Update: Temperature Overhaul

seth · 2019-02-18 15:27:53

Wow, dig this change. I was born into a town that had a small shack that was a nursery, and a partial built warehouse. I like the aspect of managing heat - come into the house, take off hat, sit by fire for a few, then head out into the wilderness to get food and do things, but always coming back for food and warmth. It feels like a nature cycle, and I'm psyched to see how villagers organize around this change!

fragilityh14 · 2019-02-18 17:13:22

Spoonwood wrote:

JoshuaN wrote:
I knew that just by bringing back iron the village would be able to advance further up the tech tree with new comen pumps and hand carts. I may avoid farming ever again! The wild is much safer than any village.
In my opinion many families already struggled with getting good farmers. I found many families barely having any diversity of crops at all. What will happen now? Will good farmers become as rare as gold veins? And how will families climb the tech tree if the smith/smithing team doesn't have enough to eat around camp when smithing?

Farming is easy, someone just has to do it. Plenty of towns still have pies, bread, stew, and sauerkraut. Making mutton pies is crazy easy and produces a ton of food, someone just has to care enough to bake.

But, assuming the the smithy isn't right by the kitchen, it is a good idea to run them over baskets of pie. Since bowls of wheat aren't stackable, it's very helpful for a baker to have a child assistant running around and grabbing and dropping things off anyhow

I'm not one of these people who obsessively does the math for these games, but if the smith is wearing any clothing or inside (and smithys should ideally be inside) you can still live quite a while on a single mutton pie.

I've also started placing my stewpots more strategically, so they're actually by where people are working, instead of all together. No good reason you can't make stew or sauerkraut next to the forge.

Kinrany · 2019-02-18 20:23:15

Having one or two of the biomes be a hellhole or a wasteland is fine. There's no reason to conserve virtual space, there's no reason why every biome should be hospitable enough to live there.

Rage · 2019-02-18 21:32:00

Hey buddy... I asked for a refund on this game not long after i purchased it. Emailed you directly and was ignored. I PAID FOR A GAME not an ordeal, and you are advertising this and offering it on steam.

This is false advertising. I want my money back or i will sue and if you do not believe me you should check case D-504-CV-2016-00293 in new mexico where i am suing innogames for 12 million dollars.

This is BULLSHIT. You cater to yours and your good buddies desires while SELLING this as a civilization and baby rearing game. IT IS NOT, it is an eating constantly and having stress game.

I WANT MY DAMN MONEY BACK

www.ragesrules.com

btw i use to be a very active game blogger, maybe i will start blogging about this game now

Spoonwood · 2019-02-18 23:54:30

jasonrohrer wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/C69TYGq.gif

The other biomes remain unchanged for the naked player. Thus, the game isn't really any harder now than it was before, unless you count the loss of the desert-boundary exploit as making the game harder (yes, that was easy, but the game was never supposed to be easy like that). Clothing and walls are so much more helpful now, that the game might even be easier, ignoring the old exploit.

This doesn't make a lick of sense. Scouting now is more difficult, since running with clothes on limits the possibility of running through a desert or jungle. Clothing and walls TAKE TIME and effort to get up. Clothing before sheep requires more soil and water to get a milkweed farm going, or more people foraging for milkweed. Clothing after sheep requires more sheep to get fed than being naked, putting more pressure on the water, soil, and iron supply. Wood flooring has to have every tile floored inside of a room or in a certain radius, which entails that kilns and ovens need to get destroyed in order to take advantage of the effect. Wood flooring also requires more butt logs to get used towards those floors. None of that had to have to happen before, since settling in cold biomes wasn't advantageous. Trees useful for butt logs were likely to lie closer, since a desert OR jungle intersection has more butt logs than a prairie which only has junipers and trees out of biome. I also find it rather curious to deliberately ignore the old edge effect, since I know as an Eve I wanted to have my farm on the edge of a desert and swamp usually.

How in the world can someone believe that something that takes more time and effort to establish (even if equivalent) just as easy as something that takes less time and effort to establish?

