I appreciate the feedback. We want to communicate science effectively in our game 
Sorry if I came off as slightly annoyed. That wasn’t my intention.
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Yes indeed compoud clouds work now.
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@Alpaca that is an amazing username (sorry for disrupting the flow of the topic just had to get that out there).
Alright, I finally got some more time to play it today. Firstly, game stability is great! Still haven’t had a single crash!
The game seems a bit harder than the previous version, that seems fine to me, a positive point even. However, trying to rely on iron ions is significantly harder than other playstyles I’ve tried (relying on glucose in some form) Specifically, big iron chunks are not really a grand oasis where you can fill up on iron ions, and then go out to collect other things. Rather, there are often only very thin clouds of iron ions hanging around the chunk. While swimming around it often seems like you’re not getting any iron at all while swimming around one (Unless it’s a new one I just arrived at, but it doesn’t last.) . Once your cell gets to a certain size, it seems you just have to rely on glucose instead. This is especially true if you add a nucleus. I’m not sure whether this is intended?
Also, I had some issues with not being able to see compound clouds clearly. Especially glucose is only clearly visible if the background happens to be black.
PS:
After writing this, I did manage to thrive (with a nucleus) with a rustocyanin build, but only by engulfing every other cell that could contain iron, so it was just a predatory playstyle anyway. Also, it was probably only possible because there was this one simple prokaryote that apparently always spawned containing a ridiculous amount of iron. Which reminds me: With this organism if I died I only respawned with 3 iron, so I would die almost immediately unless I spawned directly on top of an iron chunk or one of those prokaryotes I mentioned.
PPS:
I discovered there are some really weird things going on with ATP production/consumption. I noticed whenever my cell is at/near the final growth stage (ready for reproduction) I can no longer move continuously without running out of ATP, even though a young cell can do this just fine. No amount of mitochondria I add on will fix the problem either. Since an old cell just has an additional copy of each organelle, there is clearly something going wrong here. Either the organelle copies don’t produce (enough) ATP, or there is too much ATP being drained. I noticed these problems start when I add a flagella, perhaps you should start looking there?
Another minor issue is that flagella don’t just seem to consume ATP when pressing a movement key, but when you’re being pushed by another cell. This means you can get stuck with slow movement if you can’t move without running out of ATP, for example because of the above bug.
That’s more of a nucleus problem. I don’t touch the nucleus until gen. 10.
I definitely had this happen before adding a nucleus.
In that case, you probably added a flagella before you could sustain one.
Sorry, but I’m not sure you actually understood what I wrote down.
I can sustain the flagella just fine when I just spawn as a young cell, it’s only after all organelles are doubled and I’m almost ready to enter the editor again that this problem occurs. No amount of added mitochondria fixes it. There’s clearly something wrong with the math there.
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I’ve been experiencing this too.
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And adding an additional mitochondria doesnt fix this? (in the current build, eg the actual release)? (Where we did balance changes)?
Have you played with the official 0.4.1 release?
My experience does not match yours after i get mitochondria or even before it, maybe you really arent adding enough. Of course, this is when i do not run out of glucose, which does happen sometimes.
Also heres me winning (As you can see i dont have that issue)
But balance is nice. So if there is an issue with the current balance changes, then we can iterate on it more.
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Actually funnily enough I see the issue I was talking about around the 3:00 mark in your video, in the split second before you enter the editor. You might not notice it if you enter the editor quickly. My point is that that cell you made could easily keep moving and stay at max ATP, but drained ATP when ready to reproduce. Of course, ATP consumption should be doubled because you have twice the amount of flagella and hexes, but ATP production should be doubled as well, right? I can also kind of see it at 13:04 (that cell was not draining ATP when it just spawned).
There’s a few other times your ATP is draining (with enough glucose left of course), but I don’t count them since you’re either not fully grown, or engulfing. It’s really hard to spot in your video because you usually enter the editor as soon as possible. Swim around for a bit, and you’ll probably see.
It’s not exactly game-breaking most of the time, but it could be a sign of some under-lying problem in organelle duplication and ATP production. Also, if people see they are draining ATP right before they enter the editor, they might be inclined to add mitochondria they don’t actually need (I was).
Yes, I did confirm it in the release version for you again just now.
So some repro steps that make it extremely obvious: Start new game → survive until first editor → add one metabolosome and a flagella → swim around happily without ever running out of ATP → eat until you’re ready to reproduce → Don’t immediately hit the editor button, but notice you can now barely move without running out of ATP
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In 0.4.1 I still have this issue, and adding mitochondria doesn’t help.
Actually the processes are static in the sense that they are based on the species template a cell has, and not the actual organelles in it. That’s related to this issue that was for combining this data (it is right now duplicated):
So I guess intead we should generate the process list again whenever the organelles of a cell change. @Untrustedlife?
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Huh, so right now the processes should not be changing as the cell grows? Because ATP consumption is definitely speeding up as the cell grows right now.
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Well, ATP consumption is not a process. It’s something that is done separately to each cell on every tick based on their hex count. The process system can’t deal damage or other kinds of effects, so that’s why there’s a separate thing. And as I mentioned it works off of the process list that is per species. Additionally the flagella consume ATP directly and are also not affected by the process list not updating.
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I see, that makes sense.
Yeah that sounds like a decent (albeit quick solution)
Why has this thread not been closed yet?
Because there is no automatic thread closing because I much rather have all discussions about the same topic, in the same thread, instead of having one thread created every year.
Which is why posting pointless new replies is not good. But posting well thought out replies to existing topics is the right way to go about starting discussion about it again.