Early alpha testing coming

jasonrohrer · 2017-04-02 02:48:46

Welcome back, ..!

Regarding the extra time, working with someone else itself takes up a lot of time... so it shouldn't take all that long this time around. I also figured a lot of stuff out the first time around.

EMAIL

Man, this has been a terrible thorn in my side. Forum email is being sent through Postmark, which I'm paying for..... they're essentially acting as a trusted email relay. But apparently it's not working.

Did you tell gmail that it wasn't spam?

And jeez, I wonder if my domain now has a bad reputation.

Tons of spammers have been signing up for my mailing list using other people's emails, and some of those people have been flagging the confirmation messages as spam.

jasonrohrer · 2017-04-02 02:59:08

Ugg... I just tried sending a password reset to my gmail, and it went through fine. What a mess!

jasonrohrer · 2017-04-02 03:58:31

As for doing it faster than a human would...

That's to prevent bots that submit the form as soon as they load the page. A human takes 5 seconds to type their email.

HOWEVER, I just discovered that the One Hour One Life server system time has drifted by 126 seconds! That was totally messing up the timestamps on the form. Yikes. Working to fix it now...

jere · 2017-04-09 00:40:41

Bummer to hear about the downsizing of the team! At least now you'll have no more dependencies. And better to make that transition at object 250 than 5000.

jasonrohrer · 2017-04-13 17:28:15

Yeah, there are also a lot of inefficiencies around working with someone else. A lot of communication overhead and bottlenecking each other. I couldn't really go off and do a week's worth of server programming (which needs to be done from time to time) while also keeping my partner's pipeline full and moving.

Now I can pick what really needs to be worked on on a given day without juggling two people.

Hippasus · 2017-05-12 15:17:26

The world you're creating is...VERY BIG. Effectively that means that no two Eve spawned civilisations will ever conceivably meet. At that point why even bother with such a huge world? Why not spawn each Eve in a new world altogether? I mean, is there any reason why you're making it so HUGE?

jasonrohrer · 2017-05-12 16:31:13

Yeah, I calculated it yesterday, and it's 31 million times bigger than the surface area of the earth. Does that count as HUGE? As in, all-caps huge?

There's no plan to spawn multiple Eves in separate places on the map. Eve0 is at (0,0). Subsequent Eves spawn somewhere on the outskirts of the last civilization. To place a new Eve, which only happens if everyone dies, I find the radius of the known, human-modified world, then walk in from there, as close as you can get to (0,0) without getting blocked. (You don't want the next Eve spawned in the middle of a prison by accident.)

However, as people spread out, there will be isolated pockets of civilization. If you're a female character, you can create one of these yourself whenever you want, simply by walking into the wilderness and surviving out there until you have some babies. You just created a new remote outpost that could potentially continue and grow indefinitely. Someday, the residents of the outpost may explore and discover/meet the residents of the main civilization.

As for why I made it so big....

First, from an engineering perspective, It would have been way harder to make it smaller. X and Y coordinates are signed integers, and it's easiest to just let them span the whole possible range (-2 billion to +2 billion, roughly), and let them wrap around the way they would naturally on a computer.

Second, our Earth world is so big that it feels infinite. Walk in any direction, and it just keeps going, and you'll never run out of new stuff to see. So I certainly wanted to make it big enough to feel that way too. If I'm going to make it THAT big, so that you can never walk to the end of it, why stop there?

(Also, I'm not sure what actually happens if you walk all the way to the edge beyond +2 billion. I'm assuming that it wraps around back into negative coordinates, but I've never tested it. I don't need to test it, though!)

And finally, conceptually, I'm fascinated by "practically infinite" things on computers that are still very finite, but mind-bogglingly big. The full 4-billion by 4-billion cell map is entirely predetermined, even though most of it has not been computed yet, or will ever be computed, or will ever be seen. But I can teleport you instantly to any far-flung coordinate of it and you will be able to see what's there. You could even build a little house out there. And if anyone ever made it out there ever again, they would see the same little chunk of map that you saw, and see the remains of your house, too.

