One Hour One Life Forums

This week I developed an extension of the category system which allows crafting transitions to have more than one possible outcome.  This is obviously needed for things like fishing, which is included in a minor way in this update.  The old "do this and get that, guaranteed" just doesn't feel right when dipping a hook in the water.  You'd be hauling 'em out one after another.

All transitions in this game are A + B = C + D.  In the past, A and B could be categories, which might mean that an axe can chop anything in the "kindling source" category into kindling.

The new probability system now allows C and D to be categories as well, but a new kind of category with weights for each member.  Whenever the transition is invoked, one of the members is picked at random, according to the weights.  The weights can be any probability distribution.  Some outcomes can then be very rare, when that's appropriate (like catching a special fish, or finding a diamond in a mine).

But I didn't stop at fishing.  To fully put this new system through its paces, it made sense to explore the human activity that led to the development of probability theory in the first place:  games of chance.  Also known as gambling.  Thus, I didn't just stick in a probability set with a few outcomes, like fishing.  I included one set with 21 outcomes (for a pair of rolled dice), and another with 52 outcomes (for a deck of cards).  Good thing I did this, because including categories this big unearthed a serious, long-term crash lurking in the category system.

And come to think of it, fishing and gambling really do go hand in hand.

The tutorial was also updated with some improved wording and a "hint hallway" for people who are really stuck (age-gated at 35, so you have to have been trying for 20 minutes before you get any hints).

Those of you who saw moving ice holes related to penguins, that bug has finally been found and fixed.  And a new protocol is in place (PING/PONG) to help the client detect true cases of the bouncing-forever bug, as opposed to just genuine network outages.  This should result in far fewer false reports.  And one new cause of bouncing-forever, this time caused by the new reconnect system, has been fixed.

And stacks, and partially-used objects, no longer revert to their full state on server restart.  Their true states are correctly remembered.  This also means no more weird universal locks after server restart.

All that said, I still have quite a long list of mini-bugs on GitHub to fix this week before the Steam release on Thursday.  That will be my focus, and there will be no new content this week (it would be weird to ship a content update on the very day that the game goes live---the new players will need a week to settle in).  I hope to push out the final bug fixes (including content fixes) on Tuesday, to allow time for some last-minute fixes on Wednesday as well.

The plan is to put out a nice-sized content update the following week, and then continue with weekly content updates thereafter.

All the pieces are finally in place to make the game work on Steam.  The automated update scripts (both for client binaries and platform-independent content updates) have been augmented to include a Steam build step, which posts the changes to Steam automatically.  Steam actually has a pretty powerful command-line interface (steamcmd), which makes scripting possible.

Account creation, server-side, based on Steam ownerership, is also working.  And the final pieces are in place to enable all of you, the existing owners of the game, to unlock the game on Steam and automatically access your account details on the Steam side (you won't even need to type in your key again after installing the game through Steam).  However, I'm still waiting for Valve to flip the switch on the GrantPackage feature for OHOL.  Hopefully, they will do that early next week, and then you can all start testing the game on Steam.

So close!

One thing I should warn you all about is that the Steam release will be Windows-only for the time being.  The build process is complicated enough, and the Mac platform is finicky enough, that I've decided not to tackle it for now.  Come to think of it, the old Mac that I build the game on probably can't even run Steam, so I'd have no way to test it.  And sadly, Linux on Steam is even less of a priority.  In my experience, Mac and Linux users make up only a tiny sliver of the Steam audience anyway.  The Mac and Linux builds will continue being updated off-Steam as usual, however (and anyone who buys the game on Steam will be able to access them).  Hey, I'm typing this update message from Linux right now, so I'm a true believer, but I don't even have Steam installed on here.

