also got sick of it very quickly, this new algorithm shows promise, although I must admit that I was really intrigued to see what would happen in the heavily civilized world, I remember there were very long roads, small outposts and massive villages. It was pretty cool, in a way.

Ayala · 2018-04-26 02:36:28

Turnipseed wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
Eve is supposed to be uncommon, but on the other hand, I have not control over how common it is. Players control that by how many babies they allow to die. If too many babies die, then there will be more Eves. Each woman can only have so many babies in a given time period due to the birth cool-down. If you die as a baby repeatedly and keep respawning, eventually you will run out of mothers to spawn to, and you will spawn as an Eve.
i would disagree.
by making carrots harder to store, and towns harder to maintain you have allowed fewer towns to thrive, and more opportunity for new players to ruin a towns progress.
while letting most of your kids die is a factor have you realized the monument count has not risen since decay update?

I agree that a village that plays optimally must kill a portion of their babies, and that when sustaining a new villager is made harder, that portion is indirectly made larger. I would also like to have information on the correlation between baby abandonment and level of civilization, sounds interesting and could be useful to know if making villages scarcer increases the number of abandoned babies indirectly, too.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-04-24 20:14:04

New Eve placement algorithm

#2 2018-04-24 20:25:22

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#3 2018-04-24 22:56:10

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#4 2018-04-25 02:27:27

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#5 2018-04-25 07:40:18

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#6 2018-04-25 09:30:35

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#7 2018-04-25 16:05:15

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#8 2018-04-25 16:16:41

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#9 2018-04-26 01:37:34

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#10 2018-04-26 02:25:20

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

#11 2018-04-26 02:36:28

Re: New Eve placement algorithm

Board footer