That's one of the "magic" things that computers can do.

And when I describe it to people (a huge world that's 31 million times bigger than earth), it sometimes elicits a mind-boggled "whoa!", and that makes it worth doing.

But dealing with numbers this big is all in an ordinary day's work for 32-bit computer programs... We just never stop to realize how amazing it really is.

Hippasus · 2017-05-12 19:15:38

Well if a planet which could fit over a hundred thousand of our quaint little Suns into its volume isn't all-caps huge I'm not sure what is (galaxy clusters perhaps?) I guess the inhabitants must have very strong bones to deal with the crushing gravity.

Hippasus · 2017-05-13 13:33:09

Too many questions!
1. Will objects deteriorate in this world? Will hammers break? Will walls crumble? Will civilization need to be maintained, not just built?
2. How awful can we be to each other in this game? Can we kill each other? Can we steal each other's stuff? Can we burn down down houses? Can we enslave our weaker neighbors? Can we do even worse?
3. Is crafting as simple as A + B = C + D? Can it get more complex? Does it take time or expend energy to do?
4. Will our interactions with the world (not other people) be limited to crafting? How else might we engage with this world?

Enough for now.

Last edited by Hippasus (2017-05-13 13:36:39)

jasonrohrer · 2017-05-14 04:58:52

Never thought about the crushing gravity. That's really funny!

Except that it's flat! Topographically, it's a torus, I think. But not really, because the inner and outer circumferences are the same. It's a square that wraps around.

So, let's say that it's a flat solid that's roughly as thick as the earth. Would that cause roughly the same gravity? If not (because of side-pull effects or something), then make it exactly thick enough to have the same gravity as earth.

Anyway, answers:

1. Yes, objects can decay, but I need to make them decay, and define what they decay into. So, walls can crumble into rubble, or crack first, and then become rubble. The decay time can be anywhere from 1 second to 2 billion seconds, I think. And if it's multi-step decay (cracking wall before rubble), then they can potentially be repaired (cement + cracking wall = repaired wall). But because it's extra work for me to define decay for each thing, I'll be somewhat selective, and focus on the most interesting decay interactions first (like walls).

2. Objects can be deadly to other humans, and they can have a deadly distance defined (knife kills from one tile away, bow from 5 tiles away, rifle from 10 tiles away). There's a very simple click-to-kill mechanic, with no real aiming or timing or other shooter mechanics. You can miss if someone is moving, based on server clock differences, but that's it. And killing is all-or-nothing. You click, they die instantly. No wounding or health bars. Kinda like real life. You get shot in the chest with a bow, and you die. You don't go eat some berries and heal up. Weapons can go through ammo transitions and leave something on the ground at the target site (bow can shoot one arrow, then becomes an empty bow, etc.) So, simpler projectile weapons have a pretty severe limit on their rate of fire.

And yes, you can burn down houses (we had that in place in the previous content batch, and I'll likely add it to the new generation of content too).

You can enslave, police, imprison, and all the other real world things. That's because death is real in this game. If you point a gun at someone and say, "Come work this field for me or die," they just might do it, because they can't just respawn over and over if you kill them. They have an investment in THIS life. That's also the main motivator for trade, specialization, and so on. Time is precious and ever fleeting, and you can only accomplish so much in one lifetime.

And finally, the potential of killing is NECESSARY for society to function. Notice how infrequent trolling is in real life? In Rust, I had people cement over my front door countless times. Funny... no one has EVER cemented over my front door in real life! If you follow the logic through, you realize that it's because someone who keeps cementing over front doors will eventually be hurt or killed to make them stop. But in Rust, they'd just respawn again and keep doing it.

