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a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building

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#1 2018-04-08 00:44:20

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

End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Boy, did that wake everyone up or what?

For those of you who have played 100+ hours and are so mad after one day of change that you're thinking about asking for a refund....

Remember:  this is a game that is being actively developed.  By one person.  Working alone.  Doing everything.  12-16 hour days.  It's Saturday.  My family needs me.  But here I am.

So, think for a minute before you jump on the review button and call me LAZY in all caps, please.


I must have the freedom to try things, dangerous things, game-breaking things, in my endless quest to make the game better and more interesting.

I appreciate that you love the game as-is and don't want it to change.  But the numbers that I see on my end tell a different story.  Yes, there are an impressive number of concurrent players at peak times (150 - 200).  But that number has started to slide, and is nowhere near where it was a few weeks ago.  In the mean time, 14,000 people own the game.  They are not playing.  For a reason.

And it has nothing to do with the apocalypse.

It has to do with the game not being quite good enough yet.  The game is interesting and compelling up to the point where established villages achieve a steady, perpetual state.  If you have limitless food, there is no challenge, no danger, no drama.  Griefers are a symptom, not a cause.  If you are struggling to survive, you have no time for griefing.

And this game should always be about struggling to survive, at some level.  It should always be possible to fail, both at the individual and village level.

But villages were everywhere.  You could always wander into a deserted one and pick right back up.  Failure meant nothing.


Thus, the game sorely needed a hard reset.  I decided it would be more interesting to put that power into your hands and see what you did with it.  I also wanted to create a shared collective event.

Those who witnessed the apocalypse waves first-hand will never forget them.  It's over now, but the reset happened.


And the result, for the time being, is a game that is much more interesting again.

Building a village from scratch is the interesting part, and making a contribution that really matters is the most meaningful way to leave a legacy.  Making another bearskin rug in a village that already has 20 rugs, because there's nothing else to do, is far less interesting.

In the place of the apocalypse, I have added a new placement algorithm for Eves that will have a similar periodic cleansing effect.  Not server-wide, but at the lineage level.  Your chance to continue living and working in a given village will end when the lineage in that village dies out.  No more wandering back later and starting over in the same spot with everything already done/built for you.  Each new line will start in the wilderness.

That said, pilgrimages to the old village locations are still possible, but they will require a concerted group effort to pull off, Oregon-Trail style.


But after I implemented this new Eve placement, which involved only a few lines of code, a strange thing happened.

Server CPU and disk usage rose steadily over the next 16 hours, eventually getting to the point where the servers were so bogged down and laggy that the game was almost unplayable.

If you experienced this today, I'm sorry about that.  I've fixed it now, but the source of the problem was surprising.

The underlying databases are hash table based.  As more entries are added to these tables, collisions occur, effectively creating a chain of "pages" in the hash table.  Lookups for these later entries thus have to step through several pages before finding the matching item.

The general pattern here is that as more of the map is explored and modified, the servers become slower and slower, as hash table collisions become more common, and multi-page lookups are needed.

That has always been the case, throughout the history of the game.

But now suddenly, with the new far-flung Eve placement, it became a serious problem.

It turns out that all those far-flung Eves were exploring more and more of the world than ever before (whereas previous Eves were in the same area, so they kept wandering through already-visited places on the map).  This made the underlying databases grow and fill with collisions.

As an example, one of the databases had such long collision chains than the average lookup would need to hop through 175 hash table pages.  Not good.

Even worse, the newer entries in the hash table go at the end of these chains.  As Eves were placed farther and farther away, this meant that the quickest-to-access entries in the table (the oldest entries) were never being needed again, while the latest entries---the tiles we were looking at around the latest Eves---were at the end of very long chains.

The game uses an existing database module called KissDB that is very fast, but probably not designed with this usage pattern in mind.

The long-term solution is to re-write the database from scratch as a stack, so that the most recently-accessed elements are the fastest to access, while the forgotten parts of the map slide to the ends of the chain.  I'll be doing that work next week.

In the mean time, I changed the usage patterns for some of the largest databases, resulting in a huge performance increase and reduced RAM footprint.

The servers are lag-free again.

And once I write a new database engine, performance should be even better, allowing me to raise the player caps per server.


So I hope you'll stick with me as I continue working to improve the game.

It's not over yet.  We have years to go, together.