Also, there use to exist good farming spots in that there existed some good spots temperature wise for farmers, or people picking crops, like dry beans for stew, or berries for berry pies, berry carrot pies, berry carrot rabbit pies, or feeding sheep. Or to pick carrots or carrot seeds. Those temperature spots no longer exist, and no clothing is not equivalent to those old good temperature spots. Walls around farms? Don't make me laugh, or show me a picture of a family actually having the time to do that and their lineage numbers, and the heat of the people inside of the walled farm.

Honestly, it boggles the mind that it could be believed that "the game isn't really any harder than before" by anyone who understands it. Sounds more like a baldfaced lie.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-02-18 23:56:50)

jinbaili83 · 2019-02-19 01:12:16

Alternative update image.
exile

antking:]# · 2019-02-19 02:18:37

wow to true to true!

JoshuaN · 2019-02-19 02:57:02

Spoonwood wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
The other biomes remain unchanged for the naked player. Thus, the game isn't really any harder now than it was before, unless you count the loss of the desert-boundary exploit as making the game harder (yes, that was easy, but the game was never supposed to be easy like that). Clothing and walls are so much more helpful now, that the game might even be easier, ignoring the old exploit.
This doesn't make a lick of sense. Scouting now is more difficult, since running with clothes on limits the possibility of running through a desert or jungle. Clothing and walls TAKE TIME and effort to get up.

Actually its quite the opposite, clothes protect you from extreme changes of temperature. You can reasonably run through a desert and survive so long as you don't stay in the desert for too long. The more clothes you have on the longer you can withstand the rise of heat. However you'll need to have food with you or waiting for you on the otherside if you plan to stay until you reach max temp. Its certainly riskier, but that's how its suppose to be. The desert is not suppose to be a giant oasis, its suppose to be a death trap. The one thing that doesn't make sense to me is a desert and an ice biome being right next to eachother. In reality there would be some gray area of warm biomes between them.

The upsetting part is that we were very use to having that perfect oasis of temperature and that was taken away. The rest of the game remained the same. Cold biomes were always cold. We just don't have any 'perfect' biomes now. When Jason says the game isn't any harder, i interpret that as he means the REST of the game isn't any harder. Deserts and jungles certainly are harder without any doubt. You could say he kicked the crutch out from under us and now we're having to rely on actually managing the game mechanics as they were intended.

I do wish we made more non-decaying clothes such as straw hats, mouflon hides, and reed skirts though. This would immensely help in any biome.

Last edited by JoshuaN (2019-02-19 03:08:26)

Peremptive · 2019-02-19 13:02:10

Spoonwood wrote:

Honestly, it boggles the mind that it could be believed that "the game isn't really any harder than before" by anyone who understands it.

From his posts, it seems that he doesn't play the game, so I wouldn't be surprised. Edit: he does play the game, just wears very special glasses. Someone mentioned deserts were added at update 79. If you consider using warm terrain an exploit, that is an exploit that existed for 120 updates. So either you don't know what you code, or you don't know how people use it, or you use the word exploit just to rile people up. None of these options is encouraging.

Josh, going in the jungle for three tiles to get some bananas with full rabbit suit overheats you to max. The only way clothes protect you is if your temp is close to middle, and that only holds for 20 seconds or less. So realistically if you are foraging you will always be at slightly over grasslands temp when you go in the jungle, so overheating is really close. You need some seconds to drop basket, eat, drop eaten banana, fill up your backpack and basket. So you always max heat and max cold as soon as you leave. It is better to drop your clothes and even use them to make a path to the bananas if you can't access them from outside the jungle.

Considering that Jason wrote that clothes overheating you made them bad before the update, this is another clue that he doesn't fully grasp how what he does affects the game. The overheating problem existed before the "fix" that made you always be at least as bad when you switch from hot to cold, but using your high insulation, you could switch between cold and hot to even out your temp. So if you entered the hot with good temp you would have 15-20 secs before heat death. The fix made that impossible. If going from warm to cold with clothing at least made it so that you go to worst biome temp rather than inverse of max heat, it would be more playable. Now when you walk to a jungle close to the village you find a bunch of fully clothed skeletons on its borders.