And the bug reports keep on coming.  Thank you everyone for your diligent work reporting all this little stuff to me.  When it's all organized on GitHub, I can just go down the list and knock out fix after fix.  And this week, there are a ton of fixes.  You can now use your baby's head to open doors and launch rail carts.  Donkey Town residents see a count of their excess curse score.  Some 10-year-old causes of spurious network disconnects have been fixed.

As I type this, there are 15 more new bug reports that just came in.  More, please.   Content issues go here:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues

Programming issues go here:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues

Now that the Steam stuff is mostly dealt with, I will spend the next few weeks returning to content updates, as well as fixing the remaining bugs.

This week's update focuses on a bunch of important fixes. First of all, the temperature system, which was always very finicky, has been smoothed out. The "just keep running" exploit to lock your temperature no longer works, and your temperature will no longer jump around suddenly and unexpectedly when you step next to a fire. Instead, your body temperature gradually moves toward the environment temperature over time. Furthermore, temperature updates happen whether or not you are moving (every two seconds). This also means that if the fire goes out next to you, but you don't move, your temperature will eventually go down to reflect the new, cooler environment around you.

The code that determines where you click when you click on yourself has been fixed to prevent mistaken clicks on your clothing that extends behind your face when you click on your face. This was particularly troublesome for children wearing backpacks or aprons. Clicking their face to eat food used to mistakenly put the food into the backpack or apron pocket (because for a child, the backpack strap and apron top are behind their face). Now the head takes precedence, given that it's actually in front of the clothing anyway.

Some of you may be aware of the game recording feature. For bug-catching purposes, every game you play is recorded in a compact, text-only form. These are saved in your recordedGames folder. They contain all mouse, keyboard, and network events, allowing the game you played to be simulated at a later time. Dropping one of these files into your playbackGame folder, and running the game, will allow you to watch a "ghost" version of yourself playing. As you can imagine, this is very useful for reproducing bugs.

However, these recording files can also take up quite a bit if disk space over time. The game now defaults to keeping only the most-recent 20 recordings (though this behavior can be tweaked in the settings folder). Turning recording off completely has always been possible, and it will increase performance a little but, but I encourage people to keep it on for the time being, because you never know when you will get a recording of a rare bug.

That hilarious clothing blushing bug has been fixed, along with a few lurking server bugs.

Next week, I'll be focusing on the Steam integration process. Hopefully, there will be a way to "unlock" the game on Steam for all of you to start testing next week. I have discovered a way to do this without handing out Steam keys, which is even easier for the end-user, and there's always the danger that unwanted Steam keys will get sold on key marketplaces at a discount.

People have been asking about this for a while:  you can replant trees now.  But trees are slow-growing things, so it's really a multi-generational project.  And Bonsai---those are really slow growers.

Before this update, each server tracked curse scores separately, meaning that you could grief and get cursed into Donkey Town on one server, but then switch servers and be uncursed again.  Now there's a global, centralized curse server that all the game servers share, so each player has one global curse score, regardless of which server they are playing on.  If they're in Donkey Town, they're in Donkey Town on all servers.

There are a bunch of other, small content fixes.  A bunch of other things, like flat rocks and paper, are now stackable.

I have returned from my family vacation, and I've brought you home an update.

First, two new characters, from two new skin tones.

Then loads of bug fixes and little improvements.  You can now right-click to swap what you're holding with items in your backpack.  Some glitches in baby naming have been fixed.  At least one cause of the bouncing-forever bug has been found and fixed.  Flying objects, when you pick something up and then immediately walk away, have been fixed to snap right to you as soon as you start moving.  You can no longer steal backpacks from old people by swapping their pack with another pack.

Finally, last week, you may have experienced a few deadly "lag waves," where everyone on the server freezes for 30+ seconds, and then suddenly the connection comes back.  Depending on hunger status at the time of the temporary outage, a whole village could potentially be wiped out.  I traced this issue to some kind of networking problem with my hosting provider.  They investigated, and decided to perform an emergency migration of Server1 to a different hardware node.  Hopefully, the problem should be fixed.

