One Hour One Life Forums

breezeknight

Member

Registered: 2018-04-02

Posts: 813

Re: This Alan Watts video is relevant to some recent discussion

scarcity desn't make the gameplay more interesting, it makes the gameplay just more grindy & time consuming

Eveing is boring because it's painting by numbers
late game is boring because every town is same, every life is same
people roleplay because there is no other way to play it than linear development of things
we don't even have an option for nomadic lifestyle, no differences between cultures in different areas
there is only one right way for a town to advance, no deviations, no choices

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BladeWoods

Member

Registered: 2018-08-11

Posts: 476

Re: This Alan Watts video is relevant to some recent discussion

There's a limitation of the transition engine which makes---shall I call it "multi-tiered decay"---really hard to implement.

As an example, a domestic berry bush gets picked clean, and becomes languishing.  You add fertile soil and water it, and it grows more berries.  That cycle is fine, because there's no meta state tracking needed.  But if we wanted, say, a berry bush to have only 10 of these cycles before it dies for real, that's currently impossible in the engine.  The problem is that the "use counter" is being used to count berries as they are picked, and there can't be another "meta use counter" to track how many times the bush has gone through the cycle.

Bushes are okay in this regard, and I don't think they're a big problem.

But I'd really like the Newcomen pump wells to go permanently dry eventually, and require an upgrade to oil.  But the "use counter" is used on the full well to track how much water comes out of it, and thus there can't be a meta use counter to track how many cycles the well gets used for.

One example of a way to "fix" bushes would be to have the domestic type to require a bowl to pick in one swoop, instead of berry-by-berry (the bush would have to look different, or something).  So then the use counter wouldn't be used to track berry picking, and instead could, maybe, be used to track steps in the meta cycle before the bush dies.

Similarly, for the pump wells, each burning could give you one bucket (or maybe a "mega bucket") of water, freeing the use-counter to track the meta lifecycle of the pump itself.

It seems like the engine is having trouble handling a lot of situations, is it ridiculous to think about increasing its capabilities? A big reason cars are bad is because there's no way to turn them off when you get off and for it to remember how much fuel is left. All the fuel must be spent in one go. The timers on things like flat rocks and hot coals can be reset through transitions. All since there seems to be no way to remember values from prior transitions. You can't get rid of infinite food source cacti and berry bushes with multi-tiered decay either.