Update: Good Fences Good Neighbors
April 21, 2019
First, the big news: Potato digging no longer wears out shovels. May you rejoice with baked, fried, or ketchup'd.
Beyond that, this week's update involves a game-changing experiment. What if individual or group ownership was an actual thing in the game?
As a designer, I have some pretty big dreams for this game, in terms of what kind of social dynamics will emerge from it. While I'm very happy with some of the complex interactions that have blossomed inside the game, I feel like some other possibilities have been stunted. Where's trade? Where are the stores? Where's resource contention? Where's crime? Where's trans-generational conflict? Where are the sheriffs? Where are the monarchs? Where are the guillotines?
Now, there are probably dozens of reasons why such things have not emerged in the game, but I'm starting with the most obvious one: how can you trade when everything is just laying there, ready for the taking? When there is no ownership?
And long ago, I did add atoms to the game that would supposedly enable ownership (walls, doors, locks, and keys). But they are so expensive to make, and such a burden to use in practice, that people have never been able to build functional ownership systems with these atoms. If it takes three lifetimes to successfully build a locked bakery before you can actually start trading your bread, your family is going to lose the thread before it ever gets off the ground.
I thought about overhauling the costs of building and locking, but such an overhaul would likely have loads of other side-effects. And furthermore, one of the biggest problems with "easy" building and locking is lack of consensus. In other words, if it's easy to lock people out, it's easy to lock people in. Here come the griefers, building a wall around the whole town and locking the door. Or maybe even skipping the whole "door" part entirely. In other words, property rights cannot be claimed unilaterally. And they aren't, actually, in real life. If a bunch of people have been using a swimming hole for ages, you can't suddenly walk up to it and say, "It's unclaimed, so it's mine now." Everyone would collectively object, including physically throwing you out of your own "property" if you were persistent enough. Thus, we have come full-circle and discovered the philosophical underpinnings of homesteading---homesteading is not quick, unrestricted, or easy for some very good reasons.
So it seems like we need a new atom here. Something a bit more abstract than walls and doors and locks. For example, to stake a mining claim on public land in the USA, you literally pound a wooden stake into the ground, nail the lid of a peanutbutter jar to the stake, write your claim on a piece of paper, and screw the paper into an empty jar, attached to the stake, like this:
And most importantly, if other people are working there, they're not going to let you stake your claim, or they're going to remove your claim after you leave. But the longer your claim goes uncontested by others, the more real it becomes.
This is essentially how the new fences and gates work. They go through a three-minute proposal phase, where people can see which area of land you intend to box in. After that, if no one objects, they can be erected, but they are still "shaky" for twenty more minutes. During that time, shaky fences are easy for anyone to remove. After that, they become permanent, though they fall apart in an hour if not maintained by someone. In other words, to claim property, you have to find a spot that no one objects to you claiming, and you have to take care of it long-term.
Gates are owned by whoever builds them, and new owners can be added verbally ("You own this" or "Sam Smith owns this"). Only the owners can open and close the gate. When the last owner dies, the gate is abandoned and falls apart. Thus, if you want to keep your gate working long-term, you need to assign a new living owner to it before you croak.
And fences are very cheap to propose and build (and remove!), making them orthogonal to the rest of the resource systems in the game. They are meant to abstractly represent consensual trans-generational property ownership.
But aside from blocking movement, there is no other explicit concept of ownership in the game. The land and items inside a fence are not inherently owned, which means that theft and other juicy interactions are still possible. And one owner who no longer has the support of the rest of the town for their ownership stands no chance. There's still strength in numbers. Beheading the queen will unlock the castle.
| Update: High Society
April 6, 2019
This update is mostly about one thing: New clothing, and lots of it.
But there are also a few key fixes under the hood. Your family's last name is remembered, even if your mother doesn't give you a name. So later, if you name your own child, they will get that "invisible" last name passed on to them. This will make family trees more coherent, with a last name shared by every named person in the tree. No more lost family names over time.
Even cooler is the new grave-mouse-over feature, which now works for all graves, not just graves for people who died in your lifetime. Family history is now apparent directly inside the game, when you visit the family grave yard. To make this work, the server remembers everyone who ever lived, and keeps a new database of grave positions for each of those people. To prevent this from growing indefinitely, people get "forgotten" after a week, or when the server restarts, and the grave position database is flushed at server startup. But if your family has been around for a while, you will see a lot of family history on the ground.
In other news, community member Futurebird has created a survey for players, which you can find here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3LKVW7P
Here are the results:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-LRBDYL2FV/
There most likely won't be an update next week---I'm scheduled to be on vacation with my family.
| Update: Sweet and Spicy
March 29, 2019
Back from GDC with a bang. This is the largest content update in a while, with over 100 new objects to grow, catch, cook, and eat. And all this from only three new naturally-occurring objects.
What else? Spring loaded doors for your kitchen. That whole GDC basket horse cart right-click bug has been fixed for real client-side. Email-based family tree searches are no longer public (access your personal family trees from the button on the login screen or on your personal download page), so people can't spy on you anymore if they know your email. Animals no longer spawn outside their home biome along biome boundaries. Goodbye, arctic snakes and desert penguins. It was fun while it lasted.