3. Crafting is instant, and always A+B = C+D. Each second marks the passing of six days, after all, and I also feel like waiting around for stuff to craft in most games is tedious. However, A+B=C+D simplifies stuff so much that making most things takes multiple steps. A current example:

sharp stone + Yew branch = yew shaft

Milkweed stalk x2 = thread
thread x2 = rope

rope + yew shaft = bow

Each transition is instant, but gathering the required materials is not. And walking around to find them, likely away from your warm home, expends time and food.

Also, there are a few things that aren't instant for aesthetic reasons. When you set a snare on a rabbit hole, it takes a bit of time for the rabbit to peek out and get caught in the snare. When you seal a firing kiln, it takes a bit of time for it to finish firing and have charcoal in it, mostly because it looks cool (the sealed kiln smoking away for a bit). Some of this might change if it's too annoying (like, I suppose you could seal the firing kiln and instantly have it make charcoal), but the feel of setting snares and checking them later is nice.

Also, some stuff, like planted crops, takes a while to grow.

But baking a pie in a hot oven is instant, as an example. There's nothing interesting about waiting for it to bake.

Raw pie + hot oven = cooked pie

4. Not sure what you mean here, and how you define "crafting." Every interaction in the game is A+B = C+D. But that covers almost everything that we can "do" in a world. Example:

Bare hand + turtle pond = turtle in hand

Turtle + turtle = mating turtles

Pregnant turtle + time = turtle eggs

turtle eggs + time = baby turtles

baby turtle + time = hungry baby turtle

hungry baby turtle + time = dead turtle

berry + hungry turtle = non-hungry turtle

So... pet turtles is covered. It's not really "crafting," but it works the same way.

You can also cut down trees, dig holes, build walls, build roads, hide things in caves, tame and ride horses, etc.

Hippasus · 2017-05-14 07:19:10

Thanks for the comprehensive answers. I'm really excited about 1H1L's potential. Can you give us a sign about when the beta testing will start? If it's soon I can stop asking annoying questions and find out for myself.

jasonrohrer · 2017-05-14 20:01:18

Well, the initial private testing will be starting very soon.

I've got one more week of content production and final code tweaks, and then I'm off for three weeks on a trip with my family. I don't want to start the private testing before I leave, because I won't be very responsive while I'm away (it's an official no-work break).

So, a week or two after I get back, the plan is to get the game out to the private testers. The week of June 12 or June 19. They'll be looking for bugs and platform issues at first, and after that, I'll start weekly content updates for them, just to make sure that's all working smoothly too.

At that point, if everything's working smoothly, the plan is to go into paid public alpha, probably with a slow roll-out to people who purchased my previous games, and then a carefully-scheduled public launch, with media previews and such.

After that, the plan is to do weekly content updates every week for about 2 years.

The game will change a lot after private alpha testing is over. Obviously, loads of content will be added, but I also anticipate some code and gameplay changes, as I see how large groups of people behave together.

jere · 2017-05-15 02:03:23

Whoa! So cool to see the speed picked up. I was checking for a few days when it was stuck at like 4 objects and a little worried.

In Rust, I had people cement over my front door countless times. Funny... no one has EVER cemented over my front door in real life! If you follow the logic through, you realize that it's because someone who keeps cementing over front doors will eventually be hurt or killed to make them stop. But in Rust, they'd just respawn again and keep doing it.

But is the consequence here worse than in Rust? I've not played it, but I assume if you die in Rust you lose something and it's somewhat of a pain.

In OHOL, what do you lose exactly? You could potentially, maybe even with high probability depending on the circumstances, spawn right next to your previous area. Your items would be stored on the ground or in containers presumably. It's also interesting to think how your knowledge of locations/buildings might carry over to the next life. I'm thinking TCD all over again. Maybe not traps, but you could hide your old possessions in obscure locations or even mazes.

You could imagine an MMO with permadeath and people would be really nervous about griefing in that kind of setting because they potentially lose months of work. But you lose a maximum of ~1 hour of work here. It'd be nice if there really was some sort of investment that caused you to care about your actions beyond one hour. For instance, what if you can name yourself and any offspring you create will permanently be labeled with their lineage? Or there's some online viewer that will show your old characters as long as they still have living descendants. Something along those lines, so you're more invested in what happens to future generations.