Jason

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#2 2018-04-08 01:31:24

fragilityh14
Member
Registered: 2018-03-21
Posts: 556

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

I appreciate the updates, and the game being more "wild" is definitely a benefit.

Unfortunately, the server reset happened right when I was finally a woman spawned to an eve and we had a good camp going that would have sustained, but of course i was barren cause the server was depopulating!


I'll tell you what I tell all my children: Make basket, always carry food.

Listen to your mom!

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#3 2018-04-08 02:22:34

Lexyvil
Member
Registered: 2018-03-23
Posts: 107

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Glad to know what's been going on in the background, as well as how it's being addressed.

Can't wait till more content gets added again. Also, don't feel too pressured Jason, most of us can be patient and know that maintnance takes priority.

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#4 2018-04-08 03:18:30

TianJiaLi
Member
Registered: 2018-04-08
Posts: 3

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

While it is nice to have the server more wild in nature I am finding things a bit frustrating. Every life now is just a heavy slog of the same thing over and over again.

1. Find a goodish spot.
2. Somehow gather the resources to start a farm.
3. Hope any kids you have aren't stupid and die.

While initially a refreshing change of pace from the huge farms where nothing was needed, when you never spawn into a decent village you don't get to try new things. The problem lies in that, eventually, you just get a generation of newbies that know nothing and die off or just run out of food because there were too many kids. And with new eves spawning so far apart you never run into a startup village to help out.

I'm not saying these changes weren't needed but there are some things that need ironing out. From beginning to end, being born to a decent mother we managed to start a farm but by the end, any other kids we had died off or ran away and all we had was the farm, oven, kiln and forge. That is as far as any life has gotten and if these villages are disappearing, as that is what I understood from this post, then there is absolutely no hope of some other player continuing where we left off which defeats the purpose of trying to leave a mark on the world.

I love this game but as it stands I may end up taking a break from the endless grind. Sure the griefers were annoying but at times they added to the story. One player who worked her butt off started killing in her old age. We just made up the story that she went crazy at the end of her life and moved on. That is one of the better scenarios though. Most people took it in stride. Tragedy happens irl. Other times griefers killed off entire villages and that is not okay but, again, irl stuff like that happened I'm sure.

Seems there needs to be some sort of happy medium here. It will be hard for civilization to progress as it stands.

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#5 2018-04-08 03:27:57

roccaturi
Member
Registered: 2018-04-06
Posts: 9

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

jasonrohrer wrote:

My family needs me.


Sounds like you're getting a taste of your own medicine, huh? As the primordial Eve, you just birthed 14,000 new babies, and now they're all 'F'-ing you. XD

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#6 2018-04-08 03:38:36

Collide
Member
Registered: 2018-04-06
Posts: 1

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Jason, I just want to say thanks for your hard work. I know a few loud people were upset but I think the community trusts you to try new things. Honestly it's refreshing for me to be a part of something that's being so well cultivated by the developer and creator.

The First Epoch (pre-apocalypse) was very stale and felt pointless because all the work was already done. All I needed to do was tend the farm. I personally am very happy that lineage now has value. I didn't have a chance to play when the databases were struggling to keep up, but I did play last night after apocalypse 5 and noticed my location was substantially farther away from center than usual. I was wondering what would happen as Eves got farther and farther away. smile

Keep it up! I believe we're all in it for the long run.

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#7 2018-04-08 03:56:06

JuggleGeek
Member
Registered: 2018-04-06
Posts: 3

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

We really appreciate your honesty and hard work. I've rarely seen developers as transparent with their work as you.

It shouldn't have to be your responsibility to keep us early alpha players 100% satisfied throughout the entire development period, and it's a shame if that's been made out to be the case.

Keep up the great work!


Through the ups and downs, remember you're participating in something grand.

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#8 2018-04-08 04:28:23

devlinwyatt
Member
Registered: 2018-03-14
Posts: 8

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

I'm so happy for the apocalypse! You're absolutely right about stale game-play and griefers, something had to be done. And I wouldn't worry too much about a few people being upset, its not worth keeping a broken game.

I like being distinguished as a great player, someone who survives on the lowest rung of the ladder. However, some of the comments are correct about the beginning becoming repetitive. Find 5-6 berry bushes, make a hatchet, make a fire-bow, make a fire, raise a family, make a snare, make clothes... but here's the catch, I'm always the last one standing. Kids don't spawn when I need them too, 80% die off anyway, so their is no one to pass the legacy onto! For once I would love to spawn in a village right around when 2-3 sets of clothes have been made and a farm is being established.

