Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

Spoonwood · 2020-01-08 12:34:33

The Boots family last 287 generations. It's probably less than 3 days from an update. At 3 generations an hour, 216 generations seems around an upper limit for what a family could *hope* to achieve with a new family starting now, since lineages can't survive updates (players aren't killed by updates, but it eventually becomes impossible to have a child during an update).

sigmen4020 · 2020-01-08 12:44:51

Families are experiencing a lot more trouble with surviving that doesn't include updates, which is why I can safely say that no family this week will reach gen 200. The family that has survived the longest this week is the Dobbie family, which survived 102 gens. After that is the Dantes family that lasted 77 gens. If we want families to last longer, we should look more into why families very rarily reach gen 100 nowadays. And I guarantee that the main reason for this is not weekly updates.

Also I'm curious. How would you personally make it so families survive updates? Is Jason supposed to stop updating the game for the sake of the in-game families? How would you update the server without booting the players from it?

Spoonwood · 2020-01-08 13:03:31

sigmen4020 wrote:

The family that has survived the longest this week is the Dobbie family, which survived 102 gens. After that is the Dantes family that lasted 77 gens. If we want families to last longer, we should look more into why families very rarily reach gen 100 nowadays. And I guarantee that the main reason for this is not weekly updates.

I don't disagree that a whole host of problems here also exist. However, 100 generations is something like 33 hours. That's still a large amount of possible Eve runs that can't last that long due to updates.

sigmen4020 wrote:

Also I'm curious. How would you personally make it so families survive updates?

I'd make it so that someone who is in a family can get reborn as an Eve, and that such an Eve has an ancestor in the previous family tree. Perhaps something like such a rebirth can't happen until 2 hours after the child (or last fertile famle) in the last generation dies. Or it can only occur after an update period. Then the person reborn as an Eve would be a descendant of that person. The person wouldn't need to have the ability to choose to get reborn, it could happen otherwise. I don't think that everyone in the family would need that ability... perhaps such rebirthing would apply to a random family member. Or only to the Eve, since it was her lineage, so to speak. The person rebirthing also wouldn't have to appear in any particular location in principle.

Jason can still do updates, and the server system wouldn't need to change with the above.

If the engine can't handle that at present, then the engine needs to get reworked.

That all said, I'm not at all hopeful. Jason recently dismissed lineages not being able to survive updates as an issue recently, even though he's wondered why eternal lineages don't exist, or expected that eternal lineages could exist.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-01-08 13:30:08)

The_Anabaptist · 2020-01-08 15:06:27

With the number of incidents of racism and race based purging of towns I've seen this week, it is a miracle that any lineage is lasting more than a day or two.

And sadly, I think the genetics rating gets in the way of family members policing their own because they don't want the negative hit to their score. I think that if you curse a member of your own family, then you shouldn't get penalized for killing them. I had one game this week where I had worked my butt off keeping a town alive while race killings were happening right & left. My family lost, but I believe the other family spared me because they saw I wasn't involved and helped feed and dress their kids. At the end of my life, one kid from the other family tried to bully me out of town and called me every name in the book. The rest of her family verbally supported me, but did nothing to deal with the obvious drama queen / future murderer. Fortunately, my music was playing so I didn't have to wait for her to grow up and wield a weapon. Sadly, my curse was used up, so I'll probably have to deal with her again.

The_Anabaptist

Spoonwood · 2020-01-08 15:52:26

The_Anabaptist wrote:

I had one game this week where I had worked my butt off keeping a town alive while race killings were happening right & left.

That seems doubly unhappy. Not only because of the killing and senseless murder, but because of the racial requirements to climb the tech tree (in the large population context).

