Update: Sweet and Spicy

jasonrohrer · 2019-03-29 23:42:44

Back from GDC with a bang. This is the largest content update in a while, with over 100 new objects to grow, catch, cook, and eat. And all this from only three new naturally-occurring objects.

What else? Spring loaded doors for your kitchen. That whole GDC basket horse cart right-click bug has been fixed for real client-side. Email-based family tree searches are no longer public (access your personal family trees from the button on the login screen or on your personal download page), so people can't spy on you anymore if they know your email. Animals no longer spawn outside their home biome along biome boundaries. Goodbye, arctic snakes and desert penguins. It was fun while it lasted.

And now for a tale of a funny lurking bug situation. Some of you may have noticed that recently, the whole shebang has been going down like clockwork at 5 am EST for about five solid minutes. Website, forums, login server, everything. I'm asleep during that time, so I didn't notice, and no one bothered to email me about it. Not sure how long this had been going on.

Turns out that 5am is the time when the various backup processes run, and one of these accesses the main MySQL database with mysql dump to back it up. That backup might be locking out other database requests, which would affect the website any everything else. But five minutes is a long time. Turns out that the review/stats server log table had ballooned to over 2 GB in size, with 220 million entries. Uh, yeah, that would take a while to extract with mysqldump. Turns out that it was filled to the brim with bad requests by other servers for non-customers. What other servers? From the IP addresses, these were Chinese servers. To the tune of 300,000 bad requests per day, and each one getting logged. The mobile developers apparently forgot to switch this stat-reporting feature off in their Chinese servers, which means that every time a Chinese player lives a life, I get hammered with a bad "log stats" request from their servers.

And yes, they are the biggest fish in this pond, but there are other bad requests getting logged from small-time servers too, most likely private servers being run by individuals.

First of all, I probably shouldn't be logging every bad request that comes in, since it's a waste of disk space, and I have no control over how many bad requests come in. So, that's fixed, and these logs have been cleared, making them tiny again. Now the backup mysqldump takes 3 seconds instead of 5 minutes, and it doesn't seem to block anything (it's supposed to set a read-only lock anyway, which should at least allow the website and such to load).

I also reached out to the mobile devs to ask them to knock it off. Their Chinese servers are being run by a third party, but I'm hopeful that this deluge of requests will end soon. Anyway, 300,000 lives a day is a lot. Apparently the game is popular in China.

But the fact that so many servers, in general, are submitting requests to me by accident is a bad sign. Yeah, I guess I made "reporting" the default behavior in the public server code on github, which means that anyone who is not paying attention when they set up a server will end up hitting me with reporting requests forever. Because these other servers don't have the secret key, the requests will be rejected, of course, but they're still a waste of time and bandwidth for everyone involved. I can imagine a nightmare scenario in the future where there are 1000s of private servers, and their collective accidental reporting traffic combined results in a DDOS attack. So, the public server code has been fixed to not report by default. Update your server code, folks.

Tarr · 2019-03-29 23:53:31

Bug was probably around for a month or two I had figured it was something to do with you resetting stuff around that time of night or I would have told you sooner rofl.

With your return to regular content you've knocked it out of the park with this update. Potatoes still suck but I guess that's something we all have to come to terms with eventually.

I can't wait to look back fondly on this update like the big farm update

BlueDiamondAvatar · 2019-03-30 00:00:41

I'm gonna call this the "Salsa Update" and nothing you can say will change my mind.

Looking forward to planting some tomatoes, onions and peppers!

Thaulos · 2019-03-30 00:07:12

Great update!

Here are some minor issues I noticed:
1) Dug Wild Tomato Plant don't decay and can't be destroyed.
2) "Dug Wild Peper Plant" has a typo and also doesn't decay and can't be destroyed.
3) French fries have the same food value as french fries with ketchup
4) no stacks for onions, tomatoes or peppers!
5) can't eat raw onions, tomatoes or peppers
6) no chance of getting old boot from net throwing

Last edited by Thaulos (2019-03-30 00:10:24)

Booklat1 · 2019-03-30 00:31:40

i like shrimps, arctic really needed some love.

jasonrohrer · 2019-03-30 00:34:17

Thaulos, those aren't game-breaking... will fix em next week.

Can you log them here? Even in one report would be fine.

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues

Grim_Arbiter · 2019-03-30 01:44:04

Almost nostalgic update for me, the shrimp remind me of my old runescape days

Yeah I thought it was normal for it to be down that long too otherwise I would've posted it to the github

antking:]# · 2019-03-30 03:19:14

well I hope we get spicy ice-cream on the next update! just for fun!

Spoonwood · 2019-03-30 04:50:22

jasonrohrer wrote:

Animals no longer spawn outside their home biome along biome boundaries. Goodbye, arctic snakes and desert penguins. It was fun while it lasted.

I saw grassland boars on server3 shortly after the update. I suspected that they came from before the update, and old spawned animals don't change, especially since I found kilns in that grassland. So, I'm not sure that's a bug or not.

Spoonwood · 2019-03-30 05:20:05

Also, are snowmen and a crock of salted snow supposed to melt in a tundra? Because they both do right now.

Glassius · 2019-03-30 05:29:31

Spoonwood wrote:

Also, are snowmen and a crock of salted snow supposed to melt in a tundra?

Yes, they are Introducing dependancy on environment was suggested multiple times, like need for extra water during farming on desert or problems farming in tundra. Jason did not want to, because it would introduce a whole new system of influences and will drastically complicate rather simple crafting mechanics.

But this is interesting casus Post it on Github as bug and see, if Jason will fix it somehow

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-01 20:38:47

Yeah, probably not going to make transitions biome-sensitive.

Combinatoric explosion is a huge problem in this game. I need to pick my battles.

Spoonwood · 2019-04-02 21:38:35

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, probably not going to make transitions biome-sensitive.
Combinatoric explosion is a huge problem in this game. I need to pick my battles.

That's understandable. I wasn't aware of the technical issues previously.

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-03 03:50:45

Transitions are currently A + B = C + D

"A" can be "time passing", like some number of seconds.

To do the biome temp thing for snowmen, etc., the transition would have to be conditional on biome. Which means, essentially, A + B + Biome = C + D.

Glassius · 2019-04-04 08:21:05

What if you made a step transition instead?
A + B = C0 + D
C0 + T = C
Where C0 is initial version of C with no wait time, but immediate transition. This second transition has T as biome influence. Can be temperature.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-03-29 23:42:44

Update: Sweet and Spicy

#2 2019-03-29 23:53:31

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#3 2019-03-30 00:00:41

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#4 2019-03-30 00:07:12

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#5 2019-03-30 00:31:40

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#6 2019-03-30 00:34:17

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#7 2019-03-30 01:44:04

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#8 2019-03-30 03:19:14

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#9 2019-03-30 04:50:22

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#10 2019-03-30 05:20:05

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#11 2019-03-30 05:29:31

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#12 2019-04-01 20:38:47

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#13 2019-04-02 21:38:35

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#14 2019-04-03 03:50:45

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

#15 2019-04-04 08:21:05

Re: Update: Sweet and Spicy

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