Update: Apocalypse 2.0
December 28, 2018
First, a few important fixes that you all should be aware of.
There was a bug in temperature weighting on mothers. It was supposed to make ideal-temp mothers more likely to have a baby, but it was broken and not working. That has been fixed now. Furthermore, a Yum multiplier factor has been added to this weighting. If you have a large Yum multiplier (from eating a chain of unique foods), you will also be more likely to have a baby. If you're warm in addition to being on a yummy diet, you will be even more likely to have a baby.
And the way that Eve spawn locations were remembered---when Eve died of old age---was buggy. Thus, the surprise appearance of Eves near villages. This has been fixed. But even when it's working correctly, it's meant to only function on low-pop servers, and not as a way-of-life for reviving collapsed villages, so that has been fixed as well (your last-Eve-death location will only be used for your next Eve spawn if there are fewer than four fertile females on the server currently). This fix is even more important in light of this week's update, which I will describe in detail below.
In last week's update, I talked about how there will be no magic in the game. What I meant to say is that there will be no non-inherent magic.
Some things about the game are inescapably magic. Reincarnation---a reality for any commercially viable game---is the prime example of this.
But the map itself, and the servers, and how they get set up, and how they get updated, and how they get cleared, is another example. I'm doing all this stuff behind the scenes to keep things updated and working. I'm making choices. I'm adding things. I'm in control of the parameters that control when and how certain parts of the map go back to their natural state.
And the map is huge---unnaturally huge. 36,000x larger than the surface area of the earth. Walking from one edge to the other in the game would take you 34 years of real-life time. Walking around to visually see the entire map would take you 14 billion years.
It's a big map. Mind-mindbogglingly so. Yet I can change the entire thing with the push of a button, like when I add a new biome, or wipe it back to its natural state in the blink of an eye. How can something so big be changed so fast? Through procedural generation and the properties of computer file systems (where deleting data of length N is a constant time operation on N). It's not magic, really.
But when we try to square these possibilities with a simulation of the real world, the end results are nothing short of miraculous.
And what does that make me, the guy pushing the buttons behind the scenes?
There's an amazing idea lurking in this game, and credit for the idea goes to Edmund McMillen. When I visited him a few years ago, in between petting his hairless cat and having him kick my ass in a Magic draft, I told him about the game I was working on. In a game that starts back at zero as a premise, a question arises: how did we get to zero in the first place? And what if, Edmund suggested, players were in control of taking everything back to zero? What if, at the top of the tech tree, the most difficult-to-craft item was The Button?
It seems that, after all is said and done in this game, after all my updates are out, and the game stops evolving due to developer input, this just has to be the way that it will work. Otherwise the game will stagnate. Edmund was right.
But what about along the way? In the arms race of player progress in the face of my weekly updates, players always win.
So, the idea of an along-the-way apocalypse arose. What if The Button was a moving target? Some item at the top of the current tech tree that represented the current endgame?
The problem here is that players can get to the top of the tech tree ridiculously fast.
This means that the apocalyptic item can't be technological. It needs to be magic in some way.
Long ago, shortly after the game's release in early 2018, I tried something like this. A monolith in the desert that you could use to conduct a kind of absurd ritual using a bit of material that was high-level tech at the time. This experiment was an utter failure, as the first apocalypse was triggered four hours after the update, and subsequent apocalypses were triggered hourly after that until I gave up and disabled the whole system.
I left that failed experiment behind, without thinking about it any further. Players can get through the tech tree---and craft any imaginable thing---way too fast. This even planted seeds of doubt in my mind about Edmund's Button, even at the end of the update process, once the tech tree was gigantic.
Still, I really liked the shared collective event that had occurred. People who were playing that fateful day will never forget that flash of white...
In the mean time, other ideas surfaced, like the bell tower, which involved slowing down player progress toward a goal and ensuring trans-generational cooperation. A bell tower takes 18 hours to build. In order to build it, your village has to survive that long.
