It is finally time to release a beta build of 0.5.0 (with the change to Godot engine) to the public. This still has some bugs / unimplemented things left, but there’s also potentially more issues that us developers haven’t caught in testing so you can help by testing this.
This should run much better for most people than the version with bsf renderer. And there were a few new features that made it in.
This time the beta build is playable with the latest launcher: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive-Launcher/releases/tag/1.1.2
This is in preparation for the full 0.5.0 release as that needed launcher changes.
Sorry if anyone immediately downloaded the launcher, it had some minor tweaks I had to do to get the windows version working. It’s fixed if you download it now.
Here’s the list of open issues, please don’t report duplicates:
Also we are seemingly running out of programmer steam so any help in fixing up the last few things for the release would be great.
The full 0.5.0 version will be released in one week, even if the final issues aren’t fixed.
Just tried it, though I didn’t get beyond generation 10. It looks mostly good!
No crashes
Performance is great!
UI is good
Some things seem a bit off though:
Cells seem much rarer than before, even up to generation 10. It made playing a predator basically impossible. Plenty of cells spawn in if you actually respawn yourself, but you hardly find any when swimming around. So, in the end I had to suicide every time I reproduced to get a decent chance. (Initial starting situation seems overtuned in compound clouds compared to swimming as well)
Engulfing range seems smaller, I had to hit other cells with a specific spot in the centre of my cells to engulf them, and they escaped often.
ATP balance meter is completely off. I think I saw it mentioned in the Github, but it really is completely out of whack. I had times where according to the meter (and the warning) I should be dying but was doing fine, and there were times the meter said I should be fine but I emptied the ATP bar in an instant.
Less important graphical stuff:
Some weird tiling going on with the compound clouds.
Cell walls wobble like membranes.
Dead cells shoot compounds out at the speed of sound.
The options menu is great. I like the performance and music options especially. The music was always too loud. The performance is way better and the game is much more responsive and controllable. The difference between this version and the previous one is stark. The UI changes are excellent. Things are much larger, more colorful, and generally easier to see and understand. I like that there is a fade to black when entering and exiting the editor. The membranes and fluidity/rigidity system are interesting too, albeit needing refinement. I like that AI species can move between patches. The ability to resize the window was very good, and the game never crashed.
I had the same problems as the previous post, and much of what I noticed is already in the issue list. There were almost no other cells anywhere, even when they had high populations. The iron chunks and organelles from dead cells always disappeared shortly after coming onscreen, making collecting them impossible. Organelles often protrude from the membrane or float outside it.
I understand why you feel fatigued. This is a big project!
You can’t change the resolution in the option menu.
The nucleus is white instead of being purple
If you can use iron to produce ATP, you require both glucose AND iron to produce ATP. If you only have glucose, when you’re moving, the ATP is decreasing.
The membranes need more specialized characteristics than its current properties. You see, every membrane except Normal has an -0.1 absorption rate. Silica has all attributes despite its -0.4 mobility, which is insane yet reasonable. There need to be diverse reasons to evolve each one.
The membranes cost should be reduced to 45 MP, which would allow the player to spend MPs on something else than a thylakoid.
All patches are always shown to be at 240-300 m under sea level.
The environmental properties and compounds shown in the game differ from the ones shown in the editor. In the game, everything is at 0%, but the temperature is always 55 Celsius and the pressure is always at 200 kPa.
The units are not always properly assigned. Some environmental compounds are in % and some others are in % ppm. You can’t use two units for the same variable. Also, in the editor, the luminosity is displayed in Lux whereas it’s shown in % in the game.
In the editor, some patches show that there is no hydrogen sulfide, yet it is present when in the game.
Photosynthesis doesn’t seem to work. I was playing in the Estuary and decided to stop moving. The glucose level never increased. It might be related to the environmental issues mentioned above.
Glucose seems to be too rare. Ammonia and phosphates are difficult to find as well.