It boggles my mind how people keep saying that clothes are actually more helpful now. They are only in extremely limited and specific circumstances. Clothing for cold terrains if you are outside is the same before and after the update, since you don't hold fire temp for any significant time. You are forced to settle on bad temp (you won't convince balancing biome temp was an exploit, it is literally how climate works irl) meaning all farmers and most crafters are forced to be in the same cold as you were with clothes before the update. Clothes didn't make settling in cold biomes worth it before, they don't make it better now. Then, they are much worse for the hot. The reason that made them bad for hot terrains, mentioned by Jason, was not changed - clothes do add heat to you. But, since the hot terrains were made extremely hot compared to before, clothes and hot terrain is now much much deadlier than before - they bring you to max also in the jungle (before that happened mostly in desert) and they make you keep extreme temp when you leave the heat for longer than if you weren't wearing them. The insulation works in your favor when leaving the cold only when you have medium temp, which you never realistically have if foraging.

The only improvement for settling in the cold compared to before is for people inside heated buildings, because fire is more useful. However, buildings take time and effort to build, putting a lot of pressure on all other resources. Buildings are also useless for anyone other than the wet nurse, babies, old people who stay inside so as to not starve (but are likely just wasting food by being alive at that point) and the baker, if you take the time to destroy your previous oven and rebuild it inside. So buildings don't help the temp of anyone working to help the village, they are all in much worse shape compared to before, since they just have slightly higher than biome temp.

Buildings also make everything further away from the other parts of the village that you need to combine to make things work. The nursery needs to be close to the berries, and to make clothes for the noobs, you will need to have rabbits close, so you also need the oven close. All this completely exposes the game's storage issues, which could be tucked under the rug before the update.

Carrots, wheat, berries, pen, they were all next to each other before, so making compost was practical. You placed it in the middle of these four parts, you had soil for the crops you need for more composting, and could quickly feed the sheep if you needed dung. So, farms stabilized and became sustainable as long as you had iron for shovel/hoes. With compost running well, you could set aside an extra pile and set up corn, beans, squash next to the berries, then later top up the hardened rows with soil spread around for the rest of the farm. Now all these parts are further away from each other, so due to travelling it takes triple the time to compost. You lose food pips much faster, so not only do you need to stop what you are doing to eat all the time, the clutter means you also travel a lot more to find food, and you are less likely to find it in time if you don't have the mod.

Buildings generally screw up pathing. If you keep doors open, you aren't warm inside them. If you keep them closed, auto pathing around the building (one click) is faster than clicking in front of the building, opening the door, clicking in front of the door inside, closing the door, clicking in front of the other door (which might not even be in your FOV), opening the other door, clicking in front of it outside, closing the door, clicking where you wanted to go. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Finally the berry farm would be placed at the best combo terrains, so toddlers 3-5 could tend to it while eating very little. Now the fields need to be triple the size, nobody leaves gaps, it takes you 20 secs to tend 4 bushes. If you are a baby and have little/no clothes which is common, you need to take a break constantly to eat so as not to starve, and you have eaten 5 berries in that time. Everything is less efficient and eating time is tripled, working time is cut to 1/4. So unless well clothed, you should stay by the fire until you are 6 or 7, can't even tend berries.

I've noticed that as soon as some people start producing some advanced foods, the berry fields immediately go gray. This is because only adults can do anything, all the building clutter means they are far and can't see the berry bushes if doing anything useful, toddlers stay inside, or die outside, or overeat outside making the bushes gray. This situation is repeated when you get old, slightly better since you most likely are fully clothed, but the last 5 minutes you are forced to go in and out all the time. So the duration of your usefulness is greatly cut, before, after, and during adulthood.

Anyone saying that the game's difficulty is comparable to before... or that settling in the cold is now easier than before... I suggest they play the game.

