Clutter Be Gone
John Serafin was one heck of an interesting guy. He always had a funny story to tell, or a wisecrack, or a hot take, and always in that amazing Queens accent of his. He was a real character, and he knew it. He always called me a character too, and I knew that I was. How often our friendly verbal fencing matches---as he called them---ended with him shouting, "Jeez, Jason, come on!" in exuberant exasperation. He was unusually tall, but not as tall as me, and it took him years to get over the extra four inches that I had over him.
The first time he met me---me, the man who would eventually marry his only daughter---he approached me with a stern look on his face, and said in a gruff voice, "Who's this guy?" I was frozen for a second, but then he cracked a smile and started laughing. By the end of that first evening, he and I were getting along famously. He was impressed that I was driving a Ford Taurus---that's a dependable car!---instead of a rusted out piece of junk. But that conversation about my Ford Taurus was just the beginning.
Above everything else, John Serafin was a car man. He lived through some interesting times on Long Island back in the day, and he longed for a return to a more elegant era. The old money. The sprawling estates. The hired help. The glistening lights of distant garden parties shimmering across the still evening waters of Long Island Sound. The mystery and romance of it all. But most of all the cars, those glorious cars of his childhood. Cars that his impoverished family didn't even have---just blurs of chrome and metallic fleck paint zooming past him as a small boy in his rough Queens neighborhood. The cars from that era were huge, heavy, and all curves. We get excited about a V6 today, but how about a V8, a V12, or even a V16?
Did I say he was a car man? That was too vague. John Serafin was a Cadillac man. Cadillac was his make and his life-long passion. He eventually realized his dream of owning one of those glistening marvels that was so out of reach during his childhood. Here is his baby, a 1935 Cadillac Fleetwood convertible sedan:
All original parts and paint. Cracking original rubber gaskets around the doors. He claimed it was a one-of-a-kind, a V8 edition in a year when no other V8s were made. When I said these things are heavy, I meant it: a good portion of the framing is made out of solid wood. I got to ride in it. At one point, late in his life, when his legs started to fail him and he could no longer operate the clutch, he even let me drive it. This was indeed a machine from a different era---a time when a trip to the mostly-deserted tip of Long Island on the rustic parkways was a daring adventure, and a time when flat tires were the norm. That is the Long Island we read about in the great novels of the past century.
But he was more than just a car guy. He was the father of my darling wife. He was a grandfather of my three boys. He was my beloved pal and verbal fencing partner---that initially gruff guy who quickly welcomed me, this tall, strange, seemingly unemployed young man who was in love with his daughter, into his family with open arms.
John Serafin, the Long Island Cadillac man, died last night. Goodbye sir, I'm going to miss you.
With that important story told, I'll now turn my attention to the update. It comes to you a day early, because we're catching a plane tomorrow for the funeral. Needless to say, there probably won't be an update next week.
The biggest changes are to storage. Baskets no longer decay. Yes really. I finally caved on that sore point after a whole year of holding the line. Looking through the existing content, I found 67 different bowls of stuff that weren't containable but probably, logically, should be. That's a lot of stuff that used to sit on the ground, but can go in a box now. I've also added a new kind of box, a slot box, that can be used to store 10 small items (instead of four big items like the regular box). Before, the only way to store that many small items in one spot was to nest baskets in boxes, which made the items fiddly to access.
Before this update, there were over 1000 Eves every day, and it was clear that many players were abusing the /DIE feature to ban themselves from all family lines so that they could play as Eve. These "unnecessary Eves" were creating too many families, spreading babies out into too many doomed family lines, and starving the existing, long-running lines of necessary babies. Even worse, with the latest close-together changes, many of these Eves were griefing existing towns---and an Eve has very little to lose.
The effect of /DIE as a baby has been changed, in that it no longer triggers a lineage ban, but instead adds that family to your temporary skip list. Once you've skipped through all families, and there are none left to try, your skip list clears, and you go back to being born through all the same families again. In other words, you can't use /DIE to become Eve anymore. You only become Eve if another Eve is really needed (there are actually no available mothers around to have you).
This cut the number of Eves down by a factor of 10x, which will take a huge bite out of the above problems.
There has also been a problem of growing clutter over time, with everyone close together, and a lack of greener pastures for fresh starts. A new long-term map culling system has been added, where any 100x100 region that hasn't been seen by anyone for at least eight hours slowly goes back to nature, one tile at a time. The only things that survive the ravages of nature are stone walls, which remain in place, with trees regrowing up inside of the outlines of former building. This culling should help to create some greener pastures for new Eves. By the way, this only happens on servers with 15 or more simultaneous players.
Two client-side movement glitches, affecting the movement of other players, have been fixed. Hopefully, rubber-banding when trying to follow someone on a long walk is a thing of the past.