Update: Good Eating
June 15, 2018
There's now a good reason to eat all sorts of delicious foods, instead of just mono-gorging the most efficient and convenient food. Omelettes and tacos and kraut and stew. And even more reason to share food and meals than there ever was before, and hopefully a good reason to have a village chef that might coordinate all of this for you. Tuesday is taco night.
This update adds a YUM mechanic, which gives you a bonus for feasting with a long chain of food variety. The more variety you eat, the better you feel. So let's eat beans for every meal! Er... yeah, so plain bean tacos do get a little boring. Future updates will add some toppings to spice things up, and maybe even some slow-cooked carnitas. Get your limed corn ready, people.
Some of the more fiddly and plentiful seeds can now be stored in bowls, and a new domesticated animal sneaked in there too.
| Update: Big Farm
June 9, 2018
With most of the post-launch growing pains behind us, I was freed up this week to spend all most all of my time on content. There's a lot of new stuff in there, mostly concerning expanded gardening and things you can make with the products of that gardening.
A few of the end-products are personally meaningful to me---things that my family has been making every year for many years, with all most all of the real-life steps in place. In fact, I just ate some of our red-cabbage sauerkraut during my lunch break today.
Oh, and if you've ever tried to cut up a hubbard squash, you know that a kitchen knife isn't going to do the job. The first time I saw one of these monsters in person, many years ago, I felt like I was looking at something straight out of Star Wars. One of the strangest looking edible fruits around.
If you're paying close attention, you will also notice that the days of berry farm utopia are coming to an end, with berries now requiring soil, just like every other crop. However, soil has become both more plentiful and easier to move around. I'm still trying to design new foods in the game so that everything has its niche, but that approach will only take us so far. I envision 100s of unique foods in this game eventually, and I'm currently tinkering with new mechanics that will motivate a varied diet in a simple, straight-forward way (no, it's not a tedious nutrition system, don't worry).
| Update: Small Farm
June 1, 2018
This week's update lays the groundwork for the Big Farm update that is coming next week.
The biggest content additions this week are corn farming, a straw hat, and a high-capacity source of sewing thread from wool.
But the underlying resource systems have been given a complete overhaul.
Water sources now have a fixed, low refill rate, and emptying any source to the bottom is inconsequential, but higher and higher tech water sources have larger and larger capacity. With a deep well and a bucket, water can now be moved 10 units at a time. Moving large quantities of water around is way more efficient, if you reach that level of technology. Wells must be built on top of natural water sources, making cisterns much more useful for on-site water storage far away from a well site. Wells now have a visual indication of how full they are, so you know when you need to start building a new one.
Soil is now a necessary, consumed ingredient for all farming activities, which means it's easier to balance the value of various foods now and in the future (carrots no longer have a huge leg up, because they consume soil too). This has been balanced by making natural soil much more plentiful, and compost much more productive. Tilling is now needed to work soil into the ground instead of to re-work a hardened carrot row.
These changes pave the way for even more advanced water sources and soil fertility technology in the distant future, but also for farming of other, balanced food types in the immediate future.
As promised, blue roses are in there too.
| Update: Families and Funerals
May 26, 2018
Four new characters, for a total of six in each skin tone now. The family code has been fixed so that your kids and grand kids are more likely to look like you.
Graves have had mouse-over names for a while now, but this update pushes further with labeled grave stones that last forever. And of course, you can't have grave stones without roses. But it turns out that roses are a bit of a pain to grow from seed. Welcome to the world of seed stratification, folks.
If you see a white rose in-game, you're looking at something pretty special. Blue roses are coming in the next update.
| Update: What Grave is This?
May 18, 2018
I spent quite a bit of time this week improving the family tree browser. Cause of death, including animals and murder, is now in place, along with a display of the oldest-known ancestor at the top of every family tree page, and a display of the deepest-generation descendants at the bottom of every family tree page. Thus, you can bookmark your character's page and return to it later to see how far your descendants have gotten.
In-game, the biggest change this week is that graves of known people now display their name and relationship when you mouse over the grave. This only works for undisturbed graves, and only for people who were alive during your lifetime. Bone piles don't count after they are moved, so leave Grandma's bones alone, please.
Another fix: Ancient stone floors now hug walls properly.
But the other big thing going on this week is a bug hunt, as described in detail here:
http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1648
You may not realize it, but every game of OHOL that you play is being quietly recorded in a compact, text-only format in your recordedGames folder. Copy one of these files into your playbackGame folder and launch the game. Like magic, you can watch a ghost version of you play the game exactly as you played it before, with all server events fully simulated. This is not a video, but instead a frame-by-frame simulation of all events that occurred, such as keyboard and mouse input.
Turns out that this bug hunt unearthed a bug in recorded times values in these game recordings, which has now been fixed. Should you encounter this "bouncing for 10 seconds" bug, your recording will hopefully capture in perfectly now.
A lot of coding this week. I'm aiming to get a larger content update out next week.
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