Update: Temperature system fixed
October 5, 2018
This week's update focuses on a bunch of important fixes. First of all, the temperature system, which was always very finicky, has been smoothed out. The "just keep running" exploit to lock your temperature no longer works, and your temperature will no longer jump around suddenly and unexpectedly when you step next to a fire. Instead, your body temperature gradually moves toward the environment temperature over time. Furthermore, temperature updates happen whether or not you are moving (every two seconds). This also means that if the fire goes out next to you, but you don't move, your temperature will eventually go down to reflect the new, cooler environment around you.
The code that determines where you click when you click on yourself has been fixed to prevent mistaken clicks on your clothing that extends behind your face when you click on your face. This was particularly troublesome for children wearing backpacks or aprons. Clicking their face to eat food used to mistakenly put the food into the backpack or apron pocket (because for a child, the backpack strap and apron top are behind their face). Now the head takes precedence, given that it's actually in front of the clothing anyway.
Some of you may be aware of the game recording feature. For bug-catching purposes, every game you play is recorded in a compact, text-only form. These are saved in your recordedGames folder. They contain all mouse, keyboard, and network events, allowing the game you played to be simulated at a later time. Dropping one of these files into your playbackGame folder, and running the game, will allow you to watch a "ghost" version of yourself playing. As you can imagine, this is very useful for reproducing bugs.
However, these recording files can also take up quite a bit if disk space over time. The game now defaults to keeping only the most-recent 20 recordings (though this behavior can be tweaked in the settings folder). Turning recording off completely has always been possible, and it will increase performance a little but, but I encourage people to keep it on for the time being, because you never know when you will get a recording of a rare bug.
That hilarious clothing blushing bug has been fixed, along with a few lurking server bugs.
Next week, I'll be focusing on the Steam integration process. Hopefully, there will be a way to "unlock" the game on Steam for all of you to start testing next week. I have discovered a way to do this without handing out Steam keys, which is even easier for the end-user, and there's always the danger that unwanted Steam keys will get sold on key marketplaces at a discount.
| Update: Emotion
September 28, 2018
This week's update contains a few little fixes, but the main focus of the update is a new emotion system. The available emotions are currently:
/HAPPY
/SAD
/ANGRY
/MAD
/JOY
/DEVIOUS
/BLUSH
More will be added in the future.
I'm also busily preparing to release One Hour One Life on Steam. The game is in a good place, and I think it's ready for a larger audience. Preparing for Steam is quite a bit of work, especially for a multiplayer game, and I expect this process to take a few weeks. In the mean time, I'll still be putting out weekly updates, but they will be on the smaller side.
After the game launches on Steam, all players will continue playing together on the same servers. The game will continue to be sold off-Steam, and your non-Steam game accounts will keep working as usual. Everyone who bought the game off-Steam will get a free Steam key to unlock the game on Steam---but this is optional.
The only down-side to a Steam release is the division of the game's community. There will be Steam forums, and in my experience, Steam users don't like to leave Steam and join external forums. So discussion about the game will be split into two places.
| Update: Tree Farm
September 21, 2018
People have been asking about this for a while: you can replant trees now. But trees are slow-growing things, so it's really a multi-generational project. And Bonsai---those are really slow growers.
Before this update, each server tracked curse scores separately, meaning that you could grief and get cursed into Donkey Town on one server, but then switch servers and be uncursed again. Now there's a global, centralized curse server that all the game servers share, so each player has one global curse score, regardless of which server they are playing on. If they're in Donkey Town, they're in Donkey Town on all servers.
There are a bunch of other, small content fixes. A bunch of other things, like flat rocks and paper, are now stackable.
| Update: Dogs and Donkeys
September 14, 2018
Are you a pie gobbler? Tool hider? Seed thrower? Forest chopper? Congratulations! You just won an all-expense paid trip to Donkey Town. There, you will find a paradise where you and your fellow pie gobblers can gobble each other's pies for hours of endless, giddy enjoyment.
There will also be dogs. Too many dogs, from early reports. Not just in Donkey Town, but everywhere. Did you ever read the book "Go Dog. Go!" by P. D. Eastman? We're talking more dogs than that, even. Perhaps we will add "dog-overbreeder" to the list, and you can hop on that train to Donkey Town with the rest of them.
The clicking user interface for the backpack, when you're holding food in your hand, has been improved. Left-clicking on the pack puts food into the pack, right-click swaps the food with the bottom item in the pack, and left-clicking on yourself causes you to eat the food.
| Update: Friends and Strangers
September 8, 2018
I have returned from my family vacation, and I've brought you home an update.
First, two new characters, from two new skin tones.
Then loads of bug fixes and little improvements. You can now right-click to swap what you're holding with items in your backpack. Some glitches in baby naming have been fixed. At least one cause of the bouncing-forever bug has been found and fixed. Flying objects, when you pick something up and then immediately walk away, have been fixed to snap right to you as soon as you start moving. You can no longer steal backpacks from old people by swapping their pack with another pack.
Finally, last week, you may have experienced a few deadly "lag waves," where everyone on the server freezes for 30+ seconds, and then suddenly the connection comes back. Depending on hunger status at the time of the temporary outage, a whole village could potentially be wiped out. I traced this issue to some kind of networking problem with my hosting provider. They investigated, and decided to perform an emergency migration of Server1 to a different hardware node. Hopefully, the problem should be fixed.
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