One Hour One Life Forums

Okay, this has been improved in the code.

Servers now tell clients when a grave moves.

Clients now update the location of a known grave if they receive one of these grave-move messages from the server.

The bone pile now counts as a grave object.

Thus, moving a bone pile of a labeled grave causes the label to go with it.

This does not change the permanence of grave labels (they still don't last beyond a lifetime, etc.)

More ways to decorate graves, etc, are coming in the future.

No objects are named or store/contain names.

The client gets names for all living people and remembers them.  The client also gets lineage info for all living people and computes a relationship name for each person.

When someone dies and a grave is created, the server just sends a very simple "PlayerID grave at x,y" message.

The server doesn't remember that there's a grave there or know who died there or what their name was or what their relationship was.

The client does the rest.  It checks if PlayerID is known, and what their name was, and what their relationship was, and then remembers that grave spot tagged with that info, client-side.

As you can see, none of this stuff works beyond the lifetime of the client.  So there is simply no info available about graves from the past.  Their names are not known.

Moving a grave during a lifetime is possible server-side, and maybe I will implement that.

You will notice that the above implementation of names and relationships is very lightweight, simple, and shallow.  It is meant to "get the job done" for living people that you mouse over, and it works perfectly for this.

It also has the nice property of being BOUNDED.  The list of names the client needs to learn cannot grow arbitrarily long, nor can the lineage info.  We will never get to the point where the server is sending the client 10+ MB of name and relationship info.  There is technically no limit to how long a family line can be, if we're including information about people long-dead.

Yes, I could implement deeper tracking with some kind of stale timeout to remove old data, etc.  But I don't think this is needed.

Wells are potentially infinite, but I see a lot of dry ones around.  In practice, someone messes it up.

"I Pencil" was a major inspiration for this game.

See this video which is on the home page for OHOL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8

And yes, intertwining complexity at the higher levels is the idea.

Yeah, I probably need to do all of this stuff!

This part of the game design is very hard.  I definitely didn't have it right at launch, and I still don't have it right as of now.  It's way closer, though.

Actually, on the day of launch, ponds did NOT regenerate, at all, but there were no wells.  When everyone started starving, I scrambled to make them regenerate.

Soil is not currently infinite because of iron, stones, and saplings eventually running out, and you need those to till soil after growing carrots, and you need carrots for compost to get more soil.  In practice, though, iron never runs out before a town dies due to folly (or boredom, in the case of the Boots family).

This other problem I'm facing is that making these kinds of changes, which are necessary in the long run, makes players very angry in the short term.

It's hard to implement a "boiling a frog" approach with some of this stuff.  Though most of it is trans-generational (ponds take a long time to refill, milkweed takes an epoch to regrow, etc.), so most players wouldn't notice.

I agree that a lot of the gameplay focuses on "not doing something," which is not very interesting.  I never thought of it that way, but "don't pick the non-fruiting milkweed, don't drain the pond, don't drain the well, don't snare the non-family rabbit, don't forget to water the languishing bush" do kind of create a walking on eggshells feeling.  I've drained a pond by accident, picked milkweed at the wrong time, etc, and I always feel like an idiot when I do this.  I want players to teach each other things, but mostly that teaching should be how TO do something, not a long list of what not to do.

My friend says that only the top level tech should be infinite at any stage.  So, for example, ponds are infinite at first, but then once I introduce wells, ponds become finite, and wells become infinite.  Then I introduce infinite hand pump wells, and the old wells become finite.  Then I introduce combustion engine pumps, and the hand pump wells become finite.

BUT... I feel like any kind of achievable steady state is boring.  Once you get there, there are no more decisions to make.

I really want every civ to crash, in the end.  Not as a certainty, but as a looming and growing pressure across generations.

Weird!

It should be triggered by the ENTER key...

Or by the UP/DOWN arrow (the keys you can use to page through chat history to repeat the same message without retyping).

No chance the hands are brushing these keys?

Can someone send me a short recordedGame file showing this?

Yeah...

There are at least some reports of players being about to send speech messages and carry on conversations with other players while in this stuck-bouncing state.

This bug used to kill you, because you'd be frozen forever bouncing.  The client currently gives up after 10 seconds as a work-around.

No, the average lifespan, in minutes, of someone who died under the age of 14.

I've been looking at server logs of this bug, and I don't see anything amiss server-side.

I've also never seen this happen on my end when playing the game.

I'm wondering if some people are just experiencing true network outages, where messages from the server pile up for a while and then suddenly go through.  This game is built on socket connections, so dropped message are pretty much impossible, because the stream of data is guaranteed to arrive in order or not arrive at all.  But the stream can get backed up if the route breaks temporarily.

Anyway, I still haven't received anything from anyone.

I guess this means that it's not that big of a problem?  I don't hear many complaints about it.

Well, if it doesn't happen on the official servers, I will not be able to correlate what you send me to the server logs.

However, if it happens on non-official servers, I guess I would like to know about it.