One Hour One Life Forums

It's an aesthetic thing on my part.

I don't want names like "shitface" or "LollypopKiller65" or whatever appearing in the game.  That ruins the aesthetic that I'm trying to create.

In fact, that's why I never allowed names to begin with.  There wasn't a good aesthetic reason for them, and so much aesthetic clutter can result.  I mean, especially if players could name themselves or display a handle in the game.  I'm not "jasonrohrer" in the game, I'm playing as some random baby born somewhere.

But then someone came up with the idea of Eve naming a family line, and giving your baby just a first name, and then I thought of the whitelist as a way to eliminate distracting names.  There's a good reason to name babies when it helps you track your family lines.  It adds meaning to the game.  And it also puts you a the mercy of your mother in one more way.

"Players want/like names" is not a good reason.  That's not the way that I design games.  Almost all games have names because players want/like names.  And the result is all kinds of distracting, irrelevant, and illusion-breaking text in the game.

Almost all games have unlimited chat as well.  This game has limited chat.  I don't even allow you to control caps lock or enter random ascii characters.

As for the list being American, well, I am American, and this is an American game filled to the brim with American English.  What list should I have used?  There are already over 100,000 names on the lists.  That's a LOT of names, and includes a lot of non-English names, because the USA is such a cultural melting pot.

For first names, I think the list includes all names from 2016 that were used by more than 5 people.  For last names, I think it's names that were used by more than 200 people (I had to trim the list a bit for last names, because it was so big).

But guess what?  The names of two of my kids (Novy and Mez) weren't on those lists, because their names are so unique...

Yikes... windows permissions are apparently an inconsistent nightmare.

I'm sorry about this.

The best bet is to extract fresh from the original extractor on your Desktop.  That seems to work for most people.  But maybe Windows 10 doesn't even have a desktop anymore?

Two crashes in this update have now been fixed.

An additional client update has been posted.

I do have some recordings that show this still happening.

Will be fixing it soon, hopefully.

I'm hoping to get a short recordedGame of this bug in action.

If you've got one, please send it to me by email.

Well, the scream is in there.  I just turned its volume all the way up.  That will happen in the next update.

For now, I will also really slow down the murderer more, and make their weapon-holding last longer, and make the bloody grave last longer.

I'll also reduce the range of the bow a bit.

Really, I just need to keep tweaking it until it's possible for "police work" to take place.  Right now, it sounds like there's just not enough evidence to pursue or convict.

It's also interesting to think about "justice" in this game.  Just like in real life, if you are murdered, you are counting on those around you (your family) to seek justice on your behalf after you are gone, but you will never know for sure that they did.

We're so used to seeking justice ourselves, on our own behalf, in video games, that this feels rather muted.  But that's what getting murdered is actually like, I'm betting.

The experience of BEING murdered is sudden and frustrating and pretty horrible in this game.  As it should be.

Yes, personal servers just need to pull from github and rebuild.

I will raise the pop cap at some point soon, but I'd like to let this settle for a few days first.

Also, I just tracked down the source of excessive RAM usage (maps grow in an unbounded way over time as people explore, and the resulting map files grow over time, and so do the underlying database's hash tables, which are stored in RAM.)

At home on a blank map, my game server uses 12MB of RAM.

On server1, it's using 253 MB.  It's not a leak, because the same amount is used immediately after restart.

Profiling shows that this is all coming from the DB's RAM-based hash table.

So, I've implemented something that will revert portions of the map back to a natural state when they haven't been seen by anyone for 24 hours.  This will allow those map databases to shrink whenever the server restarts, as parts of the map can be culled.

Right now, in terms of disk space, I'm seeing this on server1:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcr13 jcr13 383M Mar 27 17:27 biome.db
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcr13 jcr13 2.2M Mar 27 19:04 eve.db
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcr13 jcr13 1.3M Mar 27 19:34 floor.db
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcr13 jcr13 1.3M Mar 27 19:34 floorTime.db
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcr13 jcr13 153M Mar 27 19:36 map.db
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcr13 jcr13 163M Mar 27 19:36 mapTime.db
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcr13 jcr13 2.2M Mar 27 19:36 playerStats.db

A lot of space is taken up by portions of the map that were visited weeks ago during long expeditions.

Furthermore, as the DB's hash tables fill up with entries, they become less efficient to access.  This may actually be part of the CPU problem, because all those container lookups will use more and more CPU as the map hash tables become full.  In fact, the only time the DB files grow is in response to hash table collisions.

I'll post again here later with the updated DB file sizes after the new culling code has had a chance to operate (I've got to wait at least 24 hours after installing it to give people a chance to actually LOOK at the map before the cull runs).

It's already live.

So... there IS (or should be) a scream when someone near you is killed.

Also, the murderer currently slows down and cannot drop the murder weapon for 10 seconds (or use it to kill anyone else during that time).

I could amp this up some more.  The murderer could be slowed down for 30 seconds or more, and become REALLY slow.  Or maybe so slow that they require someone to feed them?

Maybe murdering could work up an appetite as well?  So that you will die afterward if someone doesn't feed you?

All that said, the danger of murder is supposed to motivate you to make better tech and organize your village.

Arrows cannot cross walls.  Build walls and village gates.  Limit weapons in the village only to trusted police officers (give them blue clothes).  Have them guard the gate.  Have them vet everyone who comes in.

How did people deal with murder in real life?

So I'm sitting in the editor about to add tick-marks on the well stanchion or at least water in the bucket to show you when the well is about to go dry.

But that's simply too simple of a thing to teach.  "Don't take from the well unless you see water in the bucket."  Or "count the tick marks and stop taking when you see 13."

That leaves no room for player creativity.  It's just one more arbitrary rule to learn---a rule that I invent, not a rule that YOU invent.

What's the BEST way to track water in a well, given what you have available?

What about with two piles of stones?  When you take from a well, you move one stone to the other pile.  When all the stones are in the second pile, we stop and wait half a generation for the well to refill.  Then someone is in charge of moving the stones back to indicate that the well is safe again.

Maybe there are other ways to track this or mark the well as "risky" to take from.  Maybe building a cistern next to the well is the way to go.  Maybe building a well next to a pond.  However you do it, you need to teach it to your children so they can continue.

And that's culture!

And that's what I want to see emerge in the game.

"Our village had this really cool way of making sure the well never ran dry.  In my next life, I tried to teach the method to my new village, but they wouldn't listen to me.  They were doing it a different way."