General/vague issues:
The game relies too much on specific strategies to beat it. If our reality had been based on the game’s logic, nearly all species would be extinct. There aren’t only three evolutions that allow a species to survive and thrive. There should be more diversity in the strategies used to beat the game.
Compounds are becoming exponentially rarer. It would all be fine if you wanted most species to die, yet it’s difficult for the player to survive, especially in the late game. In biology, there is a concept of how energy and matter circulate through organisms. The matter is always recycled; there should be no loss of matter anywhere while energy is reduced each time it is consumed by a higher organism. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to reduce the compounds’ quantity each time the player evolves. That’s why most species in our reality are still alive and not extinct. I know it’s to prevent the player to buy all organelles, but still. You should find another way to prevent organelle gluttony instead of the current method.
It’s too difficult to evolve into a more advanced lifeform. The nucleus has too many downgrades to be chosen as an evolution (e.g. 100 MP, too much osmoregulation cost, etc.). It’s like the game encourages the players not to evolve. If our world had been based on this logic, none of us would exist and try to make this game. The game should encourage the player to evolve the nucleus, just not in the early game.
I looked into this before and Godot has decided that fullscreen resolutions are an artifact of the past and won’t be supported. We can add an option to render the game at a smaller scale size to improve performance:
Not a bug. Same as in 0.4.3.1. This happened on the remaking of the nucleus model.
Known bug:
This needs investigating.
Opened an issue:
Are you sure you didn’t run into the case of glucose being reduced each time you go to the editor? It’s intentional that eventually you can’t rely on glucose in the environment.
Balancing for this release is not done yet. I hope that our game designers will get on that before the full release, @Buckly, @GlassDev .
What are the strategies you have found unsustainable? What are the ones you can manage?
I have not yet extensively tested this release in it’s current state but in 0.4.3.1 I was able to thrive with a great variety of strategies, with the only real limit being the selection of organelles and the careful regulation of my cell’s size. So there is potentially something wrong if you cannot manage more strategies.
I need all the information I can get about any problems with game balance in order to quickly find the root of the issues and rebalance them.
Maybe this is just because I found that my strategy didn’t work in the late game. My strategy was this:
Gather glucose as well as ammonia and phosphate to reproduce.
If the compound bars aren’t filled enough, fill them until either they are complete or that you can’t find any of them.
Reproduce, move to next patch (Pangonian Sea Floor I think), and evolve rusticyanin and cytoplasm.
Repeat Step 1 to 3 with the exception that mutations can be different depending on the conditions. Always move to the patch upward until you reach Estuary.
That was the strategy I used. It seemed to work at the beginning, but it was harder in the late game because photosynthesis didn’t work and glucose was becoming increasingly rare. My problems might also have been caused by a membrane upgrade (Silica), which turned out to be a bad choice. I then move to double-membrane instead.
As for the strategy issue, I think it’s because of my experience in one of the earlier versions of the game, so I can’t blame the current version for that. Sorry if I sounded harsh.
EDIT: Weird, I had two bugs on the forum.
500 Internal Server Error
Body too similar to what I recently posted while it didn’t seem to post.
LordLovat
(Thrivist Philosopher and Grey Jedi )
20
weird bug where my membrane is invisible and i create glucose clouds in my way
I cant make the menu doesnt appear for some reason
I’m a god for themCELLves
Summary
I just installed a minor discourse update. They say that they are safe to do at anytime with their updater that doesn’t cause any downtime for the small updates.
Is that the only strategy you have tried? It’s bad practice to rely on naturally occuring glucose as that really only exists to supply new cells with food before they evolve new ways to acquire it. It’s reduced by 80% each generation so unless you want to become a predator, you will have to adapt to consuming alternative compounds or generate the glucose yourself.
Hhyyrylainen has recently informed me that the compound absorption rates of membranes is currently unimplemented so the only effect your membranes had on you was the speed, resistances, and osmoregulation costs.
Even though glucose is supposed to decrease gradually overtime, it is possible that the current generation rates of compounds are profoundly low, atleast judging from the brief testing I have performed while this version was not released. I’ll look into it regardless, thank you for your feedback.
