a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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And what are thoughts about rolling back this crazy leaderboard a bit?
The real problem is that everyone's average starts at 30.... so a lot of people are handing out points by living > 30 every life.
I may need to change that behavior, and instead have new player's average set to the length of their first life...
Though that might encourage players to die young once and then reap huge points from future lives living to 60.
Dammit... this new system is just not as clean as the old system.
Okay, new way that it works:
If you are over 3 and ALIVE when your mother, gma, ggma, etc. dies, then they count toward your score.
If you ever die before these people, they don't count for you, no matter how old you are when they die. You must outlive them for them to count.
If they die when you are <3, then you weren't old enough to help them, so they don't count.
This is the same for little sibs who die when you are <3.... you couldn't help them, so they don't count.
It's not a bug... it's load balancing.
In the middle of the day, there are currently too many people playing to all be on one server.
The way the load balancing works, once it decides to "split," it holds the split for a long time, even beyond where it's necessary. This makes server1 come into the pool roughly once per day and go back out of the pool roughly once per day, to minimize the issue you are talking about.
Anyway, looking closer, I see that the top players are doing this.
And you're right that pushing it up to 3-y-o won't help....
Maybe ma and gma, etc. should only count if YOU are alive when they die.
It misses a little something, because if you die at 25 due to foolishness, and thus fail to help them live long, then their short lives should reflect on you. But the "rapid fire" farming really adds up.
There also seems to be an imbalance between SELF and others.... having 5 others live long lives is way more important than having one self live long. This is maybe as it should be...
But another strat might be: have 2 BB before age 20 and then suicide (hoping the BB will live long).
The general problem is that "rapid" and "lots of lives" swamps other factors. If you can eek out a little bit of score from lots of lives, your score will keep climbing.
Yeah, I need to look into this in depth...
I've been working on other things, and didn't notice that it got this bad. 256! Yikes!
It's not about how long someone lives from average. It's about their own PERSONAL average. However, people's averages start at 30, and for good players, they tend to go up. So SIDS is a strategy that can farm this likelihood.
I need to look at the accounts in question and see what's what there...
Also, might as well let YOU click names on the leaderboard and see their recent genetic chart, right? Is there any privacy issue there? Probably not....
Cursing someone says, "Don't ever be born near me for a long time."
It's actually a crude form of matchmaking. It's not actually a punishment, and doesn't require agreement or consensus. You decide, for yourself, that you don't want to play with this player.
Before, long time meant 7 days.
But that means you might need to deal with the same annoying person weekly.
Now "long time" means 30 days. Good riddance.
Currently, it only blocks THEM from being born near you, where you're already alive.
It doesn't block YOU from being born near them, where they are already alive.
I'm not sure about this.... the problem with making it 2-way is that someone who curses a lot might end up blocking themselves from getting born in many places. This is okay, but it would be really lame for someone who never got cursed (but cursed a lot) to end up in d-town because every birth location is blocked.
Actually, with the way it currently works in my test, freestanding walls can still be forced to have a particular orientation with stakes.
It is only when those walls connect to something that they auto-flip.
So the free-standing diamond-shaped pillar is still possible. Assuming that I leave the other wall stake orientations in place.... though it might be confusing (having other orientations of stakes that aren't necessary to use). Maybe the main orientation of wall stakes can be named AUTO-ORIENTING WALL STAKES
Building walls is currently a pain, where you have to hit the stakes multiple times to pick your orientation.
Property fences don't work that way, and auto-orient based on nearby fences. You have no control over their orientation.
What if walls followed suit? You could build a wall, just one orientation, and then it would auto-flip depending on the walls built next to it.
It would also react to fences and other auto-orienting things, making everything connect up nicely, in general.
HOWEVER, it would curtail your ability to place walls in odd orientations for creative or artistic purposes. No more diamond-shaped pillar in the middle of nowhere....
Yes, some more high tech buildings are planned. Maybe concrete.