Last edited by Peremptive (2019-02-19 19:58:31)

Spoonwood · 2019-02-19 16:00:08

JoshuaN wrote:

Actually its quite the opposite, clothes protect you from extreme changes of temperature. You can reasonably run through a desert and survive so long as you don't stay in the desert for too long. The more clothes you have on the longer you can withstand the rise of heat. However you'll need to have food with you or waiting for you on the otherside if you plan to stay until you reach max temp. Its certainly riskier, but that's how its suppose to be. The desert is not suppose to be a giant oasis, its suppose to be a death trap. The one thing that doesn't make sense to me is a desert and an ice biome being right next to eachother. In reality there would be some gray area of warm biomes between them.

Clothes ALSO heat you up. So, though clothing reduce temperature shock, the longer you stay in a warm biome, the worse it gets because of clothes. It's better to be nude in a cold biome than clothed in a hot biome over time now. So, not it's not the opposite.

JoshuaN wrote:

I do wish we made more non-decaying clothes such as straw hats, mouflon hides, and reed skirts though. This would immensely help in any biome.

As clothes work now, NO, they would not. All clothes heat you up. So, straw hats, mouflon hides, and reed skirts would not help you in a hot biome. They would reduce temperature change when crossing from a cold biome to a hot biome. But, stay in a hot biome long enough and clothes make things worse than being in a cold biome. Additionally, I had a sealskin coat, a straw hat, a rabbit fur loincloth, and two rabbit fur shoes on and I got bit. I had more than 6 pips when I got bit. I couldn't eat until I was down to a single pip. So clothing makes a death trap inside of a jungle. That did hold before also, but it's contrary to Jason saying that clothing has improved things much.

Additionally, Jason didn't say the rest of the game wasn't harder. He said that

jasonrohrer wrote:

Thus, the game isn't really any harder now than it was before, unless you count the loss of the desert-boundary exploit as making the game harder

That isn't true. You would have to count both desert/neutral or ice boundaries and the middle of significant jungle areas before. But, he didn't say that both counted. And no, 'desert/neutral biome' I simply don't regard as an equivalent to jungle centers, since handling mosquitoes differs substantially from old desert/neutral biome edges.

JoshuaN wrote:

You could say he kicked the crutch out from under us and now we're having to rely on actually managing the game mechanics as they were intended.

For deserts I can believe that they were intended that way since the centers of deserts were hot before. For jungles, no way! The centers of jungles were mid temperature level (actually a little colder than the middle but not much). So, Jason clearly intended them as mid-temperature level before. I suspect he just isn't happy that there exists a guide on how to handle the mosquitoes now and enough people could learn to do that (but have they? or even if they did... would it really make things too easy since there would still be deaths from yellow fever on the big server?). Or he doesn't like that animals can get entombed or something. I'm just speculating on his reasons. However, he clearly intended for jungles to come as central temperature places if you avoided the mosquitoes before. Centers of jungles where all of the adjacent tiles were jungle tiles under the old system was MUCH different than the desert/neutral biome edge situation in that the tile sets were different substantially. How so? The centers of jungles just averaged out to the jungle temperature. One type of tiles. The temperature of a center of a jungle was completely predictable and easy to know once you knew it. The desert/neutral biome situation would average out the desert and neutral tiles. You would have to count the relevant number of surrounding tiles. So figuring out an exact desert/neutral border temperature *by hand* would be much more intensive in terms of computations than figuring out jungle center temperatures.

Thank you for your comment Preemptive. I doubt I would disagree on any point, even if I thought everything through thoroghly.

JoshuaN · 2019-02-19 19:15:03

Peremptive wrote:

Josh, going in the jungle for three tiles to get some bananas with full rabbit suit overheats you to max. The only way clothes protect you is if your temp is close to middle, and that only holds for 20 seconds or less. So realistically if you are foraging you will always be at slightly over grasslands temp when you go in the jungle, so overheating is really close. You need some seconds to drop basket, eat, drop eaten banana, fill up your backpack and basket. So you always max heat and max cold as soon as you leave. It is better to drop your clothes and even use them to make a path to the bananas if you can't access them from outside the jungle.

