Food Fear.

Purumus · 2017-07-12 00:46:21

Food Fear or Starvation Fear (FF/SF): it's not the problem of the rate nor of the system itself, it's in the interface speed in which one can actuate or solve hunger. This is because of 2 separate issues: Grid Space (around the player) to food source occupying that space, and hand/inventory management skill while eating (player skill at moving the mouse).

Berry Bush (static food source)
A world square diagram: _ = empty, 0 = Food, P = Player, X = Occupied, B = Best useful (if empty) space, W = Worst space, T = Trouble
Two main situations, Hands Free:
The player always has a surrounding grid space of 7 (6 because it’s difficult to interact with the grid space directly above the player) next to a food source, and if the player is working near a food source, that space is reduced to 5. Optimally, the player is diagonally above the source (3 best spaces), otherwise it will be below and behind (2 best spaces). Again, above is only good if dropping an item, not picking it up.
{_}{T}{W}{T}
{_}{B}{P}{B}
{_}{0}{B}{T}
Hands Occupied
This one involves the player having to move (action: click on the space and make the correct click so that it does what you want when you get there), Waiting for the food to get to the player, then activating food on self. It’s the movement that kills you, on top of the game not making the character smart enough to help the player.
{B}{T}{X}{T}{B}
{B}{T}{P}{T}{B}
{B}{0}{T}{T}{B}

Solution:
1. if waking past a food source, and lower than 4, auto eat, much like auto reload.
1.a Allow for a player to not starve while food is on hand; the food item gets consumed. If One could auto eat, that would alleviate the FF
2. Allow for different food sources to fill each square differently, but let them stack to an optimum squares occupied.
[`]=good food lasts 3x time, [-]=medium 2x, and [_], [e] = empty (change these to pencilled in squares). Then allow for the temperature to showcase the different quality (not necessarily color, maybe a different darkness of the penciled in square) of the food squares.
2.a The optimal meter center: (((-))) is the best place to be filled to.
for example: [C][`][`][`][`][`][`][`][`](-)((-))(((-)))((-))(-)[_][_][_][_][_][e][e][e][e][e]... ([C] is crawling, crying)
For instance, if too full, make player go slowly, if near enough to center (((-))), make the player go as fast as possible. You already have a similar feature with the temperature.
3. Don’t let the player die automatically. Vesticator (I think) suggested to sit down. I’m a fan of it, or crawling slowly if moving from that place, since it produces an action, letting the player at or below 2 squares sit/crawl, like a baby (make the baby crawl too), and point them to finding a food source. At the point they’re at 0 (if adult, babies die), allow them to choose to die of starvation, not auto die, like an animal that wont eat. And make auto-death happen only when age reaches 60; makes it more meaningful. It’s one hour One Life, not One Stomach one Life. This pointing to food source could be used to point to mama, or berry bush.
4. Let a player eat things even though they’re not prepared perfectly. Humans, way back when - or one could also say today, could stomach more things than the unaccustomed to hard foods. So I dub the characters Homo blankus (not knowing what species specifically)… even if they’re homo sapiens, many get used to certain diets while they’re growing up. If famished, i would eat a carrot without needing a sharp stone (make it not require one). Make the rabbit give more if cooked, but let the player eat them without needing a big tool. Let the player catch a rabbit with another tool, but give less of the rabbit unless trapped and skinned properly.
5. I know that making the player auto find food would be resource consuming for the program, but make the player see more of the world, and make the baby see less. Or have a "burning bush" at a central place that players will be pointed to automatically when starving. The game needs a "holly spirit" assist, especially when new to the game.

$0.02

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-12 01:10:48

Working on some fix here.

The current idea is the truly infinite but non-portable berry bush.

When you click on it, even if you're holding a tool, the game assumes that you wanted to eat your fill from it, and it fills you to 100%.

You can also pick a berry from it (in addition to filling up), and carry it with you, but it only fills you 1 bar.

And all foods stack. Eating three lone berries in a row (from your backpack, for example), will fill you up to 3. Eating two carrots in a row will fill you up to 12. Adding a rabbit on top of two carrots will fill you up to 20.

The effect of this is threefold:

1) You don't have to "babysit" your character near a berry bush and constantly feed them while working.

2) You can venture a bit further afield while just eating berries at home, assuming that you make it home safely.

3) Other types of food are ONLY useful when traveling away from home. There is absolutely no point in cooking a rabbit next to a berry bush. But, if you're venturing into the swamp or desert or prairie, you'll need to bring some portable foods like rabbits or pies (or whatever else) with you. The kinds of foods you bring with you will be a matter of life and death.