And now for a tale of a funny lurking bug situation. Some of you may have noticed that recently, the whole shebang has been going down like clockwork at 5 am EST for about five solid minutes. Website, forums, login server, everything. I'm asleep during that time, so I didn't notice, and no one bothered to email me about it. Not sure how long this had been going on.
Turns out that 5am is the time when the various backup processes run, and one of these accesses the main MySQL database with mysql dump to back it up. That backup might be locking out other database requests, which would affect the website any everything else. But five minutes is a long time. Turns out that the review/stats server log table had ballooned to over 2 GB in size, with 220 million entries. Uh, yeah, that would take a while to extract with mysqldump. Turns out that it was filled to the brim with bad requests by other servers for non-customers. What other servers? From the IP addresses, these were Chinese servers. To the tune of 300,000 bad requests per day, and each one getting logged. The mobile developers apparently forgot to switch this stat-reporting feature off in their Chinese servers, which means that every time a Chinese player lives a life, I get hammered with a bad "log stats" request from their servers.
And yes, they are the biggest fish in this pond, but there are other bad requests getting logged from small-time servers too, most likely private servers being run by individuals.
First of all, I probably shouldn't be logging every bad request that comes in, since it's a waste of disk space, and I have no control over how many bad requests come in. So, that's fixed, and these logs have been cleared, making them tiny again. Now the backup mysqldump takes 3 seconds instead of 5 minutes, and it doesn't seem to block anything (it's supposed to set a read-only lock anyway, which should at least allow the website and such to load).
I also reached out to the mobile devs to ask them to knock it off. Their Chinese servers are being run by a third party, but I'm hopeful that this deluge of requests will end soon. Anyway, 300,000 lives a day is a lot. Apparently the game is popular in China.
But the fact that so many servers, in general, are submitting requests to me by accident is a bad sign. Yeah, I guess I made "reporting" the default behavior in the public server code on github, which means that anyone who is not paying attention when they set up a server will end up hitting me with reporting requests forever. Because these other servers don't have the secret key, the requests will be rejected, of course, but they're still a waste of time and bandwidth for everyone involved. I can imagine a nightmare scenario in the future where there are 1000s of private servers, and their collective accidental reporting traffic combined results in a DDOS attack. So, the public server code has been fixed to not report by default. Update your server code, folks.
| Update: More Emotions
March 16, 2019
The past few weeks have been an absolute whirlwind.
First of all, preparations for my GDC talk are complete. I'm actually giving the talk just two days from now. You can read the full description at the link below, but keep the intended audience in mind: "Anyone who isn't ready to roll over and die just yet." Hopefully, that describes you.
https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/2014-vs-2018-the-shape-of-financial-success-before-and-after-the-indiepocalypse/864486
Also in the past few weeks: a huge, confusing debate about the boundaries of the public domain and authorship, as it concerns One Hour One Life and the unofficial mobile adaptation. There are very few precedents here, and lots of different opinions. You can get a taste of this here, in what became one of the longest and most viewed threads in OHOL forum history:
http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5479
You can also read the opposing point of view, in which I almost became a Sith Lord:
http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5534
There are two upshots of this discussion. First, the mobile developers have decided to eliminate this confusion in the future by hard-forking the game. They will be eventually operating under their own unique title, and they've already started the process of designing their own mascot character, and some of their own background textures, which you can see as sample of here:
I recently realized that the "mascot" they had been using in their mobile icon---my Original Eve character---happens to be my cartoon rendition of my own mother:
The hard fork will also involve a content fork from here on out, so my weekly updates will no longer be rolled directly into their game.
The second upshot is that I've clarified my stance on copyright, moral rights, personal rights, and trademark. In the past, I had only thought about copyright, and decided specifically that I did not want to wield it. Over the past fifteen years, I've never faced the situation of a direct competitor using my work to make a almost-identical service that would be confusing to end users. When I placed my work in the public domain, I never thought, "Hey, that means that someday, people may widely believe that someone else is the original author of my work." Furthermore, I realized that competitors have a huge unfair advantage against me, as I toil away on weekly content updates that they can roll into their product with almost no work at all. Finally, I realized that the ultimate financial nightmare---a completely free but identical OHOL PC service, maybe even operating on Steam---was a possibility, unless I clarified things. Yes, I was hoping Steam wouldn't allow such a thing, but if I'm serious about retaining no rights, that's an intellectually dishonest thing to be hoping. I've decided that trademark is the best tool to use to deal with such issues. My clarified "no_copyright" file can be seen here:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyright.txt
To summarize: you can do whatever you want with my work, with no restrictions and no permission necessary, but don't mislead people, and don't use my non-code work to directly compete against the service that I'm operating.
Despite all of that, here I am, on the eve of GDC, with a small but amusing content update for you.
More emotions. Lots of little bug fixes. Enjoy!
| Update: Fixes Galore
March 2, 2019
All reported, reproducible issues in both the code and the content have now been fixed. It was a lot of stuff. You can see the full list here:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/commits/master
There's also one surprise in there, and I will say nothing more about it.
Next week, I'm working on my GDC talk, which has been announced here:
https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/2014-vs-2018-the-shape-of-financial-success-before-and-after-the-indiepocalypse/864486
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