20 seconds is more than enough time to fill an entire handcart with banana baskets. Plus wearing full rabbit clothes increases your baseline temperature and thus reduces the heatshock giving you those 20 seconds to warm up to max. If you would reach max by staying longer then just walk back out of the jungle and wait for your heat to return to normal. Going into the jungle naked is the same as being in the cold naked, however you lose the transition period between nuetral warm -> hot. This transition area is better for hunger. Being naked is bad all around even in jungle... Lets say you're warm and walk into a jungle naked... you don't get nearly as long of a transition time between warm->hot as you do when clothed.

Certainly the risk of overheating is there, but you don't want to stay in a jungle all day do you? Just get your bananas and run.

If you want to stay in the jungle longer than 20 seconds then yea go naked. But seriously?? Why would you want to stay in a jungle if you could stand outside it with clothes. Even for rubber just run in, cut a latex tree place a bucket and get out. Come back in a minute and run out with latex.
Being naked is exponentially worse for hunger than being clothed.

Last edited by JoshuaN (2019-02-19 19:18:07)

jasonrohrer · 2019-02-19 21:08:50

I was aware of the desert "exploit" for a long time, but was busy working on other things. See the 800+ new objects that were added during that time. I knew temperature would have to be overhauled at some point.

I am a little concerned about the body heat issue. Yes, clothes make you slightly warmer, and this makes them harmful long-term in the jungle in particular.

However, I think that people expect clothes to warm them up somewhat when they put them on in the cold biomes. So that's what the body heat is for.

There could be another mechanism here, like clothing moves you toward perfect always. However, I think this is also counter-intuitive. I mean, wearing a seal coat in the desert shouldn't make you cooler long-term. It would certainly absorb the initial thermal shock.

I could also "disable" the body heat component when you're in a hotter-than-ideal biome. That's simple enough, and kinda solves all the problems. Clothing won't make you long-term cooler in the desert, but it will slow how fast you heat up to desert temp. Once you reach that temp, clothing will have no effect (it won't make you hotter, so it won't be worse than being naked).

As for the "dancing" exploit.... well, yes, it applies to babies, which is enough to make it bad (people can find a perfect spot for baby instead of building tech to take care of them). But I think that everyone was doing this subconsciously too.

In a recent life, I tried to "dip" into the desert to warm up. Then I remembered that it didn't work like that anymore. This is the same way that I tend to "dip" into a fire tile to warm up while waiting for something to happen. Anyway, I don't want there to be natural spots on the map that are "just as good as a fire," because then you don't need to build a fire. Fire should be crucial to survival, not optional.

I'm not totally satisfied with the thermal shock thing, and it is hard for players to understand, and unexpected. But without that, then people could step into a hot biome to "warm up gradually" and step out when they reach perfect temp. I can't imagine any way to prevent that. Well, I could also just make all biomes universally cold... that was what I was going to do initially, but I thought that hot biomes add some texture to the game.

Also, a funny side-note. Rage never emailed me, as far as I can tell. I write back to everyone within a few days. I have record of the purchase from that email, but no emails from that address after that.

jasonrohrer · 2019-02-19 21:14:19

Oh, and CrazyEddie, you are certainly right about the weird consequences of the convection model.

I'm not sure of a work-around here, because I need to limit the simulation grid around each player for performance reasons (we need to query the map database for every tile in the 8x8 grid around the player currently).

But it definitely gets weird when you walk around inside a big room.... There are discontinuities. The old cellular automata model didn't have discontinuity issues.

The core problem is when a room extends beyond the edge of the 8x8 simulation grid. At that point, I don't know whether the room is enclosed or not (the far walls our out of range as far as the sim is concerned). I'm currently treating them like open-air boundaries (no wall).