New transportation systems.  Roads and rails.

I've also reduced the distance in the Eve spreading algorithm by a factor of two, so it should be more realistic to travel between towns and connect them with roads.

One more update, next week, and then I'm taking a much needed family vacation for a few weeks.  There have been weekly updates for 22 weeks in a row at this point.

After testing for a bit on Server 1, the new database engine has been rolled out to all fifteen servers, and the player caps on each server has been pushed up to 200. CPU and disk usage on the servers is looking good.

Server lag should be a thing of the past.

I'm finally returning to working on new content for the game. There will be some kind of content update at the end of this week.

With weary coding fingertips I type to let you know that a very long week has paid off.

More profiling of the bedraggled Server1, which has the largest map data set of any server, revealed that file IO inefficiencies in the custom-coded StackDB were to blame.  StackDB was designed to quickly answer questions about recently-accessed map cells---assuming that people in cities are often looking at the same stuff, so that stuff should be kept near the top of the stack.  The old off-the-shelf KissDB did not do that, meaning that the newest stuff was the slowest to access as the data set grew.

However, none of these optimizations addressed what is actually the most common case:  asking about a map cell that isn't in the database at all.  When you wander around in the wilderness and look at the empty ground, we have to ask the database to confirm that that patch of ground is indeed empty.  Maybe someone visited that spot earlier and dropped something there that you should see.

It turns out that in both KissDB and StackDB, this is the slowest operation of all.  A non-existent cell can never be at the top of the stack, because it doesn't exist, which means that we need to walk to the bottom of the stack to find out for sure that it doesn't exist.

Finally, KissDB and StackDB are both hash table systems, but both of them use fixed size hash tables.  In the case of Server1, there were 15 million data records crammed into an 80,000 slot hash table.  This means lots of pages to look through in each slot (KissDB) or deep stacks to wade to the bottom of (StackDB) to find out that a given map cell really isn't there, and therefore is empty.

Even worse, the architecture of both engines requires loads of random-access disk seeks to move through the pages or the stack.  And disk seeks are extremely slow, relatively speaking, especially when they are jumping around a huge file and missing the cache over and over.

LinearDB, my latest custom-coded database engine, has an ever-expanding hash table based on a very clever algorithm---which I did not invent---called Linear Hashing.  The hash table grows gradually along with the data, essentially never letting it get too many layers deep.  In addition, a kind of "mini map" of data fingerprints is kept in RAM, allowing us to ask questions about map cells that don't exist without touching the disk at all.

The performance gains here are pretty astounding.

On a simple benchmark where a single player walks in a straight line through the wilderness for a minute, the old database engine performed 1.9 million disk seeks and 3.8 million disk reads.

During the same single-player journey, the new database engine performs less than 4700 seeks and 1600 reads.

Yes, that's a 427x and 2400x in disk seeks and reads, respectively.

According to a system call time profiler, this results in approximately 180x less time spent waiting for the disk.  In other words, this part of the server is now one hundred and eighty times faster than it used to be.

Server1 is the only server that has this new engine installed so far.  It has the biggest data sets and was seeing the most lag with the old database, so it's the best server to stress test with.  It's now back in circulation at the top of the list and seems to be lag-free.  I'll be incrementally increasing the player cap over the next few days and seeing how it handles the load.

Assuming that all goes well, I will be rolling the new database engine out to the other servers next week.  The end of server lag is almost in sight.

A big thanks goes out to sc0rp, who spent many hours discussing the intricacies of these systems with me in the forums, and filled my head with all sorts of great ideas.  I had never even heard of linear hashing until sc0rp told me about it.

You want to play with friends.

But how can you do that without subverting the entire premise of the game?  This is a game about being born as the helpless baby of a total stranger, and depending on that stranger for your survival.  It's also about playing a small part in a family of strangers.  You didn't know your mother in real life before you were born, and that's what makes her so special.  Imagine if your mother was really your college roommate in disguise, and you knew it.  Imagine if your mother talked to you over voice chat, and she sounded just like your college roommate.