With situations like that, it seems like another point in favor of just digging up more springs, getting more water from ponds, and trying to get people who don't yum to drink more milk, eat more eggs, berries from wild bushes, etc. And migration earlier. But, in my opinion, a deep well, isn't a suitable replacement for 'iPhones', so this just doesn't sound like a good situation overall. Or skilled players siding to get born of a certain race, which again, I don't think is good overall.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-01-08 15:55:12)

jcwilk · 2020-01-09 00:55:50

Keeping players alive during an update seems trivial. Here's an example solution:

- update process starts without warning
- kicks everyone off the server
- all characters left behind that are currently alive have their hunger and age frozen until they log back in
- update process finishes
- 12 hours later all characters still frozen are unfrozen

Frozen characters cannot give birth. If a player returns to a frozen character the character becomes unfrozen. Frozen characters can get murdered, force fed, etc, even though they're not getting hungry or dying on their own.

12 hours is arbitrary but seems like a reasonable compromise given the roughly weekly frequency of updates. It should be more than 8 hours so players can sleep if needed.

Simpler example solution:

- update process starts without warning, entire world is taken offline and frozen
- indication of when the world will be brought back online is posted somewhere, ideally the forums
- update process finishes, world remains offline until the indicated time
- everything is turned back on exactly as it was before and any attentive players will have a chance to quickly log back on and rescue their family before their character passes fertility

I'm not entirely sure what the current process is, I'm guessing it's something similar to the second option but without any kind of communication to the players to let them know what's going on and what they should do and why, which sucks.

wondible · 2020-01-09 03:02:14

jcwilk wrote:

- all characters left behind that are currently alive have their hunger and age frozen until they log back in

There is a lot of game state that only exists at run time - players, held/worn objects, family relations, language definitions and learning, tools learned just offhand. We are talking about code changes, and Jason has certainly done once impossible things when he got motivated to do so (such as biome specific crops), but tracking down and making save formats for all that information is definitely non trivial.

jcwilk · 2020-01-09 03:40:45

wondible wrote:

jcwilk wrote:
- all characters left behind that are currently alive have their hunger and age frozen until they log back in
There is a lot of game state that only exists at run time - players, held/worn objects, family relations, language definitions and learning, tools learned just offhand. We are talking about code changes, and Jason has certainly done once impossible things when he got motivated to do so (such as biome specific crops), but tracking down and making save formats for all that information is definitely non trivial.

I meant trivial in concept, no change no matter how simple in concept is trivial in code unless one is looking at the code, which I'm not as that takes a lot of time to comb through and it's pointless if Jason hasn't given the thumbs up to the concept

Spoonwood · 2020-01-09 04:48:40

jcwilk wrote:

I meant trivial in concept, no change no matter how simple in concept is trivial in code unless one is looking at the code, which I'm not as that takes a lot of time to comb through and it's pointless if Jason hasn't given the thumbs up to the concept

So, you're talking about a concept where the players get frozen in time. None of us have that experience and none of us ever will in the real world. That may be trivial for you to imagine because of your background, but I don't think the idea of something existing outside of time was such a trivial concept to think up whenever it got first thought up... or I suppose, to a believer, when it first got communicated. I just don't see how a concept totally unrelated to people's experience would be easy to think up the first time that such a concept got thought up.

jcwilk · 2020-01-09 09:44:29

Spoonwood wrote:

jcwilk wrote:
I meant trivial in concept, no change no matter how simple in concept is trivial in code unless one is looking at the code, which I'm not as that takes a lot of time to comb through and it's pointless if Jason hasn't given the thumbs up to the concept
So, you're talking about a concept where the players get frozen in time. None of us have that experience and none of us ever will in the real world. That may be trivial for you to imagine because of your background, but I don't think the idea of something existing outside of time was such a trivial concept to think up whenever it got first thought up... or I suppose, to a believer, when it first got communicated. I just don't see how a concept totally unrelated to people's experience would be easy to think up the first time that such a concept got thought up.

What... Lol... I'm talking about in terms of logic wrt virtual characters, not in terms of real life. We're talking about solving a technical problem not emulating reality. You're clearly just arguing to argue, don't do that.

sigmen4020 · 2020-01-09 10:42:46

Spoonwood wrote:

jcwilk wrote:
I meant trivial in concept, no change no matter how simple in concept is trivial in code unless one is looking at the code, which I'm not as that takes a lot of time to comb through and it's pointless if Jason hasn't given the thumbs up to the concept
So, you're talking about a concept where the players get frozen in time. None of us have that experience and none of us ever will in the real world. That may be trivial for you to imagine because of your background, but I don't think the idea of something existing outside of time was such a trivial concept to think up whenever it got first thought up... or I suppose, to a believer, when it first got communicated. I just don't see how a concept totally unrelated to people's experience would be easy to think up the first time that such a concept got thought up.