Also, couple questions:

1) Will there be signs like in Minecraft? It's hard to imagine a society developing with a complex set of customs and rules without being able to quickly communicate those rules. Imagine a group of players want to outlaw certain items from being crafted (e.g. no guns). It would be really tedious to explain everything in chat over and over again.

2) Will any items require huge/realistic numbers of items to craft? Or will all items require a cartoonishly small input? imagine you want to build a nuclear bomb. You have to acquire a huge amount of uranium. Yes, the crafting is of the form A+B, but I'm sure you could have items representing 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. uranium ores. If the numbers are indeed huge, will there ever be machines that automate routine harvesting/crafting like Factorio?

3) Are you worried about scaling the game in case it gets really popular? This is a notoriously hard problem and one of the reasons MMOs are so hard to develop, right? I remember in Asheron's call that if enough people gathered in one area, then a "portal storm" developed and people would be randomly teleported away.

Last edited by jere (2017-05-15 02:13:54)

jasonrohrer · 2017-05-15 21:43:30

In Rust, last time I played, you can craft as many sleeping bags as you want, and put them wherever you want. For example, you could put ten of them in your safe room.

When you die, you get a menu of sleeping bags and get to pick one to respawn into.

You only lose what you were immediately carrying when you die (it's left on your body). But respawn is instant, assuming that you have a sleeping bag ready.

After using a sleeping bag, it goes on cooldown, so you can't respawn again from the same one for 2 minutes or so. Obviously, this can be overcome by just making a bunch of sleeping bags.

I think that in a more recent update, they gave each sleeping bag a radius, and when you respawn from one, all bags within the radius go on cooldown. Not sure how the latest version works.

ANYWAY, the result of this---of instantly spawning back in the safety of your base with all your stuff---is that there's essentially no cost to trolling. Run out with a cheap spear, or a bow, and bug the heck out of people. If they catch you and kill you, you respawn back in your base. Run right out and do it again. You lose a cheap spear each time, but it's worth it.

In OHOL, your life is unique. Where you were born, what you were born into, what your parents gave you, and how well they took care of you. Getting to the point where you CAN start or resume trolling takes loving parents, and most importantly, time. You have to grow up again.

So, if you troll and are dealt with by an in-game police force, you can instantly respawn.... as a helpless baby with none of your stuff halfway around the world.

Which is why, even if reincarnation was true, we wouldn't have a problem with real-world trolling.

Yes, it's possible to respawn near your stuff (out of sheer luck, or if there are very few players---your mother is likely to be near your stuff if the world is small), but you still can't instantly regain possession of it. You're a baby again, and you can't even feed yourself at first, let alone pick up your bow.

So yes, you lose only an "hour of work," but you ALWAYS lose an hour of work, every hour, in this game. It's not "work" for yourself, ever, but work for future generations (which may include you), but there's no well-defined, long-term possession by individuals.

Maybe people will wait to troll until they are old and have nothing to lose. But hopefully, after an hour of playing, and watching their great grandchildren growing up, they'll be somewhat invested. I guess they can troll their great grandchildren... It's thematically consistent.... losing your mind with senility.

1) Signs are interesting. But I find that they lead to pretty horrible clutter in Minecraft, so I hesitate for that reason (and it's why I didn't put them in TCD).

In this game, who are you explaining things over and over to? Remember, you only live one hour. It's not "your server" or "your village." You're just kinda passing through.

How do we communicate with future generations? With signs? Like, "Whoever uses this shovel must clean the mud off and put it back in the shed." That's a more immediate form of communication, meant for a community where people come and go (like a communal farm). You wouldn't think about leaving a sign like that to control your great grandchildren's use of your shovel. Primarily because you wouldn't care how they used it!

