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.
| New Eve placement algorithm
April 24, 2018
The way Eves are placed has a substantial impact on the feeling of the game. Whenever a player joins the server when there is no suitable mother for that player, that player spawns as a full-grown Eve instead of as a baby. Eve serves as the potential root of a new family tree, and her placement determines the opportunities that are available to that family.
Originally, Eves were placed at random inside an arbitrary radius around the world location (0,0).
This worked fine for a while, until that area began to fill up with civilization. Eve is supposed to feel like a fresh start, with maybe a small chance of stumbling into the ruins of a past civilization, or eventually bumping up against a living, neighboring civilization. As the center of the map got full, Eve was always just a stone's throw away from a village. Furthermore, with everyone so close together, there was no danger of losing a village if it died out. Thus, keeping a village alive meant nothing. We could always find our way back to revive the ghost town tomorrow. Even worse, as these areas got ravaged by human activities, the resources that a new Eve needs to bootstrap became more and more scarce. Eve does need a somewhat green pasture to found a new civilization.
The next Eve placement algorithm involved a random walk across the map, looking at the last Eve location and making a random jump 2000 tiles away to place the next Eve. There can be some randomly-occurring back-tracking with this method, which means that Eve can sometimes end up near the ruins of old civilizations, but we expect such a random walk to eventually explore the entire map, so we will also get farther and farther from center over time. And with many Eves dying without founding new civilizations, and also perhaps due to biases in the random coordinate generator, we quickly walked our way from (0,0) out into the 50,000's. This meant that villages were generally too far apart to interact with each other. Still, Eve was usually in an untouched area full of natural resources.
The next Eve placement algorithm was radial, placing Eves randomly at a radius of 1000 from a fixed center point. This put all villages within trading distance of each other, and offered plenty of untouched space for Eve---for a while. But soon, the "rim" of the wheel filled up with civilization, and we were back to where we started---Eves placed in a crowded area that was stripped bare of natural resources.
The latest Eve placement algorithm was suggested a long ago by Joriom and maybe a few other people, and involves an ever-growing spiral around a fixed center point. This guarantees that Eve is always in an untouched area, but also that she is never too far from some recent civilizations, so trade can happen.
While a server is running, the placements look like this:
You can see the three initial Eve placements at the center, which the server permits at startup to ensure that the first few Eves can have a chance to bootstrap a village in that spot. After that, the spiral ensues, and would keep going as long as the server was running.
What happens when a server shuts down though, as it does every week during updates?
First, the death location of the longest-lineage person during shutdown is remembered. This is used as the "center" of the spiral at the next startup, and after startup, the first three Eves are placed near there. After that, a new spiral grows around that new center point, like this:
As this new spiral grows, it will cross through the previous spiral like so:
That is okay, because any of the other civilizations that were active at shutdown will potentially be rediscovered by Eves, which makes for an interesting Eve variation. Still, future Eves will not be trapped in these already-developed areas, as the spiral will continue further out into untouched areas again.
Also, some of the older, long forgotten villages in the old spiral will be wiped when the server restarts due to the 24-hour abandonment cut-off. Thus, the new spiral will cross through many now-wild areas, even as it overlaps the old spiral.
As the new spiral grows bigger, it will eventually engulf the old spiral and move beyond it, but the overlapping area will always be substantially less than half of the new spiral. Thus, even if 100% of the old spiral contained active villages that were not wiped, more than half of the Eves in the new spiral will be placed in untouched wilderness.
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