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.
| Update: Turkey Hunt
November 22, 2018
Yes, this update is a bit obvious. It's Thanksgiving tomorrow in the US. But separate from that, the turkey is a majestic animal.
The wattle! The snood! The caruncles! The beard! What other animal, of feather or fur, has facial anatomy more distinguished or beautiful than the turkey? Furthermore, it is a true native of our new world. An American original. Imagine what the early European settlers must have thought when they first laid eyes on it.
To prevent turkeys fighting over who has the longest, reddest, and most engorged snood, farmers often desnood the turkey chicks at a young age. That sounds like a barbaric practice to me. There will be no desnooding in this game, at least not yet, because turkeys cannot even be domesticated. They are wild turkeys, thank you very much, and you just can't pin a wild turkey down long enough to desnood it. Maybe someday, a future update will feature domestication, desnooding, and the all-important Presidential Pardon.
The only other content change involves yellow fever. Getting bitten multiple times will no longer auto-kill you, but will instead just extend the duration of your illness. The side-effects of the illness have also been adjusted to reduce the chances of survival without help from friends. You're sick. They need to nurse you back to health. This should help balance the Jungle a bit more.
Those of you who have been having trouble with mouse cursor alignment on ultrawide displays will now hopefully find that the problem has been fixed. On such displays, I now hide the system mouse pointer, which is off, and draw an emulated mouse pointer at the true click location. This emulated pointer can also be scaled to your heart's content from the SETTINGS screen, which also should be helpful for low-vision and high resolution users.
You can now access your personal family trees, which will open in a web browser, from a button on the main menu screen. No more typing your email or logging in via Steam to access your lineage page.
|
|
|
