0.4.4 Features Discussion

Future Game
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0.4.4 Features Discussion

I think developers should start from Enzyme system?
or a better Patch Map system…

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IIRC, hhyyrylainen said that he would mainly work on a new graphics engine.
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" These are things I’d want to work on:

  • Setting up a patreon for me
  • Switching to diligent engine, which is a low level graphics API abstraction, so I’d have to write my own scene handling code, but presumably there is much less to go wrong with it, it would just take me more time to do graphics stuff instead of constantly having to swap away from borked graphics libraries where the author doesn’t fix it.
  • Writing a custom GUI library to replace CEF, I’d like to work on this after the graphics engine change.

So basically I’d have no time to implement actual gameplay features, but I’ll try to answer any issues other > developers and potential developers have in trying to implement features:"

-hhyyrylainen

it makes sense for the next update to focus on optimizing the game imo. there aren’t enough devs to actually get new game mechanics out. and hrryylainen is basically carrying thrive development all on his back. so it would be very straining to both optimize the game and implement new mechanics.

If more programmers joined the team however. in my opinion i think it would make sense to probably add these things:

  • Option menu.

  • Saving the game.

  • Implementation of better patch info gui.

those were just my two cents.

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I’d say the devs should work on just bugs and balancing issues. I hope that is not gonna be hard.

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Also, when will the Planet Generator be continued?

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There are three things that I want in 0.4.4 is:
An options menu
A load and save feature
Full gui implication (in the editor)

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TJWhale was working on it… It’s not high on my priority list. So whenever someone joins / some team member wants to work on it.

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What i want is for the devs to fix a bug where my game crashes as soon as it starts because i have not been able to play thrive since 0.4.2.
Also for later in the development i think it would be nice to have a disco cheat and a banana cheat as well as others.

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Do you have Windows 8?

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I’d say that 0.4.4 should be focused more on optimizing what is present and dealing with any software shortcomings that may impede development in the future, so the graphics engine switch seems like a good idea, along with other general bug-fixes.
For the near future, I’d suggest that patch generation and a fluctuating dynamic environment could be a worthy time investment. I feel that it really improves the simulation aspect of the game while setting up the framework needed for other planned features, such as disasters, increasing oxygen that scales with photosynthetic life, etc. In general, I’d predict that the 0.4.x updates should continue the legacy of the patch map update, improving the environmental functions of Thrive.

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I’d think this would actually not be that difficult, since you could probably calculate how much oxygen a certain cell use/releases using the organelles they have, and if you would then multiply it with the population of that cell and divide it by the volume or something of each patch you could get a calculation of a species’ effect on the oxygen in a certain area. If you would then do that for each species and calculation the diffusion between patches too you could pretty easily calculate the difference in oxygen in each patch for each reproductive cycle.

The issue is that I don’t think the game is simulated properly enough to accurately have a great oxygenation, since the current system does not favor plants at all. (Slow movement, can’t hunt (so no ‘succesfull hunts’ bonuses), NPCs don’t live long enough to run out of glucose anyway, easily hunted, can’t gather ammonia/phosphate, no access to cell walls, and there are probably even more)

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Fair point. It would be wiser to nail down auto-evo and natural selection before introducing a dynamic environment.

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Apologies for the double post. As I played through Thrive again, I felt that small things could be polished to further to improve gameplay.

1.) the ability to remove a nucleus. I’m not sure if this is intentional, but no matter where I right click, I can not remove this feature. Could be awkward to program considering the fact that other organelles you placed with are eukaryotic dependant would have to go as well, which could lead to a mess of a cell.
2. ) An ability to move the camera a bit in the cell editor. This mostly is a result of a small issue after adding the nucleus in which part of the cell is off screen.
3.) This one might be awkward to put in, but I feel that it would be cool if there was a feature to move an already placed organelle to another spot on your cell. This could come at a cost of say 20 mutation points.
4.) An ability for the player’s cell to have a physical impact on discarded organelles/small iron chunks. It’s a bit of a weird sight to see your cell’s movement be stopped dead in its tracks because it bumped into a metabolosome or a small fleck of iron.

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Yeah, it is intentional that you can’t remove the nucleus, ever since the days cells started with a nucleus it was impossible to remove.

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