So, the berry bush kinda becomes a symbol for a fixed-location gathering lifestyle. You can survive forever on it, but only here.

And at home, there's nothing to fear, and very little babysitting to do. Even if you're cold, you can go a full two minutes between feedings. If you're warm at home, you can last a full 6:40 between berry bush visits.

3) above is interesting, because it kinda feels like a big change, but I think that 3) is already true in the current game. If a berry bush is near, you'll babysit your character and keep going back for berries rather than eat rabbits, because they are so much more work. So there's already a "loophole." Might as well make the loophole big enough to drive a tank through, and eliminate the tedium of feeding every 24 seconds.

But it's always been true that there's no safe way to travel without better foods. And that's still true.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-12 17:30:40

Okay, take two:

After talking about the food system literally for 6+ hours with different people yesterday, the current plan is this.

Call it, "Food of all forms is constantly running out, unless you do something about it."

--All food goes back to stacking.

--Berry bushes have a limited supply of berries (10?), and they take forever to regrow, like 20 minutes or something. Each berry fills you up +4.

--Same with wild carrots, wild rabbits, etc. They regenerate too slowly to be sustainable fixed-location food source, even for one person. If you want to hunt/gather, you need to keep moving to new areas.

--Each berry can be eaten, but it can also be turned into a seed and planted. Same with the carrot (some seeds can be gathered.) Same with rabbits (they can be caught and domesticated).

--New berry bushes and carrots are also really slow to grow, but some low-level tech (tilling, watering) can dramatically speed up the growing process. Feeding domestic rabbits makes them breed faster, etc. You also have the economics of scale. Planting 10 slow-growing berry bushes, all in a nice row.

--Your success at farming (and other more advanced food production, processing, storage) will naturally determine how big of a population you can sustain in your village. If you don't produce food at all, you have no village, because you have to keep moving to find new wild food. If you are producing food, and you have a baby boom, and some people help less than others, you won't be able to sustain your larger population. Successful villages will grow bigger and bigger, because more of their babies will survive, eventually leading to even more fertile-age women, and thus an even bigger share of incoming babies, while people who don't produce food as well will have shrinking populations, fewer women surviving into adulthood, and thus a smaller share of incoming babies.

One bad generation can completely destroy a functioning village, which means that civilization success is a long-term group project. Keep this plane in the air, folks, we worked hard to get it as high as we've gotten it. Separate villages are also in a kind of meta competition, guns, germs, and steel.

Anyway, I never wanted this to be an open-ended crafting game where you just freely explore the tree of content to your heart's delight. It's supposed to be hard. You're supposed to claw you way up to each accomplishment, and barely get there.

Like, I finally got a steel ax in my lifetime, but I neglected my babies along the way, so I died alone, and the ax that I made was lost in the wilderness. Next time, I'll be even better at managing this process, and there will be a future generation to pass my ax onto.

All that said, hard and tedious are two different things. Tedious, to me, is being forced to manually execute a rote, seemingly-automatable process, with no important decisions along the way.

Eating from an infinite berry bush every 24 seconds is tedious. A robot could do it way better than you can.

I don't think it's simply a matter of "eating isn't fun, but crafting is fun." Eating isn't fun if it requires no thinking. Hard eating---eating as an eventually-impossible time and resource management puzzle, is as "fun" as any other challenge. I just need to figure out how to make it so.

joshwithguitar · 2017-07-13 12:57:08

This sounds great Jason, limited resources will make the game much more interesting. A real "survival" game rather than a game of "make more stuff while remembering to eat". It should give everything a lot more meaning.

If you're planning on having berry bushes have X berries on them then I'd suggesting standardising some form of numerical system for objects rather than going through the tedious process of creating a new bush object for every possible number of berries. So the idea would be to be able to have recipes like:
berrybush(X) = berrybush(X-1) + berry
berrybush(0) + 0 seconds = berrybush-empty

This could be really useful for a whole bunch of things, consider:
axe(X) + tree = axe(X-1) + logs-with-stump
axe(0) + 0 seconds = blunt-axe

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-13 17:24:50

Induction!

Yeah, I have thought about this.

I implemented the berry bush stuff by literally making 10 separate transitions. It's tedious (for me) and error-prone. However, it does allow some nice things like being able to visually show the berries decreasing (berries are separate sprites from the bush, so along the way, I make them gradually go away, which wouldn't work with an induction system).

A simpler way to do it is with timers. Once you start picking the berry bush, it becomes empty after X seconds, timed so that you can eat-until-full from it 4 times before it becomes empty. Then there's only two transitions.

