Yuletide Together:
This update is on time for sure this week, and lemme tell you why. Tomorrow is the solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. The sun will die as it passes through the constellation of the Southern Cross, remain dead for three days, and the be born again as it rises on December 25 through the constellation of Virgo, the virgin. But enough of that astrological claptrap! What's that got to do with the update?
What we do, in my family, on the solstice is take a step back in time for a day. We use no lights except for sunlight and candles. That also means no computer screens. This is actually a pretty amazing thing to do every once in a while, because everything---and everyone---looks absolutely gorgeous when you've got candles all over the place in your house.
So, no sneaking the update in after the bell tomorrow. Today or bust.
We also have salsa, on the solstice, because my oldest kid thought that sounded funny when he was little. Salsa on the solstice. Tradition!
And yes, you can now celebrate this season in various ways in One Hour One Life. But be forewarned: do NOT expect some magical Santa NPC to be running around in-game handing out presents. That will never happen in this game (as hilarious as it sounds), for a good reason. This is a game that draws as many of its aesthetics as possible from real life. It's about human technology, and human society. It is not about magic or other supernatural things. No gremlins, no dragons, no ghosts, no Santa.
The only place the game breaks with this aesthetic is via reincarnation, for sheer playability reasons (as much as I was tempted to make a game where you only live once). And the curse system follows as a necessity from that (because criminals can reincarnate just like everyone else, and keep bugging you for all of eternity---unlike in real life).
So, holiday stuff, but actual human holiday stuff.
There are also two new chat "commands" that you can use to help you in diagnosing lag. /FPS will toggle a count of the current frames per second (are you experiencing GPU slowdown in dense areas?), and /PING will ping the server and display the round-trip time in milliseconds (is your connection to the server getting flaky?).
Have a great holiday season, everyone!