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.
| Infant Mortality
May 18, 2018
This graph shows the average life expectancy of everyone who died younger than 14 in the game---all the players who did not make it through childhood.
This is a more interesting dataset than the overall life expectancy, because the presence of Eves in that data, who spawn at age 14 and therefore at least live 14 years, muddies the water. At some point, I will run a more complicated analysis that removes Eves from the data, but that will take a bit of extra scripting on my part.
The above graph is a good indicator of the prevalence of baby abandonment and baby suicide. You can see how dire this situation had become before the lineage ban, and it looks like the lineage ban has had a positive impact.
| Update: Family Tree Browser
May 11, 2018
The biggest change this week is the addition of an online family tree browser, which you can view here:
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/server.php?action=front_page
You can search by your email address or any character name that you can remember, and if you click on faces, you can browse up and down through the generations in the tree.
There are also a few changes to the way that families work. First of all, the client now displays Big and Little status for your siblings, and also detects the rare case of twins and identical twins for you and your siblings.
Second, babies now inherit the last monument bell that their mother heard before they were born. This bell will "echo" through the genetic mother-baby connection when the baby is 0.5 years old. Thus, trans-generational pilgrimages to distant monuments is now possible (journeys that are too long to make in one lifetime).
The way locks are displayed has been improved, with loose locks and keys labeled with A, B, C, etc., so you can keep track of what you're making. After a lock is installed, however, this label becomes invisible, so an attacker won't be able to know which key to try. I took this one step further: The server now doesn't even send the true lock object ID to the client (instead sending the ID for the generic lock), so even someone sniffing the protocol can't get unfair information about a lock. Trial and error (making all ten keys and trying each one) is still possible, of course. And if an attacker gets a hold of your key, they will be able to see which key it is. This is just like real life---take a look at your own keys, and you will see a number stamped on any master keys. My computer room door has a 43842, because it is a 5-pin lock with those pin lengths.
As you may have noticed, after a server update, all keys and locks revert to a base form. That is now displayed with a "?" in place of the letter label for clarity. Everyone who knew which lock was which is dead, and the next generation to discover the village is essentially handed some easy-to-open locks that they can re-key as they see fit.
Unlocked doors can be removed, and milkweed stumps can be removed in the same manner as berry bushes. Making the letter N no longer eats you knife, and U and C no longer fill your bowl with water.
| Update: A Message for the Future
May 4, 2018
There are signs. But what good are signs without letters? Think you can just type out your message with your computer keyboard? What keyboard? You're in the wilderness, friend. Letters don't just grow on trees.
When I was a kid, my father had one of those black plastic sign boards with removable white letters in the lobby of his business. When he wasn't looking, I re-arranged the letters to make the sign say something much more interesting.
Actually, this happened when I was an adult, not when I was a kid....
But how long do you really think your precious little message is going to last, knowing the kids these days? My father was not thrilled, and you will not be thrilled either.
So you gotta lock that sign. My father never thought of that. Apparently, in 35 years of running his business, he never fathomed that a bad seed like me would come waltzing through his lobby.
But there are no bad seeds in this game, so you probably don't have to worry about it. Try putting a second sign next to your first sign that says, "Please do not change the sign." Or was that "Inspect Neonatal Hedgehogs"?
Yeah, so, lock your sign, daddy-o.
And hey, since signs are containers, that means we can lock some other containers now too.
| Update: Fixing a bunch of things
April 28, 2018
This week's update involves a lot of maintenance and tweaking.
Decay times have been increased dramatically along with tool usage counts, but the tool usage engine has also been overhauled to fix some bugs and inconsistencies, and also to switch to a semi-random breakage model.
For example, an ax can be used 100 times on average, and goes through four use states, with an average of 25 uses per state (1/25 chance of advancing to the next state). Worst case, which would occur once in about 400,000 axes, would be an ax that can only be used 4 times. Contrast this with a purely random usage model where the ax has a 1/100 chance of breaking. We'd still expect 100 uses on average, but we'd also expect an ax that breaks on the first use to happen once in 100 axes, which would be a frustratingly high rate.
Various natural resources have been tweaked, and a new way to deep mine exhaustible iron ore has been added.
Also, for those of you who might have missed it, a new Eve placement algorithm is live, which you can read about here:
http://onehouronelife.com/newsPage.php?postID=1310
The plan for next week is solid content creation. I'm hoping to take a break from programming and tweaking next week. And signs are coming.
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