I noticed there wasn’t a feedback thread for this version, so I made one. The patchmap makes the game much more interesting, and I think this version is a huge improvement. Still, I have some issues.
Many species as listed as having escaped engulfing, when in fact they merely bumped into each other endlessly and were unable to engulf each other due to being the same size. This results in huge population numbers despite the species not having escaped anything. Also, this population bonus doesn’t seem to apply to the player’s species, even though its AI exhibits the same behavior.
I wish I could make my nitrogenase stop making ammonia once I have enough, as it just wastes ATP after that.
I wish I could see the total amount of glucose my chloroplasts/thylakoids produce so that I can know how many metabolosomes/mitochondria I need. Of course, I can calculate the numbers by just adding the production values for each organelle, but a UI element showing the number would still help.
ATP does not need to be indicated both at the top of the screen and on the side. The side menu, despite being collapsable, should never be closed because it contains essential information. As such, the ATP value at the top could be removed, the suicide button could be shifted to the left, and the lux value could be moved to be in line with the rest of the UI instead of below it.
Differentiating the foreground and background is difficult sometimes, particularly in the coastal patch’s bright colors. I often can’t tell whether something is a nutrient cloud or just background color.
The tooltips for the larger organelles are wrong. The chloroplast gives +3 osmoregulation cost, not +2.
I’m glad I am helping identify issues! I just looked at the reworked UI concept, and I realized that my UI complaint is fixed in it. Very good! The energy balance bar would be greatly appreciated. The chloroplast is not the only incorrect tooltip; the mitochondrion is wrong too.
I am confused about why the lux value at the ice sheet is 50%, while the ocean patch below it has a lux value of 100%. If light is being blocked at the surface, it should be even weaker beneath the surface.
In my game the mitochondrion is listed as having 2 osmoregulation cost, which is correct as it is 2 hexes big.
The ice shelf biome is not physically located on top of the entire ocean. The patch map depth and left / right positioning is just approximate to give a picture roughly how things are.
Oh yeah, you’re right. Somehow I didn’t notice that.
I didn’t realize the patch positioning was not supposed to be a direct representation of these biomes’ positions. I think the patchmap will need to be correlated with a geographic map at some point to avoid the confusion I mentioned
I played the game to 27 generations, and I think the problem of gluttony has not been solved. Cells spawn at such a high rate that there are always plentiful nutrients. And since the AI always sends smaller cells on kamikaze missions to engulf larger cells, I barely had to move at all to have all the nutrients I needed. I lived in the estuary and planned to use mostly chloroplasts, but I left that idea and instead was almost entirely mitonchondria and flagella.
The good news is that the game has a natural “powers of ten” aspect wherein I zoom out more and more as the scale becomes larger and larger.
Furthermore, I wonder why there is no upgraded version of rusticyanin. Chloroplasts are like upgraded thylakoids (although chloroplasts can’t ferment), and mitochondria are like upgraded metabolosomes. Even if it were a non-LAWK “rustisome” or something like that, I think an upgrade would be cool.
There was some discussion about this. If we want the map to be a side view or a top down view. Now It’s kinda just whatever I thought made sense. The ice could have been at the same “depth” as the ocean, but the left and right directions were already full.
Energy is more scarce early in the game, but later it is extremely plentiful as smaller cells rush toward you so you can engulf them without even moving. Cells spawn and die with such frequency that almost the entire world is covered in nutrient clouds produced from their deaths. Cells seem to spawn from nowhere, so there is eternal free energy.
I played a game as a ferrovore, and I had an idea of another way to counteract gluttony. As a ferrovore, glucose was useless to me, as I had only rusticyanin and a flagellum. This made me think that there could be major bonuses and maluses attached to every organelle. That way, organelles would not only increaase osmoregulation cost, but they would also affect other organelles. Unnecessary organelles would be much more negative then.
For example, rusticyanin could reduce the efficiency of glucose metabolism. This would mean that players could not use much rusticyanin without deactivating their glucose processes. This would encourage players to design cells in such a way that the malus can be ignored so that only the bonus is experienced. If you don’t use glucose anyway, then you don’t care about rusticyanin blocking fermentation.
As you can see the Chemosynthesizing proteins tooltip stretches to the bottom, could it be because of the UI is not automatically resizing properly with the screen resolution?
The GUI does not really scale to different resolutions. Stuff are positioned the way they are and they only properly fit onto the screen at certain resolutions. All of the content is on screen at 1280x720 resolution. In your screenshot it seems a few pixels are cut off from the tooltip. I guess your resolution is a tiny bit too small.
I’d like for us to move to a GUI that actually scales well to many different resolutions.
So I tried the new version and it was very interesting . I like how all the species descend from the player’s species. I also tried going to a different biome (I went to the seafloor biome) because there was a point where there was too much competition and I tried adapting by focusing on feeding on iron but I don’t know if I missed something with how organelles works or if was ill-adapted, but there were times when my ATP would completely drop as soon as I exited the cell editor (this also happened in the starting biome). So I had to stop moving for a few seconds to recover ATP, but when I eventually died to AI species pushing me (I’ll talk about it later) when I respawned this time I didn’t lose my ATP and I still had glucose left.
I’m actually a bit tired as I type this so I’ll just ask a few questions: why do ALL the other species chases me? Is it normal? And maybe it’s a detail but I noticed that each time I arrive on the main menu, the music starts abruptly; would it be possible to make it fade in smoothly?
Because they are programmed to, I guess. The AI cells try to engulf everything, even if it is impossible because the other cells are the same size. I assume you were consuming more ATP than you were producing and you did not start with enough resources. All your extra resources from a previous life are transferred to your next life, so you should not enter the editor immediately. Continue gathering resources so they can be transferred to your cell after you exit the editor.
Edit: I just remembered that the game has a tendency to freeze when its loading a new music; there was even a time where it froze longer than before so I was afraid that it crashed.
Yeah I agree with this point, I think we need to make it harder to get compounds from other cells.
However I get the sense that once we do that it might all click into place. Now, for example, you have to think carefully about cell design for a while and some builds are non-viable so hopefully if we can improve the predation and combat mechanics then the late game will be interesting too.
However, the thing is that it restricts the number of strategies possible. Life is supposed to have nearly infinite possibilities, so having at least 5 possible strategies at the beginning of the game would be better. The only thing that worked for me was the trick mentioned in the other 0.4.2 thread, which basically consists at upgrading 4 cytoplasm hexes + Thylakoid & Chemosynthesizing proteins (I used Iron organelle instead of thylakoid), and then buy the nucleus.