I have auto-orienting walls working... very tempting to push it out...
Though it will interfere with "artistic" uses of wall orientation....
Nice!
Just wait until you can floor the ice hole in this week's update.
But where are my oriented walls?
I'm wondering... with the auto-orienting fence code working pretty well.... should it be applied to walls too?
I worry that it will be annoying sometimes, when players want to build certain walls for specific reasons.
Also, I'm not sure that it will work when different types of walls are next to each other. Fences currently only recognize other fences...
I could make it general-purpose, so all walls and fences recognize the orientation of all others.
What do you think about this? Have you experienced any problems with auto-orienting fences?
Best shorthand I've found is "JOB?"
Just go around asking that. You'll eventually get an answer from someone.
The reason this is so effective is that it doesn't demand a long response, and is less demanding than "teach me, please." It also doesn't necessarily imply that you're new. Even expert players want to find a job that's not already being done.
Anyone with half a brain would jump at the chance for free labor from you. I know I would.
Jony, I know you are an expert player.
However, when you tried to do something hard, there is no guarantee that it will succeed. There are many obstacles in your way, many of them in the form of other players. They need leadership, negotiation, and so on.
Have you ever played a quest game like Zelda and had to interact with a grumpy mill-keeper, and you just can't figure out what he wants that will make him happy? You give him milk, and he doesn't want milk. You try grain, and he doesn't want grain either. Other players in this game are just like that, except they are actually intelligent.
Their intelligence makes them much harder to deal with. With the grumpy mill-keeper, if you say the right thing to him, he'll give you what you want, every time, all the time. Everyone who plays Zelda has exactly the same experience. You can read a strategy guide to spoil the whole game.
But in this game, you're surrounded by intelligent entities, and everyone has a different experience. Your story (the frustrating one) is unique to you. No one else will ever experience that story ever again, not even you. And no strategy guide will help.
You say:
It is good if you get what you are looking for ...
For it to be an actual challenge, you have to NOT get what you are looking for some of the time, right? If you get what you are looking for every time, there is no challenge.
I agree that it is a delicate balance. If you have 99 failures for every 1 success, the game is too hard, and it is frustrating. But on the other hand, not enough failures makes the game boring and not dramatic.
Here's an example from my own experience:
In my last life, I was experimenting with building a private piece of land to have food for just my offspring, to see how that helped my gene score. I got the fence built, and brought some stuff in there, but then someone in the village accused me of stealing and demanded that I return the stuff. I returned it, saying that I was just borrowing it (I was). Then my child was born, and when she got old enough, I told her we were going to make a hoe from scratch, no stealing. She agreed. I wandered south to find milkweed to make a hoe. I found a huge abandoned town with carts and steel hoes and lots of good stuff. I had two kids while I was there. I loaded a cart and came back, and they helped me carry stuff.
When we returned home, the corner of our fence had been cut, and our property was empty of resources. I put the cart in there, and started trying to repair the fence. Someone started sniffing around, saw the cart, and stole it. They took it back to the village center and started unpacking it. I protested, saying that I found it myself outside the village. "No private property, everything shared by all," she said. I took the cart back to my fence. Then she locked on to me with murder mouth, and at least one other person joined her posse. I ran out of town, and they followed. I tried to go into a bad biome, but I screwed up, and she stabbed me.
I completely failed at what I was attempting to do in this life.
That said, it was one of the most interesting and engaging stories I have ever experienced in a video game. My adversaries in the game were intelligent, and they plotted against me while I was away and then behind my back when I returned. My children listened and helped a little bit, but not as much as I wanted them to.
BUT, I made mistakes along the way, and learned a lot for next time. My fence was too close to the town center, I should have recruited someone to help guard it before I left to look for supplies, I should have explained myself better to this nosy woman from the town, and so on.
Yesterday, there were 149 new road tiles built on the map.
Today, so far, there were 394 new road tiles built on the map.
