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a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building

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#1 2017-09-01 19:43:46

jasonrohrer
Administrator
Registered: 2017-02-13
Posts: 4,801

New Eve placement algorithm: your own personal civilization

The live server has been updated with a new Eve placement algorithm.

Note that Eve placement in general only matters during times of sparse player population, because with a steady flow of players, the family tree will grow without any new Eves being spawned.  However, making this base case work well is really important.


The old Eve placement method tracked a global list of the most recent 100 objects that humans changed in the world, and use that list to determine the epicenter of the largest cluster of this activity, and then placed the next Eve in a radius around that epicenter.  This resulted in the next Eve starting roughly where the last Eve was working.

The old method worked great if you were a lone player coming back over and over, since you could keep working on your mini-civilization without starting over from scratch with each new life.

It did NOT work so great if you were a brand new player, as you found yourself starting out in the middle of someone else's camp, robbing you of the experience of trying to survive from scratch yourself.

It also did not work well if you played as a solo player and then came back later.  If an intervening Eve wandered away and started a new mini-civilization, you might end up starting there when you came back later.  Where's my old camp?

But in general, I think that focusing all Eve activity in one place makes things less interesting.  If there's one pocket of civilization instead of multiple pockets, once one pocket gets the ax, everyone has the ax forever, and so on.


SO... the new algorithm maintains a database of civilization epicenters associated with each account.  New Eves are spawned out in a random place in the wilderness, but on subsequent solo-Eve lives, they are put back near wherever they have been working.

So, you essentially get to work on your own, personal civilization across multiple solo-Eve lives.  You can still cooperate with other players, but only if they are playing at the same time as you.  No more asynchronous cooperation by default.

The other civilization pockets ARE out there, however, waiting to be discovered.  And, at least with the current settings, I'm not flinging new Eves ridiculously far away from each other, so discovering another civilization is possible.


And again, this has NO effect on playing together.  You'll still get born as someone else's baby, right next to them, in their civilization.

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