a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
You are not logged in.
Pages: 1
Obviously, the wheat isn't a good enough food source right now to make it worth it, but multi-bite pies are coming that will give them a huge multiplier.
Are you going to implement "bread"? It seems silly that you have to put something in your dough before you can cook and eat it.
"I'm still stuck on the lack of visual change, though..."
Hmm, if you're generating things on top then there should be no issue in having different images for different states. Just put all the images in a folder and name them with the state number or range (e.g. 1-5) and make the generator do the rest of the work. Some things, like an axe, wouldn't need many images or perhaps wouldn't change at all until it is blunt.
This sounds great Jason, limited resources will make the game much more interesting. A real "survival" game rather than a game of "make more stuff while remembering to eat". It should give everything a lot more meaning.
If you're planning on having berry bushes have X berries on them then I'd suggesting standardising some form of numerical system for objects rather than going through the tedious process of creating a new bush object for every possible number of berries. So the idea would be to be able to have recipes like:
berrybush(X) = berrybush(X-1) + berry
berrybush(0) + 0 seconds = berrybush-empty
This could be really useful for a whole bunch of things, consider:
axe(X) + tree = axe(X-1) + logs-with-stump
axe(0) + 0 seconds = blunt-axe
I just did a calculation, average life span is currently ~30 years.
I've set it so that you have a 5% chance of dying in each of your first 5 years, then a 2% chance of death each year after that until 100% chance at 60.
I've also set it so that a player has a (years of life)/60 chance of starting a new game after death.
I didn't see any real difference in the outcome after modifying these numbers. You basically have the same thing happen if you have everyone live to 60.
Hmm, maybe 5% would be better.
I've uploaded the sim as a webpage so you can try tweaking the numbers yourself:
http://joshuacollins.net/ohol/serversim.html
I agree that it is probably best to try and concentrate population rather than spread it thin, what I was considering is some way to maintain a small population on the servers that would otherwise die out, just to keep the continuity and prevent new Eves. Perhaps make sure they get new players after they drop below 10. Only problem is that it would be hard to fit such a thing in with your current system as the last servers would have to somehow guarantee that few players join them.
I've a quick run of some different threshold values and the main difference you get from adjusting the upper threshold is the number of servers that end up spawning. When it is set to 75% 10% you get a maximum of 6 servers and only one drops down to 0 during the day, so this could be better.
At 87.5% 0% you get 6 servers and none ever drops out... perhaps once a server starts spreading it should remain spreading?
Thanks for the detailed response!
I've run a rough simulation of your server system in which I had a max of around 1000 players and a min of around 500 over a day.
What I found happened was that during the times with the most players 7 servers were populated with a distribution something like:
191 191 191 190 100 50 50
So the first 4 stayed 95% full 5th around 50% and the next 2 25%
During the times with the least number of players the last 2 servers would go extinct and the distribution would be something like:
189 184 74 33 33 0 0
Would it make sense to try to maintain a bare minimum population on each daily active server in order to minimize the number of Eves that have to be spawned each day? Ideally the player would always be born to a lineage that stretches back to when the server began, and Eves would only be spawned when there was a surge in the overall player population, such as during the launch.
If a server continued to languish at a small population for more than a week without ever rising you could have some method of letting it die off knowing that it is unlikely to be needed again.
I was thinking about population dynamics in OHOL and it seems that there might be a number of issues that have to be dealt with.
Firstly, the overall number of users is likely to decline after launch. How will the servers deal with this? If the decline is spread throughout the servers then each might become fairly sparse. So it might make sense to drop off servers and just accept that some of the worlds that have been created will cease to ever be active again.
But if you drop servers off we could have another issue. Population won't just vary over weeks but will likely vary quite a bit during each day as as player numbers naturally rise and fall. If we send new players during the natural daily decline to a smaller number of servers you'll end up with a whole bunch of servers going to a population of zero and then later in the day respawning a lots of Eves when the numbers increase. This doesn't seem ideal.
So are there any plans in place to deal with these issues? Overall it looks like the fluctuation of current user numbers is going to have a pretty massive effect on how these worlds develop whatever method is implemented.
To reproduce carry a baby then take off your hat. You'll have a hat it your hands and the baby will be gone. Soon a baby skeleton will appear somewhere. If you're the baby you will still seem to disappear.
Some suggestions to make "accidentally starving" less common and frustrating:
- If you click to pick up food while holding something you will drop it on any free adjacent tile
- Grabbing berries from a bush should cause you to drop what you are holding, just as if you were picking it up from the ground
- If you're holding food when your food metre goes to 0 you eat the food rather than dying
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.
Pages: 1