0.6.3 Release Candidate Testing

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A surprise early release candidate this time due to midsummer. It’s time to test 0.6.3 RC.

The 0.6.3 release adds all of the remaining prototypes for game stages that weren’t ready in time for the previous release. Besides those there are a bunch of small fixes and feature improvements for the microbe stage and general GUI parts.

The RC can be downloaded with the Thrive Launcher by enabling the beta versions in the launcher options and then selecting the newly available version to play. The RC can also be downloaded as the beta version on Steam and Itch.

If you find any problems, or just want to provide some feedback on this build you can leave those below.

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Looks like we got the power to teleport to another area 2 billion years early as a single cell all you need as a buddy.

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I played through the game 3 times, Descending twice. I didn’t get to Ascension on the last attempt, but got to Society Stage.

Performance (This is generally low on my hardware, as I don’t have a graphics card. I generally consider anything at or above 30 fps to be fine): The opening video is running well, and rarely drops below 60fps. I dropped to 14 fps on the main menu. The microbe intro video was also a bit slow, at 23 fps. In game speed is good at 40-50 fps. Rocket launches were extremely slow. They were showing about 2 FPS, but seemed to progress at a slower speed than that. Each one took maybe 10 minutes (this was after clicking to launch). Movement in single-cell sometimes seemed to stutter quite a lot, even if the framerate was reasonable. This was only really noticeable on the first playthrough.

Sound: I was getting quite frequent audio pops in the Vents area, becoming very frequent (several per second) by the third session (before 300My). Sometimes while attacking, sound effects (pilus hits, feeding, etc.) would stop playing for a couple of minutes. It seemed like there were no sound effects at all during that time.

AutoEvo: It seemed that more species were appearing, with an initial 3 species splitting off at 100My on 2/3 playthroughs. On the first playthrough, there was also very little difference between the 3 species. This might be complete coincidence, though.

Bugs:
At one point in single-cell, I got the ‘Editor is now ready to be entered’ message when the ammonia and phosphate bars became full, and immediately, my cell became unable to move from the spot, although it could rotate. I was able to go to the editor as normal.

When I had a small, round cell with a chemoreceptor at the front, I added a flagellum to the back, but in the Membrane tab, the chemoreceptor had was now showing at the back of the cell, overlapping the flagellum (the placement in the Structure tab hadn’t changed). This disappeared when I undid all the changes to the cell. When I added a flagellum again in the same editor session, the issue repeated. When I continued from the editor, the cell looked normal.

Engulf tutorial is still showing a line to an engulfable object after the object has just disappeared.

I was getting a lot more crashes on the multicell stage. Again, this was mostly on the first playthrough, for some reason.

One of my saves in multicell was actually a copy of a previous save. I think that after clicking ‘Save’ from the pause menu, I clicked on a previous save, then changed the number in the top bar, to make a new one. I got the ‘Save Successful’ message, but when I later tried to load that save I had just made, it was actually at a point several saves back, the save I had made just before going multicellular. In the Load menu, the new save had the same image as the older save. I’m sure I didn’t click on the pre-multicell save when making the new save. I’m not sure what happened to the duplicated cell file now, unfortunately.

In one multicell session,I had a bug where my ‘mouth’ cell would not engulf. Both the Stem cell and the Mouth cell had Double Membrane, but the Mouth would not engulf, even though the Stem cell did. After the Mouth was removed by an enemy cell, and then I grew another, that one would also not engulf. After the next editor session, it was working fine.

Once in Space, the Rocket is stuck at an odd angle.

The word ‘Possess’ is misspelt on the ‘Possess a member of Your Species’ button (written as posses ).

In one playthrough, I got the same texture error on macro stage as during the last release candidate.

One of the times I changed to Society stage, I got the ‘Patch Extinction’ message. I had to click on a previous patch, before the popup went away, and I then advanced.