But you want to play with friends.  There's only one solution here, and I never said it was going to be pretty.

How can you play with friends and yet still be born as a helpless baby of a total stranger?  Only if you and your and your friends are ALL born as helpless babies to the same total stranger.  Twins.  Triplets.  Quadruplets.

If you act like you've known each other since before birth, you have---you shared a womb together, after all.  To others in the game, you almost seem to read each other's minds.  And you look identical.  And your poor mother---one baby is hard enough.  It's not easy being a twin.

Also, a bunch of little bugs have been fixed along the way.

If you bounced off the game in the past because it was too hard to figure out, this is a great time to give it another shot.

This week's update brings a brand new tutorial.

This has always been a game that just throws you right in there, and that will remain the case, so don't worry.  The tutorial mostly explains the nuances of the controls and systems.  There are a lot of little things that just aren't explained anywhere else.  Some of these things are lost on veteran players.

Also added, and explained in the tutorial, is the new crafting-hint filter feature.  If you want to make a hatchet, for example, you can cull down the hint list to show only steps that are relevant along the way to the hatchet.  This greatly reduces the "sharp stone does 46 things" problem, and should allow pretty much everyone to be able to figure out the final crafting challenge at the tail end of the tutorial.

You have to get through the tutorial, and solve that last crafting challenge, to actually play the game, so I'm really betting the farm on this one.  At least you'll know that if a baby is born to you in-game, that player is not totally clueless.

This new filter system also just might make wikis and other external crafting guides unnecessary, but we'll see how it goes.

A bunch of little content issues have been fixed.  Committing murder now "counts" as living a full time block in a family line, just like being a victim of murder does.  Griefers can no longer kill and then suicide before 30 minutes elapse to come back at the same family again.  The lineage ban has been upped to 1.5 hours of life lived in other lines before returning to a given family line.

There's now a good reason to eat all sorts of delicious foods, instead of just mono-gorging the most efficient and convenient food.  Omelettes and tacos and kraut and stew.  And even more reason to share food and meals than there ever was before, and hopefully a good reason to have a village chef that might coordinate all of this for you.  Tuesday is taco night.

This update adds a YUM mechanic, which gives you a bonus for feasting with a long chain of food variety.  The more variety you eat, the better you feel.  So let's eat beans for every meal!   Er... yeah, so plain bean tacos do get a little boring.  Future updates will add some toppings to spice things up, and maybe even some slow-cooked carnitas.  Get your limed corn ready, people.

Some of the more fiddly and plentiful seeds can now be stored in bowls, and a new domesticated animal sneaked in there too.

This week's update lays the groundwork for the Big Farm update that is coming next week.

The biggest content additions this week are corn farming, a straw hat, and a high-capacity source of sewing thread from wool.

But the underlying resource systems have been given a complete overhaul.

Water sources now have a fixed, low refill rate, and emptying any source to the bottom is inconsequential, but higher and higher tech water sources have larger and larger capacity.  With a deep well and a bucket, water can now be moved 10 units at a time.  Moving large quantities of water around is way more efficient, if you reach that level of technology.  Wells must be built on top of natural water sources, making cisterns much more useful for on-site water storage far away from a well site.  Wells now have a visual indication of how full they are, so you know when you need to start building a new one.

Soil is now a necessary, consumed ingredient for all farming activities, which means it's easier to balance the value of various foods now and in the future (carrots no longer have a huge leg up, because they consume soil too).  This has been balanced by making natural soil much more plentiful, and compost much more productive.  Tilling is now needed to work soil into the ground instead of to re-work a hardened carrot row.

These changes pave the way for even more advanced water sources and soil fertility technology in the distant future, but also for farming of other, balanced food types in the immediate future.

As promised, blue roses are in there too.