Either the game is too hard for new players or their needs to be a way of invoking babies to spawn and I bet its the latter. I understand their needs to be some spontaneous player generation but why not prioritize those who want it? For instance, I just spawned in my ideal scenario (as described above) however my mother and sister died very quickly. I was born a boy and was not about to work in a village by myself with no offspring on the horizon. Therefore I killed myself.

Which brings me to my next point, male vs female characters. I have heard it so many times "Sry, no boys". Either boys need to be able to produce offspring or they need a mechanical advantage like being faster or a greater max hunger limit. Men producing babies makes as much sense as a lone eve producing babies and It would solve the last man on earth scenario. 

Thank you for the great game and keep up the good work! Best $20 I ever spent.

Last edited by devlinwyatt (2018-04-08 04:58:05)

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#9 2018-04-08 04:57:20

Exgrathanor
Member
Registered: 2018-03-11
Posts: 3

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Jason,

Thanks again, I appreciate you making a great game. As a computer scientist myself with a masters degree, I get the technical things you're saying about hash tables and such. However, I'm one of your 14,000 inactive players with 100+ hours of game time at the moment and I thought I'd chime in and tell you why that is.

While I appreciate your idea that OHOL should always be a struggle, it gets boring starting over from scratch. Finding milkweed to make rope, to make hatchets, to make snare traps for watering pouches, to form a bow drill and a hatchet so I can make a fire to finally get to the state where I can make a water pouch or a clay bowl to start a farm. When I come across a civilization and I don't have to waste an entire life making advanced tools or a sustainable compost farm, what is there to do really? I can build or raise sheep or hunt for gold to make a crown. I mean what's the incentive? Your goal was to defeat routine boring tasks you see in games like farming ore all day in world of warcraft to make weapons, but you pretty much just created this same kind of routine in a more boring, annoying way by making it random as to where resource spawns are with time limitations. Once you really understand OHOL and how to craft just about anything, there is no challenging task anymore. That is what really has prevented me from playing recently and turned me inactive. Extreme gamers like me need a challenge. We need a near impossible task to accomplish that we can strive for. Currently, OHOL has none of these tasks. Everything in the game is pretty much accomplishable with the right spawn.

Griefing is a symptom of endless resources. I agree with you. Once I had done literally everything there was to do in OHOL from building a base from scratch, to crafting a crown, the only entertaining thing I found left to do was to see how many people I could kill with a single life. After killing 4 people, I endless ran around searching for more people to kill and died to a wolf. That was about the point in my OHOL career I just quit.

As far as the horse update was concerned, I didn't even redownload the patch to play for the horse update, because why would I do that? I get a horse to travel to another town that has the same boring resources? Again, my point is incentive. There is no incentive for end game play in OHOL. That is what it is really missing. I don't want to go through the boring tasks of developing a civilization if there is no chance that civilization can better itself to do far more advanced tasks.

I know your time is limited as a single developer, and as I said I greatly appreciate what you have made so far. It has brought me great joy and is fun to play. In my endless hours of troubleshooting and becoming an efficient machine at playing OHOL, my opinion is you just won't captivate players like me if there aren't more features added, more stuff to do, more things that are almost unobtainable that we can strive for. I know adding lots more stuff to do and more features is asking a lot, and I don't expect it of you. I just wanted you to know my rational and give constructive feedback as to why I'm no longer captivated and active in OHOL. Best of luck to you! Even if I never play OHOL again, which I'm not saying I won't, what you've created so far was well worth the money I spent for the time I have enjoyed playing. I may revisit OHOL in the future when it is more developed, but right now I just kind of put playing it on hold and keep reading your emails for content updates until I see something added to the game that peeks my interest.

Sincere Kudos,
Exgrathanor

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#10 2018-04-08 04:58:26

Mewmew
Member
Registered: 2018-04-04
Posts: 3

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

I'm horribly tired, barely awake and about to go to sleep, so hopefully my grammar isn't too atrocious here but it very well may end up being so big_smile


>>"And this game should always be about struggling to survive, at some level.  It should always be possible to fail, both at the individual and village level.  But villages were everywhere.  You could always wander into a deserted one and pick right back up.  Failure meant nothing."