This takes a page from the Clock of the Long Now.
The insight this week was that these two ideas can be combined. An apocalypse, for the time being, is a magical, not technological event. So there's a ritual. What if it was a very slow ritual? What if people had plenty of opportunity---and warning---to interrupt the ritual before completion?
That was always the idea with Edmund's Button anyway---that people would be fighting to stop it along the way.
So, I give you a new and improved apocalypse. It has:
--Rare, unsustainable ingredients that you cannot procure while working completely alone.
--A map-wiping wave that is limited to one server only (no more chance of an Easy Apocalypse on a vacant server causing wipes on the populated servers).
--A map-wiping wave that you can live through and come out the other side.
--World-wide warnings as the ritual gets closer and closer to completion.
--The ritual itself is very fragile and easy to set back along the way.
--The entire ritual, if uninterrupted, takes 24 hours to complete.
And, for the time being at least, it's magic.
| Update: Yuletide Together
December 21, 2018
This update is on time for sure this week, and lemme tell you why. Tomorrow is the solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. The sun will die as it passes through the constellation of the Southern Cross, remain dead for three days, and the be born again as it rises on December 25 through the constellation of Virgo, the virgin. But enough of that astrological claptrap! What's that got to do with the update?
What we do, in my family, on the solstice is take a step back in time for a day. We use no lights except for sunlight and candles. That also means no computer screens. This is actually a pretty amazing thing to do every once in a while, because everything---and everyone---looks absolutely gorgeous when you've got candles all over the place in your house.
So, no sneaking the update in after the bell tomorrow. Today or bust.
We also have salsa, on the solstice, because my oldest kid thought that sounded funny when he was little. Salsa on the solstice. Tradition!
And yes, you can now celebrate this season in various ways in One Hour One Life. But be forewarned: do NOT expect some magical Santa NPC to be running around in-game handing out presents. That will never happen in this game (as hilarious as it sounds), for a good reason. This is a game that draws as many of its aesthetics as possible from real life. It's about human technology, and human society. It is not about magic or other supernatural things. No gremlins, no dragons, no ghosts, no Santa.
The only place the game breaks with this aesthetic is via reincarnation, for sheer playability reasons (as much as I was tempted to make a game where you only live once). And the curse system follows as a necessity from that (because criminals can reincarnate just like everyone else, and keep bugging you for all of eternity---unlike in real life).
So, holiday stuff, but actual human holiday stuff.
There are also two new chat "commands" that you can use to help you in diagnosing lag. /FPS will toggle a count of the current frames per second (are you experiencing GPU slowdown in dense areas?), and /PING will ping the server and display the round-trip time in milliseconds (is your connection to the server getting flaky?).
Have a great holiday season, everyone!
| Update: Internal Combustion
December 14, 2018
Sheesh, an internal combustion engine has a lot of moving parts. I should know, because I just drew them all. There was so much detail that I had to lay out the whole thing in CAD software first, as printed a tracing guide. It's all still hand-drawn. Call it Computer Aided Human Drawing.
So I drew it, and now it's up to you to put the damn thing together.
The internal combustion engine was actually a major sticking-point in the design of the game: how do we get over the very steep hump that leads into industrialization? Like I mentioned in a previous update, the actual history here is far from clear. We went from very crude machines that were mostly made out of wood and powered by animals, water, or humans to finely crafted clockwork contraptions that could literally pump like well oiled machines. My guess is that it was a process of micro-refinements over about five hundred years.
So, I kinda just winged it here, assuming that if we had something spinning fast enough, that would be enough to bootstrap the whole thing via the magic of the lathe. And here we are, a week later, with a pretty accurate model of a four-stroke, two-cylinder diesel engine, complete with all major parts.
If you're interested in more details about how this works, this video explains the working of a single cylinder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTAUq6G9apg
And this weirdly-narrated video explains how the camshaft ties the whole thing together in terms of timing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZt5xU44IfQ
My gosh, humans are clever!