HOWEVER, in practice, because of the radiant component, it really works out fine and feels good.

I just built your 7x7 room with a fast fire in the middle. The corner is in fact the coldest spot, because it has the lowest radiant value. Well, actually, the entire border of the room is pretty much the same temp (both corner and edge).

There are also no noticeable discontinuities, because the fire in the middle produces enough radiant heat to cover that up.

Discontinuities really become noticeable if the fire is in one corner of a 7x7 room. If you stand inside the 4x4 block around the fire, you feel its warmth. If you stand outside of that, it is outside of your simulation grid, so it's totally invisible to you in terms of heat.

I'm not sure what to do about that.

jasonrohrer · 2019-02-19 21:36:46

Whoops... there's a bug in the jungle (at least) that is making it as hot as the snow is cold when naked. Fixing that.

And the desert is actually worse than the snow. The body heat component is added in (even when naked).

Thaulos · 2019-02-19 22:06:34

Hey Jason,

Is the 8x8 room limit including the walls? Only had to include one side? How does 7x7 factor in the 8x8 "airspace".

wondible · 2019-02-19 22:23:02

jasonrohrer wrote:

I'm not totally satisfied with the thermal shock thing, and it is hard for players to understand, and unexpected. But without that, then people could step into a hot biome to "warm up gradually" and step out when they reach perfect temp. I can't imagine any way to prevent that. Well, I could also just make all biomes universally cold... that was what I was going to do initially, but I thought that hot biomes add some texture to the game.

Yeah, it feels very forced. And I'm already seeing discussions about how to optimize navigation around it.

Long ago, temp was the the tile you were in. Unless you were moving, then it was the last tile you stopped in, so people were "temp running". (You could also judge the temp instantly when you stopped) I contemplated trying to fix temp running for a patch or personal server, but for myself maybe bumping the food usage a bit to compensate. Instead you added averaging, which allowed a limited form of temp running to dip into a hostile biome. It also made it possible to bounce back and forth to hold near center.

The Point: What if you dropped the "special case" temperature shock and removed averaging. Go directly to biome temp, but evaluate it as often as you do averaging. This would be a simpler implementation and easier to understand. You might even be able to optimize it to not process when the player is stationary (though this wouldn't process fires appearing/going out etc.)

Spoonwood · 2019-02-19 22:26:12

JoshuaN wrote:

Peremptive wrote:
Josh, going in the jungle for three tiles to get some bananas with full rabbit suit overheats you to max. The only way clothes protect you is if your temp is close to middle, and that only holds for 20 seconds or less. So realistically if you are foraging you will always be at slightly over grasslands temp when you go in the jungle, so overheating is really close. You need some seconds to drop basket, eat, drop eaten banana, fill up your backpack and basket. So you always max heat and max cold as soon as you leave. It is better to drop your clothes and even use them to make a path to the bananas if you can't access them from outside the jungle.
Being naked is bad all around even in jungle

Two words: mosquito bites. Yes, being clothed can still do you in. I wore a sealskin coat, a straw hat, a rabbit fur loincloth, and the rabbit fur shoes, and got bit in a grassland I think. I had more than six pips when I got bit. I stood in a grassland when waiting out the fever. I dropped to 6 pips when I got bit as expected. I had ONE pip before I could eat.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-02-19 22:50:36)

Spoonwood · 2019-02-19 22:50:09

jasonrohrer wrote:

This is the same way that I tend to "dip" into a fire tile to warm up while waiting for something to happen. Anyway, I don't want there to be natural spots on the map that are "just as good as a fire," because then you don't need to build a fire. Fire should be crucial to survival, not optional.

I'll note that "Frost", the woman in the Santa hat, makes a fire at about 08:15:00 here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/382187720 and then repeatedly dips into that spot. It consists of an observation. That's all I know, and all I can know.