The game was supposed to be about working together to build up a society and world that stayed there.  It was hard to survive, but what you made was left over to make it so future generations could continue from where you left off.  It seems that some of that idea is falling out of favor now.  Rather than a wipe, dying out, making people constantly have to re-start, why not make it so there are other struggles that make it more difficult for cities to survive once they are built up?  Maybe the cities attract dangerous wildlife, maybe disasters start to strike more populated areas but are recoverable and workable to get through.  Maybe everything in the world ends up getting a natural decay level so there isn't always a big stockpile of so much stuff in some places, with things lasting longer depending on what they were made of.


>>"Building a village from scratch is the interesting part, and making a contribution that really matters is the most meaningful way to leave a legacy."

Except if the villages are just wiped away in the way that's being done now, you haven't made a contribution that matters.  You have no legacy.  You have nothing saved at all.


>>"Griefers are a symptom, not a cause.  If you are struggling to survive, you have no time for griefing."

This here shows me that he really doesn't understand griefing at all, and if it's not understood, it can't be lessened.  Making it even more hard to struggle to live isn't going to stop griefing, and in fact a number of the changes being made are going to make griefing all the easier.  Griefers don't care about long term survival, they only care about living long enough to screw everybody else over, then they can die and be reborn to do it all over again.  The only way to make survival so difficult that you have no time for griefing would be to make survival so difficult that you had no time to do *anything* at all other than survive.


>>"Your chance to continue living and working in a given village will end when the lineage in that village dies out.  No more wandering back later and starting over in the same spot with everything already done/built for you.  Each new line will start in the wilderness."

Wow, griefers are really going to have a field day of fun with that.  Not only will they get to screw over people hard, but they'll be able to wipe out entire lines now and everything they've done so much easier.

As mentioned earlier I think adding item decay to everything would really be a better way to go.  You could have repair levels and let things be patched up and used for long term, but the overall highest durability would go down over time so eventually it would have to be totally replaced.


>>"So, think for a minute before you jump on the review button and call me LAZY in all caps, please."

I wouldn't call you lazy in all caps in a review, but I might write here on these forums that some of these changes definitely feel lazy.  There should be other things to make the survival challenge difficult when cities are built up rather than destroying everything and making everybody start the same things over again.  You just want to make the current situation more difficult and add more failure so people will be stuck doing the same stuff again and again, which is definitely an unindustrious way to deal with the situation no matter how long you're working each day.

There are two things I'd like to see, more content and less griefing.  By what you've written to us in the newsletter I can see you don't really have a grip on understanding griefers and griefing overall, so I don't know what to hope for there at this point.  Re-doing the early content over and over again isn't fun for me, that isn't progressing, that isn't doing anything that matters.  It means you're building it for a different type of gamer than me, you're building it for the Flappy Bird type of gamer that wants to do the same bits of content over and over at super high difficulty levels.  You're feeling that ultra over the top challenge is what people want and what makes it fun and thinking that people aren't playing because they're not being challenged enough anymore, which to me makes me think you don't really understand what most of these players were looking for.

Maybe when you see these changes do not end up causing a big rush of people to return you'll understand a bit more.

The wiping was fine, the game will probably need to wipe multiple more times as changes come, and that's not what this is about.  It's that thinking that's some kind of a solve and making sort of a built in village wipe as well that's all too easy to happen especially if griefers decide they want to make sure it happens.

I think I need to go away and give the game time to mature, and I will return one day in the future to see if it became something I can enjoy or not.

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#11 2018-04-08 05:36:35

Xuhybrid
Member
Registered: 2018-03-16
Posts: 85

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Mewmew wrote:

I'm horribly tired, barely awake and about to go to sleep, so hopefully my grammar isn't too atrocious here but it very well may end up being so big_smile


>>"And this game should always be about struggling to survive, at some level.  It should always be possible to fail, both at the individual and village level.  But villages were everywhere.  You could always wander into a deserted one and pick right back up.  Failure meant nothing."

The game was supposed to be about working together to build up a society and world that stayed there.  It was hard to survive, but what you made was left over to make it so future generations could continue from where you left off.  It seems that some of that idea is falling out of favor now.  Rather than a wipe, dying out, making people constantly have to re-start, why not make it so there are other struggles that make it more difficult for cities to survive once they are built up?  Maybe the cities attract dangerous wildlife, maybe disasters start to strike more populated areas but are recoverable and workable to get through.  Maybe everything in the world ends up getting a natural decay level so there isn't always a big stockpile of so much stuff in some places, with things lasting longer depending on what they were made of.