The major thought experiment in this game is this:
"It took us 4000 years to advance from stone-aged tech to the iPhone the first time around. If we had to start over from scratch, naked in the wilderness, with nothing but rocks and sticks, but we retained all knowledge, how long would it take the second time?"
The more closely I study this stuff, the more baffled I am about how we ever did it in the first place. How long would it take the second time? My current best guess: Forever.
As in, never.
| Update: Black Gold
December 8, 2018
"And then one day he was shootin' at some food, and up through the ground come a bubblin' crude. Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea." Californy here we come!
My father was an oil man. At least he tried to be, for a while. When I was young, he invested in a local oil exploration company in Ohio. Everyone in the family got free ball caps with the drilling outfit's logo. I remember climbing up the steps on the side of a huge oil tank, where he wrenched open the porthole cover and we peered inside as the oil poured in. Was a sight! And more importantly, what a smell! With tiny me perched up there by his side, my father reached his arm down inside with an empty peanut butter jar and filled her up directly from the gushing pump stream. (What the hell was he thinking?) That jar sat---and settled---on his office desk for many years. Sludge would be a naive appraisal of what was in that jar. Brown sludge. A reminder of an investment in oil that never turned a profit.
But your investment in oil will turn a profit!
The more time you spend around crude oil, the more trouble you will have believing that people actually used to rub this noxious stuff on their bodies as a medicine.
But what about the very best stuff? Light, sweet crude, with a very low sulfur content---really top notch. If you're brave enough to take a sip, it actually tastes sweet.
So you want that oil. But oil prospecting and refining requires a lot of equipment along the way. And that's why this update is one of the largest and most complicated in the history of the game so far. Machines galore.
But when you finally see that black plume shoot toward the sky, you too will dream of striking oil before you die.
| Update: Newcomen Atmospheric Engine
November 30, 2018
This update paves the way for the forthcoming industrial revolution. After banging my head against the actuality of human history in this area (much of which is, strangely, shrouded in uncertainty) for four straight hours on Monday, I realized that bootstrapping is hard. This is the point where the true mystery of human civilization comes to a head: how do you make a lathe without a lathe?
We've come a long way so far, and bootstrapped a whole bunch of things in this game. But these are all things that I myself know how to make from scratch, in principle. This is the kind of stuff that is made on the Primitive Technology YouTube channel. If it looks hand-made, it can probably be made by hand, right?
But how do you bootstrap metal machines? I'm starting to suspect that this is something that no one now living actually knows how to do. So it's my job to figure it out, or at least make up a reasonable approximation. I was thinking that we'd be skipping right over the age of steam---that steam was just an unnecessary side-branch on in the inevitable path toward internal combustion. But now I think it's actually about tolerances. Internal combustion requires extremely tight tolerances, and metal gaskets, because there's fire right there in the cylinder. Steam engines can be made with much lower tolerances, and leather or rubber gaskets, because the fire is kept outside the cylinder. I.e., crude steam machines can be made without the process of machining. And with steam machines, we can make the machines with which we can actually "machine" parts with tighter tolerances. Steam lathe, here we come.
And speaking of steam lathes, this video of a 1900's era steam-powered machine shop is pretty amazing. But none of those belt-driven machines contain parts that were made by a blacksmith:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WXHNBMLZZM
But there's no lathe in there yet. What can you do with this Newcomen Atmospheric Engine? Pump water! Why would you want to do that? You'll find out soon enough.
This update also dramatically improves the mouse interface when dealing with stacks of things that should also be moveable as a stack (stacks of plates, for example). Left click grabs the whole stack, and right click removes an item from the stack. In other words, the stack now behaves similar to a container when you left or right click on it.
New wild wounds (or sickness) no longer replace your current wound. You can't heal from a snake bite by contracting yellow fever or getting hog cut.
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