Same could work for the ax (it becomes dull over time whether you use it or not----and I guess that's the way I was imagining the ax to work, anyway).

The problem with this is that it lets an infinite number of people eat until full from four times it during that time.

The timing method of making food run out encourages sharing, but it doesn't create any contention over food resources, which I think misses some interesting social dynamics. That makes sharing have no meaning, discourages trade, etc. If I give you some of my hard-earned food, that should be a very meaningful gesture, as it should lessen my personal supply.

Finally, I hope that the berry bush is kindof a special case here. Most food sources will be single-use. The ones that aren't should change visually as they are used up (like a row of carrots where you pick one at a time).

Also, adding a numerical system for objects, like doing it for real, is an insanely deep change. Protocol and database would have to support that.

The category system was added "on top" of the existing stuff, where it just auto-generates all resulting non-category transitions based on category transitions at startup. So its really just a way for me to offload the combinatoric explosion onto the computer.

I suppose I could add a numerical transition system "on top" in a similar way, where at startup, the abstract induction transition generates the necessary dummy objects and all necessary concrete transitions for them.

But the lack of visual or verbal changes to the object along the way is still troubling....

I mean, unless the auto-generated stuff just displayed a number. Literally "Axe (25)", meaning there are 25 chops left. "Goosberry Bush (9)", meaning there are 9 picks left.

I'm still stuck on the lack of visual change, though...

Could some sprite layers be flagged as "emptiable", and then the auto-induction system would generate dummy objects with fewer and fewer of these emptiable sprite layers?

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-13 17:34:16

Well, the problem with doing it "on top" is that both the client and the server need to do it exactly the same way, because the server will be sending map chunks to the client containing some of these dummy, induction-generated objects.

Let's say the max real object ID is 395.

For the berry bush, 10 dummy objects would be generated: 396, 397, ... , 405

The client needs to generate these in the same way, or else the wrong object will be displayed.

They're both doing it with the same code, and they both should always have exactly the same "real" objects, so it should aways happen exactly the same way, in the same order. It just seems very fragile to me.... maybe I'm overthinking it.

joshwithguitar · 2017-07-14 08:25:02

jasonrohrer wrote:

"I'm still stuck on the lack of visual change, though..."

Hmm, if you're generating things on top then there should be no issue in having different images for different states. Just put all the images in a folder and name them with the state number or range (e.g. 1-5) and make the generator do the rest of the work. Some things, like an axe, wouldn't need many images or perhaps wouldn't change at all until it is blunt.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-14 16:48:07

Oh Josh, just WAIT until you get your intelligent little hands on my editor....

Just put images in a folder, he says? Ha!

You will forget that you ever remembered using folders, sir.

Anyway, I've taken the plunge into objects with "use count," and then I'm auto-generating dummy objects for each step of the way, and auto-generating transitions to go with them. So Bush_9, Bush_8, Bush_7, etc. are created as objects if Bush has numUses=10. And then if I have:

Hand + Bush
    =
Berry + Bush

It notices the numUses on bush, looks for Bush => Bush transitions (where Bush doesn't change), and replaces them with generated transitions like this:

Hand + Bush
    =
Berry + Bush_9

and

Hand + Bush_9
    =
Berry + Bush_8

Also, I'll have a way to define the "last use" transition specially, so I can effectively define:

Hand + Bush_1
    =
Berry + Empty Bush

And I have also implemented "useVanish" flags for sprites in an object. These sprites vanish gradually and evenly over time as the object is used up. Berries can disappear. A "high water" sprite can disappear and reveal a "low water" sprite underneath (for water in a bowl or bottle). A "new axe" sprite can disappear and reveal more and more worn axe sprites underneath.

The vanishes are spread out across the numUses, even if there aren't enough vanishes. So if there are 3 vanish sprites, and 100 uses, one will vanish at 75 uses left, another will vanish at 50 uses left, and the final one will vanish at 25 uses left.

This way, I can tweak the number of uses at-will, to balance the game, without breaking anything. The vanishing sprites will "stretch and shrink" to cover any number of uses.

(I also don't need to show 10 berries on a 10-use bush, because that's too visually crowded.)

Hippasus · 2017-07-14 22:42:44

I like where this is going. Josh's assessment "building stuff while not forgetting to eat" pretty much sums up the state of the game at the moment. If you feel inclined to build stuff which you think at least will give you the advantage of having to remember to eat less often you find that all this distracting technology stuff you have to deal with makes you forget to eat thus perpetuating the problem. Perhaps the irony of starving to death while attempting to make a delicious pie is amusing the first couple of times, after that the joke wears thin.