Also, I don't get the part about not wanting ever there to exist natural spots as good as fire in light of this comment:

jasonrohrer wrote:

Players, being the rational folks that they are, reacted to the peculiarities of this thermal simulation by avoiding buildings, founding towns along desert boundaries, wearing minimal clothing, and generally not depending on heat sources for warmth. This was *never* [emphasis added] my intention for the game, of course, but that's where things stood. I envisioned a game were buildings, clothing, and heat sources brought crucial advantages to a civilization, and all of the more advanced civilizations would depend on all three.

But then why were jungles ever made so close to the middle in terms of temperature?

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-02-19 22:51:13)

jasonrohrer · 2019-02-20 01:24:16

Well, the jungles were a mistake, essentially.

Perfect temp, but I assumed you would never be able to live there because of yellow fever. The idea was that it would be tempting, but too dangerous. That's why bananas were initially regrowing (oh so tempting, better than berry bushes!)

In practice, there were many villages founded in jungles, and they kept the mosquitoes away by littering the ground with a wide enough border of items that the mosquitoes couldn't cross.

I nerfed jungle very shortly after releasing it, so at least bananas wouldn't ever respawn. After that, I didn't see quite as many jungle towns. But it was still an issue that bothered me. I didn't have time to think of a solution, until now.

Essentially, when a game is getting weekly content updates, I just need to roll with it and see where things end up, and fix stuff later after it all shakes out. Which is what I'm doing right now.

The 8x8 simulation grid is centered around you, the player in question. We search that grid for heat sources, and we look for an insulated airspace in there. If the room you're in goes "off the edge" of the 8x8 grid around you, we don't see those walls (or heat sources) beyond the edge, so we essentially assume they aren't there.

The main load here is querying 64 tiles of the map to look for heat sources, walls, floors, etc. For 200 players, if we want to update them each every 2 seconds, that's 6400 map look-ups per second (and in each spot, we have to look up the object, the floor, and possibly contained objects (which can themselves be hot), so it's more than 6400 database ops).

Hot fix incoming for two things;

1. Desert and jungle were actually too hot.

2. Body heat no longer affects you in hot environments (so clothing will make you no hotter than your hot env).

3. Kindling can go in basket and backpack (to make early fire tending easier).

CrazyEddie · 2019-02-20 02:06:02

wondible wrote:

The Point: What if you dropped the "special case" temperature shock and removed averaging. Go directly to biome temp, but evaluate it as often as you do averaging. This would be a simpler implementation and easier to understand. You might even be able to optimize it to not process when the player is stationary (though this wouldn't process fires appearing/going out etc.)

I like this suggestion.

The current benefit of clothing slowing down your adjustment to the equilibrium temperature isn't really much of a useful or interesting effect. The important effect of clothing now, just as it was before the update, is the heat it adds, not the heat it preserves. And the paradigm of progressively reaching equilibrium rather than instantly reaching the tile's target temperature doesn't really add much to the game.

This would result in simple-to-understand mechanics, and dancing between tiles wouldn't let you reach perfect temperature.

If you think about it, clothing slowing the rate at which you progressively move towards equilibrium is a third-derivative mechanism. Clothing changes the rate at which you change the rate at which your food bar changes. Does that degree of indirection really improve the experience?

Peremptive · 2019-02-20 03:11:52

jasonrohrer wrote:

1. Desert and jungle were actually too hot.
2. Body heat no longer affects you in hot environments (so clothing will make you no hotter than your hot env).
3. Kindling can go in basket and backpack (to make early fire tending easier).

All these are great steps in the right direction! Thank you

Spoonwood · 2019-02-20 12:18:18

jasonrohrer wrote:

Essentially, when a game is getting weekly content updates, I just need to roll with it and see where things end up, and fix stuff later after it all shakes out. Which is what I'm doing right now.

It's interesting that you say that, because you talk about your intention in the past tense:

jasonrohrer wrote:

Players, being the rational folks that they are, reacted to the peculiarities of this thermal simulation by avoiding buildings, founding towns along desert boundaries, wearing minimal clothing, and generally not depending on heat sources for warmth. This was never my intention for the game, of course, but that's where things stood. I envisioned a game were buildings, clothing, and heat sources brought crucial advantages to a civilization, and all of the more advanced civilizations would depend on all three.