The main "new" people that we're interacting with in the game, where immediate communication is required, are our children. They are helpless at first and at our mercy. They can primarily just watch us do things. We can talk to them, but we don't have to. They can learn by watching us do stuff (see us put the shovel away each time). But talking to them isn't so bad either.

There aren't really "groups of players" like you're describing, at least not long term. Everything in the game is really trans-generational, because lives are so short. It's more about families. And in that context, oral tradition is way more interesting, to me, than written records.

I have thought about enabling signs using A+B=C+D crafting, where you have to craft each letter separately using bits of wood and glue or whatever, and then arrange them on a sign, which could be a container for letters.

It would then be so much work to make a sign that people would think very carefully about what they wanted to say. That feels better to me than a cheapy "type anything" sign that you can just throw up everywhere with whatever random joke on it.

2) Yes, what you're describing with "stacks" of items is possible. I'm already using it in some places (like making a coat out of rabbit fir requires that you first stack up four pieces of fur together).

Harvesting machines are possible. I suppose they could be installed on an ore vein of some kind, and then fill up some kind of bushel over time. Encoding very deep stacks and splitting is pretty tedious on my end, though, so I need to think carefully about this stuff. For example, if a bushel of ore contains 100 pieces, You probably wouldn't be able to take out one piece at a time (since that would require me to input 100 A+B=C transitions). So a bushel would probably be indivisible and used as a unit (and maybe the centrifuge to refine uranium would only operate on bushels for input). Powers of 2 splitting is possible, but also somewhat tedious for me.

As a current example, you can pick one berry from the bush at t a time, which can be individually stored or eaten. Or you can use a bowl on the bush, picking a bowl full and leaving an empty bush. You can make a pie from the bowl-full, but you can't currently take one berry at a time from the bowl until it's empty. The bush is infinite for single berries, and I suppose the bowl could be as well. But I'm not going to encode 60 transitions to enable you to empty the bowl (or bush) one berry at a time. A bowl and a single berry have different uses though, so there are reasons for harvesting berries in different ways.

3) Here's the deal with scaling: I think the server, given the bandwidth available, can currently support about 200 simultaneous players. I'm using Linode to spin up overflow servers, though. When 100 players are on the main server, the reflector automatically starts sending half of newly joining players to a second server. When that second server has 100 players on it, a third server will start getting used, etc.

Each server has a separate permanent map and timeline. They are each isolated worlds. This isn't ideal, but it's the only simple way to make this work. In the context of this game, where each life is unique and there's an interesting game to play at every population size, I think it actually fits pretty well. Being a 10th-generation baby on the ancient-civilization main server is very different from being Eve on the untouched overflow server. Both are interesting and add variety to the game.

But there won't be any glitching or teleporting due to scale issues. Each life is atomic and will pass entirely and consistently on one server. That's another nice property of this game for scaling purposes: we can safely make load balancing decisions at the moment of your birth. There's no expected continuity across lifetimes, so we don't even need to move your inventory over to the overflow server. You just get born there.

Hippasus · 2017-05-21 15:03:20

Given the intentional minimalism of the crafting system I'd be intrigued to know a (probably hypothetical at this point) crafting tree for something complex like, say, a motorcar or a smart phone. I'm guessing to make it work there will have to be a little artistic licence like, say: cart + engine = car?
Oh, and have a great holiday!

jasonrohrer · 2017-05-29 16:18:08

Well, I haven't gotten there yet, so I'm not entirely sure.

Everything in the game so far is simple enough to have pretty realistic step-by-step crafting. Making a fire-starting bow drill, for example, takes around ten very specific steps, just like real life. It's not just (( 3 wood plus 2 rope = bow drill )) like it would be in Rust or Don't Starve. You have to whittle one piece of wood down into a small shaft, then find a small curved branch and whittle it for the bow, then add rope (made in several steps from milkweed), and finally attach the shaft to the bow.

