Update: Filling Station
August 25, 2023
A seemingly small update this week, but it actually involved changes to 170 different objects. You can now fully manipulate all bottles on top of tables, including filling them with funnels. Before, you had to move a bottle to the ground to fill it with a funnel. All the bottles also now have better looking positions when held.
| Update: Fine Milk
August 18, 2023
A raft of fixes this week. Bugs have been fixed in the presentation of a player that walks into view from far off screen. Radios no longer mistakenly transmit weird metadata from maps and orders. A glitch was fixed that prevented cursing living players by name. You can down drink milk from wine glass. Empty bottles have better positioning on tables and in boxes. You can now put slaked lime in a bottle. A crock of pumpkin can be composted. Diagonal gradient dry springs can be dug. You can now dig all the different types of rabbit holes. Sprinkler pipes now require a two-person effort to remove. You can remove feathers from hats. You can now pile up unskinned dead rabbits. The turkey platter no longer has to be removed from the table for the final stages of slice serving.
| Update: Close to Home
August 11, 2023
Players who want to build an Endtower, which triggers an apocalypse that wipes the entire world back to zero, face many obstacles, since most of the other players will do anything in their power to stop them. There hasn't been a successful apocalypse in quite a long time, but hope, apparently, springs eternal for the most purpose-driven players.
The threat of an apocalypse creates macro-scale dramatic tension, so I don't want to detooth it entirely. But these purpose-driven players are a creative bunch. The latest trick is to try to get as far away from the population center as possible. They want to get way more than one lifetime's worth of walking, so they have babies along the way, and the babies grow up and keep walking. Eventually, they get ridiculously far away from all the other players, and they build an Endtower there.
While this kind of perseverance is admirable, it's also not that interesting to defend against. Just walk forever yourself, and have babies along the way, until you eventually find the tower. Many, many hours later.
The Endtower can now only be built within 10,000 tiles of at least 50% of the active player base. It can be somewhat far and hidden away, but not ridiculously far away.
Some bugs in cursing people during the five minute window after they die have been fixed.
You can now say GOODBYE FOREVER in your final utterance to disable the feature that has you born automatically to your own descendants if you live to old age.
There's a new method of interacting with moveable containers: right clicking on the ground around the container will swap your held item for the container itself, instead of inserting it into the container. Right-click the container itself to put the item in or swap it with contained items.
| Update: Photo Processing
July 28, 2023
Photography has been part of the game since 2019, but the photos themselves were somewhat ephemeral. After the click of the camera, the image itself disappeared from the game world and appeared in a permanent archive on the public-facing website. This was cool, in that otherwise-undocumented and invisible moments from inside the game world could produce a kind of permanent record visible outside of the game.
However, the fact that photographs worked this way was a little magical and weird. You put photo paper into the camera, but took nothing out. After taking a photo, you ended up with an empty camera.
While it was cool that in-depth photo chemistry was represented in the game (making photo-sensitive silver nitrate solution from scratch), some important real-world steps were omitted. What about fixing the negative? What about making positives?
The photo chemicals in the game start out clear and become dark when they get exposed to light. Essentially, light breaks up the molecules, releasing elemental silver. When more light produces a darker spot on the paper, we get a negative image.
Of course, once you have a negative, you're not done yet. If you wave it around out in the open, it will get exposed to more light, making it darker and darker. By soaking it in a fixer, the remaining unexposed photo chemicals are dissolved, which halts the darkening process. After that, you have a negative that is safe to look at under normal lighting conditions.
To get a positive, you need to make a contact print with another piece of photo paper. The light areas in the negative let more light through, which creates darker areas in the positive print. And of course, you need to fix the positive too before looking at it. After that, you have your finished photograph.
All that said, photographs, both positive and negative, are now objects in the game that can be stored, traded, moved from place to place, and looked at by whoever handles them. A full-resolution version pops into view on the client whenever you handle a photograph.
And by using one negative to make multiple contact prints, you can duplicate a photograph as many times as you want.
Imagine visiting an abandoned village and rifling through a storage box to find photographs of the people who used to live there. Imagine viewing a photograph of your own great great grandmother. These things, and more, are possible now.
| Update: Orders Again
July 21, 2023
I have been working through a heap of improvements and fixes this week.
There are several new features on the settings screen for toggling vsync and manually setting the frame rate when vsync is off. You no longer have to go digging through the settings folder to tweak these things.
Objects that empty out as you use them, like buckets, now have a visual distinction between the full and one-less-than-full state.
A new /ORDER command allows you to review the most recent order that you've heard from your leader. Before, if you missed it the first time it was presented, there was no way to recall it later.
Radios no longer work between Donkeytown and the main world.
A bunch of fixes have been put in place for the situation where specialty biomes switch on and off during the wee hours when player counts drop below the threshold of 30. Tool tips get re-enabled, expert waystones still work, and there's a buffer between 30 and 40 players to prevent the specialty biome status from flip-flopping as the player count hovers around 30.
Some glitches in oil flow transitions have been fixed.
You can now remove green beans from a bowl, one by one.
|
|
|