So, it sounds like you're now trying to stick to the original vision you had for the game. But, that's different from the flexibility suggested by 'rolling with it'. Sticking to a vision of how the game 'should' work I don't think would pose too many problems for sufficiently small family groups. I mean here's the thing, and I say it on the basis of playing both in the big groups (mostly before the bigserver change, since I had some lag issues with the bigserver and wasn't enjoying those big groups as much as smaller population play around that time) and having played on low population servers either by myself or with small groups of people:

The difficulty of this game tends to ramp up the larger your family becomes (evaluated by building a thriving and successful settlement). It's a tendency not a one-way arrow. Two people instead of one won't necessarily make things more difficult. But, ten people instead of three almost surely will make things more difficult for a settlement to thrive. With bigger groups, there exists more water pressure, more soil pressure, more milkweed pressure, more iron pressure, more food pressure, more kindling pressure, more pressure on mothers up to a point, and people will end up more confused about where everything lies. Each improvement to the water supply becomes more and more difficult and takes longer to achieve than the previous one (stanchion kits take longer than rocks and a shovel for shallow wells, newcomen pumps take longer than stanchion kits, and diesel water pumps take longer than newcomen pumps, and good cistern placement becomes more difficult the longer that a family waits). Wild foods will also tend to run out more quickly. And probably a bunch more. All of that ignores griefers trying to doom towns.

Thus, sticking to a vision of how the game should work in terms of mechanics might just lead to the game becoming more and more difficult if the game grows a bunch in terms of it's player-base. So, I'm not so sure that making the game more difficult makes for a good choice even if inline with the original vision, though of course that's the game designer's choice to make (or anyone re-designing the game for that matter).

InSpace · 2019-02-20 12:59:45

What do you use to make your gifs Jason? I was thinking about you can put in the text, like with some photoshop deal?

Spoonwood · 2019-02-20 16:53:19

jasonrohrer wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/C69TYGq.gif

One other problem in the old system was that the desert, while hot, was not as hot as the other biomes were cold. The jungle was too close to perfect, and the mosquitoes didn't offer enough of a trade-off. So the jungle is now as hot as the other biomes were cold (moving between prairie and jungle now results in no change to your hunger rate), while desert is now as hot as the polar biome is cold. You've always been freezing to death in the snow, and you are now cooking in the desert. Think of it like hot snow.

Alright, but grasslands and prairies have no natural threats... ones that can kill you immediately. Jungles have mosquitoes. So should the difference of temperature from the middle point be the same for grasslands and prairies as it is for jungles?

Also, tundras have no natural threats. Deserts have snakes. So should deserts have the same difference of temperature from the middle point as tundras?

And haven't people fared better in deserts than in tundras?

jasonrohrer · 2019-02-20 17:15:08

Spoonwood, by "rolling with it," I mean that I can't stop to second-guess everything I add to the game each week. I added deserts, and moved on the next week to add something else. I didn't spend the next week tuning the desert. It would take a long time (many weeks) before players collectively realized that desert was better than green, and started settling there exclusively. Before that, people were all wearing clothes and using fires. The "laws of the land" that players came up with included "cover your nakedness," for example.

Sometimes, an update is so off-kilter that the bad effects are immediate and obvious, and I have to fix it right away. But other times, the effects are more subtle. It also takes me a while, sometimes, to realize that something is a problem. Oh, deserts are preferable.... okay, I guess that's interesting. Oh, and biome boundaries are just right.... that might be reallly cool emergent behavior.

But wait, no one is building buildings or wearing clothes.... hmm....

Since deserts were added, (back in March 2018), I have added 1733 new objects to the game (calculated from a raw diff of the objects data folder). In other words, I've been busy.

Over the past few weeks, my mission has been to fix stuff that needs fixing. The fact that people weren't wearing clothes or building buildings was something that needed fixing.

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