I can imagine we will have a few way stones around.
"Just chisel and arrow in a stone"? In which direction? The map contains the destination, which is why a map is used.
I could allow you to do it on the trunk of a tree or something too. I suppose there could be a less-permanent way of leaving a marker around.
Tool slots are supposed to be completely disabled on low-pop servers.
I just checked, and that's not working correctly. I'll fix it.
Miskas, for long-distances (>1000 tiles), the vanilla client already shows a distance estimate under the HOME arrow.
Assuming that other towns are planting way stones, a serious explorer needs:
1. Good set of clothing
2. Backpack
3. Pie
4. Two blank maps
5. Charcoal pencil
The maps can be used if the explorer finds a way stone that is more than 240 tiles away from its destination.
I'll fix the client to give a distance estimate whenever you read a map or way stone. It will be part of what you read out loud "MAP TO DUCKY TOWN. STRANGERS WELCOME! - 243 METERS AWAY"
I just tested this.
My kit:
--Hand cart
--Shovel
--Wolf Hat
--Mouflon Hide
--Backpack
--Pie
--Map back to my town
--Chisel
--Mallet
First, go out with the cart and dig/chisel four stone blocks. Put them in the cart. Then walk 100 tiles out in each cardinal direction and make a way stone.
Starting age: 14
Total way stones place: 4
Total time to complete: 11 minutes
Total food consumed: 1/2 pie
This is no harder than building roads, and there are roads everywhere. I imagine there will be way stones everywhere.
And one way stone provides as much information as hundreds of road tiles.
Way stone makers kit:
--1 cart with 4 blocks
--Backpack with:
----Map back to town
----Chisel
----Mallet
This allows you to head out and plant four way stones pointing back to your town.
Fill another cart with blocks and repeat.
In one lifetime, you could easily plant dozens of way stones pointing back to your town, making your town impossible NOT to find.
Here's the commit that made the bell tower so slow to build:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeD … 2350413726
I can shorten that part to 5 hours, and then shorten the other layers a bit.
My idea with Way Stones is NOT for explorers to place them.
Instead, I expect towns to place them, to help other people find them.
Imagine this:
You get a town established, and you have a chisel and paper maps.
You walk out 100 tiles to the N, S, E, and W, and put way stones in those four places, pointing back to your town.
This raises the chance of some other family finding your town by 5x
The more way stones you plant, the higher the chances that someone will find you.
Furthermore, as explorers from your town venture out with blank maps to find other towns, they can make maps of those places, then return home and make a "bank" of way stones in the center of town, permanently pointing to important places nearby.
Outsiders people visiting your town can check out your way stone bank and learn of other towns they didn't know about yet.
They can copy your way stones onto blank maps, and make waystones themselves back in their own town. And thus, knowledge of what's around can spread.
In my last life, I found an amazing abandoned town about 200 tiles south of our town. It was full of valuable stuff. I could only carry so much, and I died before I made it back there for more stuff.
But if I had made a map, I could have planted a way stone in our town, pointing to this resource trove, and future generations could have used it.
Jony, I hear you that it was frustrating, but that "story" sounds like an excellent one to me. It's supposed to be very very hard. You had to think on your feet, and you ended up failing, in the end. Success doesn't taste sweet if there aren't failures along the way. And most importantly, you had to interact with a bunch of people in order to solve this puzzle. Some of them didn't cooperate.
This doesn't feel all that different from a quest in Zelda, where you have to go to see this guy to get a chicken, but he won't give you a chicken unless you first bring him some milk, but the dairy farmer is sick and needs medicine. The difference here is that no one authored the quest. It emerged naturally from the situation. Another big difference is that every quest in Zelda can be easily solved if you just keep playing. Here, there's no guarantee that a solution is even possible, currently. These aren't hand-designed NPCs that will always cooperate with you. They are real people. You might bring the dairy farmer medicine, and find that they have changed their mind, or that they have died.