>>"Building a village from scratch is the interesting part, and making a contribution that really matters is the most meaningful way to leave a legacy."

Except if the villages are just wiped away in the way that's being done now, you haven't made a contribution that matters.  You have no legacy.  You have nothing saved at all.


>>"Griefers are a symptom, not a cause.  If you are struggling to survive, you have no time for griefing."

This here shows me that he really doesn't understand griefing at all, and if it's not understood, it can't be lessened.  Making it even more hard to struggle to live isn't going to stop griefing, and in fact a number of the changes being made are going to make griefing all the easier.  Griefers don't care about long term survival, they only care about living long enough to screw everybody else over, then they can die and be reborn to do it all over again.  The only way to make survival so difficult that you have no time for griefing would be to make survival so difficult that you had no time to do *anything* at all other than survive.


>>"Your chance to continue living and working in a given village will end when the lineage in that village dies out.  No more wandering back later and starting over in the same spot with everything already done/built for you.  Each new line will start in the wilderness."

Wow, griefers are really going to have a field day of fun with that.  Not only will they get to screw over people hard, but they'll be able to wipe out entire lines now and everything they've done so much easier.

As mentioned earlier I think adding item decay to everything would really be a better way to go.  You could have repair levels and let things be patched up and used for long term, but the overall highest durability would go down over time so eventually it would have to be totally replaced.


>>"So, think for a minute before you jump on the review button and call me LAZY in all caps, please."

I wouldn't call you lazy in all caps in a review, but I might write here on these forums that some of these changes definitely feel lazy.  There should be other things to make the survival challenge difficult when cities are built up rather than destroying everything and making everybody start the same things over again.  You just want to make the current situation more difficult and add more failure so people will be stuck doing the same stuff again and again, which is definitely an unindustrious way to deal with the situation no matter how long you're working each day.

There are two things I'd like to see, more content and less griefing.  By what you've written to us in the newsletter I can see you don't really have a grip on understanding griefers and griefing overall, so I don't know what to hope for there at this point.  Re-doing the early content over and over again isn't fun for me, that isn't progressing, that isn't doing anything that matters.  It means you're building it for a different type of gamer than me, you're building it for the Flappy Bird type of gamer that wants to do the same bits of content over and over at super high difficulty levels.  You're feeling that ultra over the top challenge is what people want and what makes it fun and thinking that people aren't playing because they're not being challenged enough anymore, which to me makes me think you don't really understand what most of these players were looking for.

Maybe when you see these changes do not end up causing a big rush of people to return you'll understand a bit more.

The wiping was fine, the game will probably need to wipe multiple more times as changes come, and that's not what this is about.  It's that thinking that's some kind of a solve and making sort of a built in village wipe as well that's all too easy to happen especially if griefers decide they want to make sure it happens.

I think I need to go away and give the game time to mature, and I will return one day in the future to see if it became something I can enjoy or not.

I agree. It does seem like he is out of touch with why the players play. Naturally as new content is added, players become active again. That's the natural flow of a game in development. The problem comes when the new content isn't advancing the top of the tech tree. The game only stagnates, because once u have all the tools and wells, there's nothing left to aim for above that.

One thing i'd like to see would be flint and steel. Why after we master the ability to make tools from fire, can we not make tools to make fire? Why do we not have crops like potatoes, corn or beans? Instead of removing the existing content like wheat and pies, we should be getting more content that makes people rely less on carrots? I think we'd all welcome new things to farm, instead of finite farming and harder and harder changes to existing methods. Why fix what wasn't broken?

The update that made BOTH berries and wheat useful again was amazing. It made existing content useful. This is the same as adding new content. But with the latest update it feels like content was actually removed from the game, just to make the game "harder".

Last edited by Xuhybrid (2018-04-08 05:38:06)

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#12 2018-04-08 06:25:56

Lexyvil
Member
Registered: 2018-03-23
Posts: 107

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

He does plan on adding more content, but right now he has to toy around with performance issues (such as fixing the lag from yesterday, which thankfully got fixed) and balancing the game out after observing a month of progress from players. The apocalypse had to happen before being able to tweak some aspects to see how new civs will approach the balanced changes, without relying on old ruins for the time being.