One more recent example that uses a bit of artistic license is the bellows. You have to fire a clay nozzle in the kiln, and you have to split a branch to make handles, and you have to stitch a skin water pouch. But after you have those parts, you just put them together, in two steps, you make the bellows. You don't have to sew the handles or nozzle into place like you would in real life (or seal the nozzle in place with pine tar, or make a one-way valve on the side of the air bag).

So, this is kind of half-way between the detailed, realistic crafting of the bow drill and your cart + engine = car.

Obviously, a car has dozens of gears and hundreds of bolts of different sizes. I'm not imagining that you'll assemble it piece by piece. Even if I wanted to put YOU through that tedium, it would pretty much be impossible for me to input and manage that many detailed transitions. And then there's the ordering problem (no reason you should put this bolt in before that one), leading to a combinatoric explosion if I want to do it right.

But I'm still imagining that you'll need to vulcanize rubber for the tires, and make pistons along the way to creating an engine, etc. There are parts of car manufacture that are interesting (travelling to the jungle to find a rubber tree) and parts that are not (tightening 300 bolts). The "artistic license" that you're talking about is basically me glossing over the less important, less interesting parts, while still including enough interesting detail that it FEELS like you're building a car from scratch.

No one is going to complain that you don't have to seal the tip of the bellows with pine tar... You had to build an entire kiln just to fire the nozzle!

joshwithguitar · 2017-06-25 15:02:04

jasonrohrer wrote:

2. Objects can be deadly to other humans, and they can have a deadly distance defined (knife kills from one tile away, bow from 5 tiles away, rifle from 10 tiles away). There's a very simple click-to-kill mechanic, with no real aiming or timing or other shooter mechanics. You can miss if someone is moving, based on server clock differences, but that's it. And killing is all-or-nothing. You click, they die instantly. No wounding or health bars. Kinda like real life. You get shot in the chest with a bow, and you die. You don't go eat some berries and heal up. Weapons can go through ammo transitions and leave something on the ground at the target site (bow can shoot one arrow, then becomes an empty bow, etc.) So, simpler projectile weapons have a pretty severe limit on their rate of fire.

I'm interested in how combat will pan out, especially when it comes to technological improvements.

Will you be able to build armour/shields or any protective gear? If not, will the only things that make weapons better or worse than each other be their range and rate of attack?

Will a ranged weapon always trump a hand weapon in 1v1? And if two people attack each other will there be a basic hierarchy of weapons such that if you hold A you will always beat someone holding B and two people holding A that know what they are doing will always end up both dying if they attack each other?

I guess what I'm wondering overall is will there be a "stone age -> bronze age -> iron age" etc development up of weapons/armour or will it just be "knife -> bow -> rifle", basically jumping from pre-historic weapons to modern weapons in a single jump.

jasonrohrer · 2017-06-25 16:15:22

Yeah, I'm not trying to simulate a history of warfare with this game.

It's funny to think that steel swords really had such a huge leg up on bronze swords. A sharp metal thing is a sharp metal thing.

Here's one answer about this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimf … at_bronze/

Sounds like the ores needed for bronze were simply more rare, giving armies that used bronze fewer weapons and armor (which may be true in this game if I want to make it true).

But yeah, for the later answers there, I'm not implementing weapon shattering or weight.

So there's no built-in hierarchy of weapons. Rate of fire and range will be the only advantage to the higher-tech weapons.

The reason for this is that this isn't a game about combat.

If that's the case, then why include weapons at all? I think I said it earlier, but I've come to the conclusion that the possibility of violence is necessary to make social systems function. It's the only way, at the end of the day, that we enforce our group rules. And group violence (police force) always trumps individual violence. And violence is permanent.

All of that stuff is true in the way that I designed this game. Weapons are there so that people can build functioning societies, and that's it.

Hippasus · 2017-06-26 11:30:21

Weapons are there so that people can build functioning societies, and that's it.

Or, of course, disfunctional societies!

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