Essentially, here's what this game is: A collective roguelike.
By "collective," I mean that the "player" playing the game isn't an individual person, but a whole group of people working together and spread over many hours and generations.
The "player" in this game is a village or family line. The death or failure condition is when the village or family line dies out. The village is the organism.
It works this way because "death" of an individual player always happens on a fixed time-line. A life is a life. Surviving to 60, after you get the hang of it, is almost always possible. However, surviving to 60 in isolation is pointless. The point comes from the survival of the group.
If the group survives 12 hours or 24 hours or 48 hours, that's a really big deal, and a big success. That is the equivalent to making it to the last level in Spelunky or some other roguelike.
And your own individual failure doesn't mean your village failed in the end. There will be other smart, motivated players who will continue trying to solve the problem you tried to solve.
And I'm sure you learned something from this experience, so next time, you will be even better at it. And when you finally save your town by making a rubber gasket someday, it will feel amazing.
To look at it another way, saving the town with a Newcomen pump is an expert activity. It should be very challenging for experts. Previously, any expert would just "go through the motions" and make the pump. After making one pump, they could make 100s of pumps in future lives, with no issue. That is boring. Going through the motions isn't even really playing a game. That's the reason expert players get bored and quit, because the challenge is gone.
The challenge is back.
Yes, it makes a complete copy of the map.
The "map" is actually implemented server-side as a piece of writing with coordinates embedded in it.
So the copies of a map aren't even copies, really, just extra pointers to the same piece of metadata in the database. Which is nice, because it means that copies of maps don't flood the database with duplicate metadata.
And my reply wasn't snarky. I worked hard on the Halloween costumes. Why didn't you like them?
You come in here, into my house, and accuse me of "conning" people? You also make stuff up about no content for an entire year. Look at the update log, sir. A year ago was November. Since last November, there have been 268 new objects added. 268 objects is more than many other games have total. To make those objects, I hand-drew 645 new sprites. That's more than two new drawings per day for each day of the year, and that's on top of all the other changes I was making to the game.
The reality is that this is one of the most frequently and deeply updated games ever. There have been 81 weekly updates in 19 months. Try scrolling through the news posts on Steam and see how long you go before your finger gets tired.
Go back to last November and find... no Jungle, no steam engines, no diesel engines, no radios, cameras, etc etc etc.
And despite all of this stuff, all made by one person, and despite all the 12 hour days I've put in over the past year to make the game better and better and better... it just isn't enough for you.
Your attitude is completely inappropriate, given the facts of the situation.
Some content will be part of this update.
Inspired by SirCaio's excellent suggestion.
You make one by chiseling an existing paper map into a stone block. The existing map is NOT destroyed in the process.
The way stone remains new for 10 minutes, during which time it can be erased with more chiseling, turning it back into a moveable block.
After 10 minutes, it becomes permanent. After that, the 2-person elder removal notice process (like fence removal) can remove it (that process takes 10 minutes, and can be interrupted by someone who wants to keep the waystone).
After 10 hours, it becomes ancient. Then no one can remove it.
You can use a way stone in two ways:
1. Touch it to set your MAP home marker to the destination of the way stone.
2. Use a blank paper map and charcoal pencil on it to copy its destination onto another paper map.
You're "memory" of the destination specified by a way stone lasts as long as your memory of a paper map that you're no longer holding (60 seconds). The destination can also be used as a flight destination for the plane (just like a paper map).
For longer trips with way stones (where the destination is more than 60 seconds away), multiple stones can be used like way points. First stone leads to second stone, etc.
The way stone also clones whatever name the original map had, and the person reading the way stone speaks this out loud upon touching it.
This is like a sign, but with the added benefit of a destination attached too.
I'm adding way stones this week to help you all find each other.
Not sure about the bell tower... maybe...
I'm also making it so that you can ride straight through bad biomes on a horse or car.