Last edited by Lexyvil (2018-04-09 02:11:33)

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#13 2018-04-08 06:43:26

Tebe
Member
Registered: 2018-03-03
Posts: 65

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

There is ALWAYS a chief incentive, and a very difficult one at that, at the heart of this game. And that's sustainable civilization. And more than ever now, that means long lineage. So far the longest family line is 31 generations. Obviously you're not likely to play 10 hours straight to see this through, the only way you can top this "high score" is to organize, to contribute toward long-term sustainability in whatever way you can best do. You may just end up living a crucial, fluorishing lifetime in the most successful family tribe in OHOL history. It's not about the tech tree. Things are far from done when the wells are built and the horse-drawn carts are in use.
What use are they if they're part of a doomed and poorly-operated settlement?

The game is long-term - the challenge is long-term. It's about figuring out what works best, and your legacy really matters in a long-lived tribe. Jason is constantly adjusting the game, and meanwhile the community is constantly adjusting how to create and organize the most sustainable civ.

If you're looking for a challenge in the game's world, look beyond the top of the tech tree.

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#14 2018-04-08 08:10:34

Bones
Member
Registered: 2018-04-08
Posts: 5

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

It seems griefing has been brought up a few times and I have a potential compromising solution to it. I'll make the idea free of charge Jason. I'm not against killing in the game and I respect the moves making the killer slower and more obvious. But someone made a great point about griefers may have a field day trying to end a well established lineage that has made something for themselves. No village will last forever but it shouldn't be because of a griefer that its ended.

I would add a **mind stability rating** to the game that would address murderers. As they kill more people, their mind rating will drop. After they murder a player they're given some kind of instability that could be set or random. These instabilities could entail slower movement speeds, smaller vision view port, random hearing of things to not hearing anything at all, to inability to articulate speech into anything other than garbled words. Once they go completely insane they simply can't pick up anything.... cause crazy.... and can just very slowly move around gibbering words no one can understand until they die. The moving very slowly is an important part because they wont be able to just kill someone in a town and run off with all their gear and hide it easily because they will be walking like snails. Also this will force them to have to wait until they die or force them to quit out of the game and waste more of their time.

Now how many kills will be allowed is up to you our Lord Jason. Certain kills could count more to the mind stability counter.... like killing a baby or anyone under fertility age could be 2 points while adults would count as 1 point of instability. But each point will entail more insanity debuffs until the ultimate fate of inability to pickup and hold anything happens and they just move slow and are only able to talk in random letters! The coding behind this could be "insanity" inducing but it's a very realistic idea that has merit to address the problems of griefers along side the changes already made. May C'thulu and H.P. Lovecraft inspire you to go insane!

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#15 2018-04-08 09:12:47

trstovall
Member
Registered: 2018-03-30
Posts: 9

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Impressively quick find on the database issues!  I have been studying kissDB the past couple of weeks (because of this game), and was thinking that may be happening.

An idea you may consider is to periodically sort the entries in the first N hash tables by most recently referenced, and trim off the end as having "decayed".  That should also stop the unnatural despawning of items in front of the player.

I love the intellectual depth of this game, and I admire the developer transparency you champion!

Cheers

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#16 2018-04-08 09:39:40

Go! Bwah!
Member
Registered: 2018-03-16
Posts: 204

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Mewmew wrote:

>>"Griefers are a symptom, not a cause.  If you are struggling to survive, you have no time for griefing."

...  Griefers don't care about long term survival, they only care about living long enough to screw everybody else over, then they can die and be reborn to do it all over again.  The only way to make survival so difficult that you have no time for griefing would be to make survival so difficult that you had no time to do *anything* at all other than survive.

Can confirm; just had a milkweed farm destroyed in a "struggling to survive" game.

Make it so hard that it's genuinely impossible for people to grief, and you frustrate pretty much every player who isn't a top-tier apocalypse speedrunner type.


I like to go by "Eve Scripps" and name my kids after medications smile

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#17 2018-04-08 09:42:46

Math3vv
Member
Registered: 2018-04-03
Posts: 11

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Havn't had griefers since the apocalypse.
Only had lag for 1~2 playtroughs. not that bad.
Game now focuses more on long family chains, wich is fun and challenging.
Thanks for the hard work, best game concept in ages.
gameplay and playerbase wise : they will return, this game is way to addictive.
U deserve some loving Jason <3

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#18 2018-04-08 10:03:11

shoukanjuu
Member
Registered: 2018-03-08
Posts: 48

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Exgrathanor wrote:

I know adding lots more stuff to do and more features is asking a lot, and I don't expect it of you.