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CRITICAL bug:
I know this is a beta but the game crashed by just using the “undo” and “redo” in the multicellular stage (given that there is no save this is quite serious as you lose all progress)

I supposse this happens because you undo and redo in-between different cell views so there is some mismatched data in the algorithm that wasn’t accounted for.

Minor bug:
In multi-cell stage, with auto-reproduce disabled, you get the chance to evolve before filling the phosphate purple bar. Actually, I was thankful for this, since it takes forever to fill without auto-progress and unlike the other there is no organelle/protein to produce this component internally (another thing to look at).

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The main menu 3D backgrounds is expected to be heavy. But the rocket launch sequence should be much less intensive as there’s just 2 particle emitters and one light, whereas the main menu backgrounds have over double the particles and screen effects on top.

What kind of computer do you have?

Over the past 3 years, this is the second time I think someone has said they got this bug. I think I didn’t open an issue for this at the time (at least I can’t find one now) due to this being super rare and I don’t have a clue why that could even happen.

Very likely that this is the known issue:

Can you clarify this? If the problem truly happens just like that, could you really quickly check those steps in a new Thrive game to see? If the problem does truly happen so simply then it is a major issue and will be prioritized to be fixed.

Can you show a screenshot?

You just used the same spelling twice. What’s the problematic spelling (exactly)?

This is a known problem that has happened for over half a year:

No one seems interested in fixing up the prototype to not have this issue. If people keep complaining my solution will be to just disable the redo functionality.

How? When? What? Can you share some details? Does it always happen? Is it just before the bar is filled up? Does it truly not happen when auto reproduction progress is disabled? It seems very suspicious. There’s no code that acts differently in terms of when the editor is enabled if the auto reproduction progress is off versus on.

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Lenovo ThikPad E15
CPU: Intel Core i5-10210U CPU @ 1.60GHz (4x cores, 8x threads)
RAM: 8GiB SODIMM DDR4 Synchronous 2667 MHz

It is spelt as ‘posses’, instead of ‘possess’.

The Undo in Multicell was the cause of most of my crashes.

As for the rest, I will have to do more testing…

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Does it not have a GPU? If not then that’s probably it. Integrated graphics can’t really do any expensive rendering effects.

I see. This is just a purely prototype text that isn’t even translated for other languages. I guess I can fix it.

I already posted the issue about this, this is the most well known crash in the game.

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No. I have Intel inbuilt UHD graphics. I do seem to often have problems with effects using emitters. I usually play games with the graphics settings at minimum, and extra effects turned off. I generally avoid anything graphics intensive, and don’t have many problems. As I said for the last version testing, I was able to play Ark: Survival Evolved, and its first expansion with generally no performance problems (at mostly the minimum settings).

Oh, and I should have said, I was playing the Steam version.

I’ve experienced that one a lot before, of course, but it was happening much more frequently on that playthrough.

Here’s the curiously angular rocket:

It seems to be tilted up maybe 70 degrees away from camera and to the right. It always faces that same way. How is it meant to be? Was it set to face the direction of travel?

I got the Maco texture error again. It seems to be persistent on playthroughs when it occurs, but doesn’t happen in other playthroughs. It only occurs in the water-based scene, not on land.

I have yet to reproduce the save error, so no update on that.

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Well that’s the problem. It is so much worse than even the lowest power dedicated graphics that it isn’t even fair.

We’ll probably try to have more graphics options in the future, but doing all graphics multiple times is going to be extremely difficult for us due to our small team size.

The rocket should be pointing straight up. Fleets rotating towards their direction of travel is unimplemented, because again they are prototypes. I’m going to guess that the angle to the camera is what is distorting the apparent rotation of the rocket.

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It does seem to actually be camera distortion which made it look like that. Not sure how I didn’t notice that before.

Also, being able to skip the rocket launch would be fine for me.

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Having to implement skipping for all sequences that take like 10-15 seconds would not be worth the development time in my opinion. We just need some way to have potato graphics without supporting such a mode being very manual effort intensive.

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The release is now out so all future feedback should go in this thread:

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