If indeed the civilization producing the most fertile women will "win" in the long run then the perfect strategy at the moment is a no-brainer. Do nothing except sitting around berry bushes eating and popping out babies. A more 'advanced' civilization will struggle with ever increasing cases of technologically induced forgetting-to-eat syndrome which will decrease its child producing capacity so its demise is inevitable.

Perhaps the more advanced societies could counter this by hunting and killing the technologically inferior "berry munchers" for sport?

Last edited by Hippasus (2017-07-14 22:48:55)

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-14 22:53:55

Good analysis there.

Purumus · 2017-07-24 04:31:18

Jason could you move the "Sex lightning rod" to its own forum topic entry. I think that's a subject worthy of discussing.

Back to food... after v29 (+kindling fix)

The food fear is gone; instead of Food Fear, I Feel Full easily most of the time. I guess this is one of those numerical problems that will either be a super magical number, or a dynamic that balances itself out with a lot of people on a server. Feels like a bad conclusion to say that it's too easy.

Food: main issue I feel is that I have no real reason to make more food, since a berry bush is easy to grow, easy to find, easy to plant and manage throughout the entirety of a Homo OHOL. With berries around, I don't see the reason to make fire to prepare and eat anything different. If I want to help the world, a sharp rock + berries are a dominant strategy.

Reasons why I wouldn't eat a rabbit frequently; I must eat it once to move up on the tree, which makes a rabbit a key:
Creates trash I can't remove until the carcass disappears
Infinite bones/needles I don't need...
Only consumed once
Requires trap being made, set up, cleaning up the rabbit,
storing fur is a pain after a while
I need fire to make it... Fire is somewhat annoying to make
I can screw it up and burn it

Steps of Berry:
Pick
Click on self: eat
Or: place on floor, hit with sharp rock 2 times... wait, repeat.

But then, once being able to survive easily, makes the game all about climbing through the tree. There are some elements of the game that seem to simulate or resemble a primitive version of humans (I know you're not going for that Jason; I've read through reddit and the videos etc). However, a lot of our food requirements come from things that uniqueness of each meal. Sickness comes from that; energy, lethargy, sleepiness. Food is a chemical fuel, and right now the fuel is flat in benefit. At the moment, the food is your health, it takes away some challenge once full, and takes away some humanity from the characters. In real life, I eat different things sometimes because of boredom. In the game, the food has no "flavor", nor uniqueness, nor health.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-24 19:16:28

Okay, posts have been moved to a new topic.

I'm really trying to avoid a nutrition model in this game.

In Don't Starve, I eat all sorts of things, mostly because everything is running out, and I'm desperate. There is no "texture" to the food, though. It's all just food. In fact, a nice steak doesn't even seem to fill you up much more than a handful of berries. But the berries run out pronto, so you have to take the time to get some steak.

In my game currently, even if you farm your way to a lifetime supply of berries, I still think the other foods have gameplay value for long voyages. I just don't think that people are making many long voyages right now.

That said, farming your way to a lifetime supply of berries should be impossible.

I wonder if fertile soil should run out....

Clay should also run out, probably. Everything that's not alive should, really.

I just have this scarcity fear... like, clay running out so that no one can build walls and it ruins the game. But I also realize that scarcity makes things more interesting, so I really need to embrace it all around. For example, why aren't people taking long voyages? Because they don't need to (all they need is one clay node and one fertile soil pile nearby and they're good to go).

Maybe ponds should dry up...

Hippasus · 2017-07-27 08:42:12

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
Greek Proverb

Wood · 2022-07-03 04:37:55

big oof

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2017-07-12 00:46:21

Food Fear.

#2 2017-07-12 01:10:48

Re: Food Fear.

#3 2017-07-12 17:30:40

Re: Food Fear.

#4 2017-07-13 12:57:08

Re: Food Fear.

#5 2017-07-13 17:24:50

Re: Food Fear.

#6 2017-07-13 17:34:16

Re: Food Fear.

#7 2017-07-14 08:25:02

Re: Food Fear.

#8 2017-07-14 16:48:07

Re: Food Fear.

#9 2017-07-14 22:42:44

Re: Food Fear.

#10 2017-07-14 22:53:55

Re: Food Fear.

#11 2017-07-24 04:31:18

Re: Food Fear.

#12 2017-07-24 19:16:28

Re: Food Fear.

#13 2017-07-27 08:42:12

Re: Food Fear.

#14 2022-07-03 04:37:55

Re: Food Fear.

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