Riiight. You know that this game has a two-year proposed timeline to develop all that stuff and features, right? Along with rewriting the database from scratch, and all the other things along the way. So maybe you should play a bit LESS, so you don't burn out before it's all done.

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#19 2018-04-08 10:12:41

shoukanjuu
Member
Registered: 2018-03-08
Posts: 48

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Mewmew wrote:

The game was supposed to be about working together to build up a society and world that stayed there.

Um…no. That's what "you" thought the game was about. And you were wrong. Because Jason has made it very clear what the game is about. It's about rebuilding civilization FROM SCRATCH. Not once, but over, and over, and over again. Because everything runs out. Regardless of the game being developed to the point of 200+ items, or finished with 10,000 items…EVERYTHING RUNS OUT. If you're not working on the next level of tech to keep the humans going in the next generation than you are already doomed. And when we finally reach the end of the (to-be-developed) tech tree…humans will STILL be doomed. And the world will NOT stay there.

Maybe that's not what you understood the game to be, but that was YOUR misunderstanding.

But I think you're right, about going away and giving the game time. Personally, my goal is to live to old age once or twice a week, as the changes get made. If I do that, over the course of two years, that will still be a WHOPPING 100-200+ hours playing a single game title, which (for me) is a ridiculous amount of time to spend playing any single game.

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#20 2018-04-08 10:23:00

shoukanjuu
Member
Registered: 2018-03-08
Posts: 48

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

jasonrohrer wrote:

For those of you who have played 100+ hours and are so mad after one day of change that you're thinking about asking for a refund....

Ugh, I have no words to describe this type of person…aside from insults. It's nice for people to be "passionate" about a game that they love, but…this is overinvestment in the extreme, combined with short-sightedness and a crippling lack of patience.

Try not to let them influence you too much, no matter how vocal they may be.

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#21 2018-04-08 10:54:15

Claudio_f5
Member
Registered: 2018-03-26
Posts: 5

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

I'll agree with anyone who says that starting from scratch every single life is boring, and it turns me off of the game more than the idea to start in an already established civilization, with nothing "meaningful" to do. At least, if I'm born in an advanced civilization I can learn new things, try different jobs and experience different "stories" (and griefers added to the story-telling potential imho). Right now the game not only is very monotonous, but there's no room to teach or learn anything new, because everyone is too busy "surviving", repeating the same basic tasks over and over again.

Last edited by Claudio_f5 (2018-04-08 10:55:40)

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#22 2018-04-08 11:30:17

Aname
Member
Registered: 2018-03-16
Posts: 386

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Lol ofcourse its all basic tasks we still at the bottom of the tech tree.

the trailer says it all first you have a basic task but when you go further the tech tree the tasks will become more difficult.

the game is not even finished yet. you cant make a super hard task in the lower ranks of the tech tree. you have to wait some days-weeks maybe months when you get something of a challenge. like making a car or making that robot in the trailer. making that monorail.

so ofcourse the game is still basic tasks. and yes it is easy. but you have to have patience.


Eve Gluck! We are the great glucks and we will beat every other dynasty!

Best Gluck linage so far: http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=4082492

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#23 2018-04-08 11:44:46

Nikko71
Member
Registered: 2018-04-06
Posts: 4

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Your post is a little heart breaking Jason :s

But keep up the amazing work smile I hope you'll be able to make your vision of the game come true eventually.L It's never gonan please everyboy and not everyone can sink hundreds of hours in games. I think what's already in the game is really cool and I'm looking forward to see where this journey takes us!

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#24 2018-04-08 12:38:41

mianderson2469
Member
Registered: 2018-04-08
Posts: 1

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

It is a truly amazing game.  One that has the possibility to keep growing.  I am thinking of just how hard something like this is.  I could never do it.  I only have one issue with it.  Peoples lack of appreciation for what they are getting.  No game is perfect.  But is is fun.

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#25 2018-04-08 12:46:04

Liosan
Member
Registered: 2018-04-08
Posts: 1

Re: End of the apocalypse, and lag fixes today

Hi,

I read your email, so I decided to come to say to keep up the good work smile

But since I'm here, just a random thought - converting the list to a stack in KissDB sounds like a lot of work, maybe it would be easier to convert it to a two-directional list and change the order you traverse...?

Liosan

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