I mean you could sort of work with the idea if you for example disabled hunger (and maybe also fertility) on the players that disconnected during updates. That way time wouldn't stand still and noone would die from the disconnections. Could work, but I don't know how long it takes on average for updates to usually get rolling so maybe not. Maybe time could only stand still if the server is offline and updating, and then time will start again once the server is back online, so you would be born into the same character you were before the update started after the update without supernatural frozen people in time standing around. The "frozen" people would then just be like your regular disconnected player, maybe with hunger disabled or reduced (without disabling aging) to give people a chance to get back into it. That way families could survive updates right?

Sorry if that was a bit of a rambling. Hopefully my ideas are understandable enough.

Spoonwood · 2020-01-09 12:52:18

jcwilk wrote:

What... Lol... I'm talking about in terms of logic wrt virtual characters, not in terms of real life. We're talking about solving a technical problem not emulating reality.

And you think the concept of virtual characters a trivial concept? I don't think what you proposed conceptually easy. Simple conceptually, sure. But, ease of something differs.

Spoonwood · 2020-01-09 13:10:29

sigmen4020 wrote:

I mean you could sort of work with the idea if you for example disabled hunger (and maybe also fertility) on the players that disconnected during updates.

I think it would be jarring for all players to get forced to disconnect during an update. Some people might check elsewhere online and see nothing wrong. Then they'd try to fix their client. But there wouldn't be a failure along the way, since such disconnects would be a feature. I imagine a fair number of people would feel something like "what the fuck is this game blocking me from playing like this?!" when it wasn't the end of the game, and they wouldn't be people with poor intentions necessarily either. Such an experience I would imagine would feel different than an internet disconnect which is a technical issue. Alright, now JC's solution seems to fit his personality, because he likes chaos/strife, and perhaps anticipated such chaos would result before I did.

I do think that families could survive updates with that sort of idea.

sigmen4020 · 2020-01-09 13:18:47

Spoonwood wrote:

sigmen4020 wrote:
I mean you could sort of work with the idea if you for example disabled hunger (and maybe also fertility) on the players that disconnected during updates.
I think it would be jarring for all players to get forced to disconnect during an update. Some people might check elsewhere online and see nothing wrong. Then they'd try to fix their client. But there wouldn't be a failure along the way, since such disconnects would be a feature. I imagine a fair number of people would feel something like "what the fuck is this game blocking me from playing like this?!" when it wasn't the end of the game, and they wouldn't be people with poor intentions necessarily either. Such an experience I would imagine would feel different than an internet disconnect which is a technical issue. Alright, now JC's solution seems to fit his personality, because he likes chaos/strife, and perhaps anticipated such chaos would result before I did.
I do think that families could survive updates with that sort of idea.

Understandable. When I wrote it I didn't really take into account that people aren't currently disconnected when updates are coming but they are rather left to finish up their lives before the server goes offline. I could definitely see frustrations from people being disconnected in the middle of a life thinking it's a bug. If the idea I brought up were to be implemented the player definitely need to be informed what's happening on the disconnect screen then.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2020-01-08 12:34:33

Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#2 2020-01-08 12:44:51

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#3 2020-01-08 13:03:31

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#4 2020-01-08 15:06:27

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#5 2020-01-08 15:52:26

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#6 2020-01-09 00:55:50

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#7 2020-01-09 03:02:14

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#8 2020-01-09 03:40:45

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#9 2020-01-09 04:48:40

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#10 2020-01-09 09:44:29

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#11 2020-01-09 10:42:46

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#12 2020-01-09 12:52:18

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#13 2020-01-09 13:10:29

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

#14 2020-01-09 13:18:47

Re: Probably Not Enough Time Now... This Happens Almost Every Week

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