The time to test 0.7.1 is here! This release was almost called 0.8.0 as most of the 0.7.x roadmap is now complete, but a few items are left. The most immediate noticeable thing in this release is that the world will start off without oxygen and only get oxygen after photosynthesis is evolved. That has required various tweaks all over the game to keep things working nicely with the new starting conditions. There’s also a ton of the usual small changes, features and bug fixes. There’s also some new microbe stage visual effects that can be enabled in the options menu. If people like these, they may become default options in the future.
This beta version is available through the launcher (after selecting the option to show beta versions) or through Steam and itch on the beta channels.
Please provide any feedback you have about this new upcoming release, we are especially interested in any major game breaking bugs that we have not found yet.
Pressing Confirm also did not let me continue.
Reloading from the last autosave and repeating the same actions did not reproduce the problem, but loading the save made in this screen does:
Some other observations so far:
Does the editor grid look better, or is that just me?
The phosphate chunks are green. I am not exactly sure what phosphate salt you had in mind. But no doubt from a gameplay perspective, picking something purple would be more obvious.
Bloom effect is perhaps a bit much. Bright clouds on dark backgrounds (abyssopelagic) hurt my eyes. I think the washed out effect is nice, but a bit too bright. These glowing clouds are making me feel like bioluminescence has already been implemented!
Lighting effects on the 3d membranes are actually gorgeous!
I noticed that after I engulfed a bunch of microbes and then released them, one of them apparently became undamagable and also didn’t respond to anything.
Actually now also encountering a problem with not getting any starting compounds when respawning after death:
Another observation: Flagella modification seems to have a very wide range of energy usage, with a fairly minor effect on speed. At least on larger cells.
I noticed that the photosynthesis values are way too low compared to 0.7.0, making the entire playstyle unviable, even with high CO2 levels like 12.5%:
Additionally, chloroplasts are vastly less efficient than thylakoids, which definitely shouldn’t be the case.
I have experienced this issue both in freebuild and in a normal game, and it seems to be a constant issue which happens in all patches.
I can confirm the part about flagella. The increased speed from having a longer flagellum is rather negligible compared to the extra ATP needed to sustain it - this makes the shortest flagellum length possible the clear optimal choice in all situations, which probably shouldn’t be the case.
This also makes flagella quite unbalanced in general, since super short flagella need way less ATP while still providing a speed boost comparable to unmodified ones.
The effect flagellum length has on speed definitely needs to be way more pronounced than it is currently.
(Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if the speed value displayed in the editor is fully accurate, so the problem might not be present in-game and everything I said here may just be a consequence of incorrect displayed values - in which case this is a different issue entirely.)
After some more testing, it seems to me like the second option (the speed displayed being incorrect) is the issue here, so the first half of my previous reply can safely be ignored.
I made the same cell, one with short flagella and one with long flagella:
The speed difference displayed in the editor is very small (19.1 vs 19.4), however the actual speed difference in-game appears to be way more apparent, with the long flagella cell being around 2x faster than the short flagella cell, which is definitely not correctly reflected in the displayed statistics.
Yeah, this is what happens. The scene is not correctly loaded so the variables our C# code use are messed up and it runs into a serious error after only running part of the editor initialization logic. Godot 4 no longer allows crashing the entire game when things go very wrong. So the end result is this half loaded editor screen.
So you made a save after the broken screen happened? I think I see that in the preview screenshot. Loading that save I get an error. So that’s why loading it leads back to the broken state (I see that the patch that is shown in the editor is null even though that variable should never be null, likely due to the broken state being saved). I don’t think it is worth it to try to fix this as the root problem is the broken scene load which allows the game in the first place to get into a totally broken state.
I don’t recall any changes related to that…
Since this initial report a workaround was written:
I call it a workaround as this doesn’t really explain why it happens, and I think if we find the root cause of the bug then it should be fixed in a much cleaner way by just fixing the ejection logic to work fine without needing to delay it by one frame.
I realized based on this and other reports that now with the default patch no longer having any oxygen, the initial compounds calculation will not give any glucose to oxygen breathers. And sure enough your save shows that. I’ve already made the fix for that which will be in the release. With my fix in place doing any change in the editor recalculates the initial compounds in your save and after that the cell spawns with glucose.
Once big, a single flagellum has pretty minimal impact on speed in general.
I can confirm the logs aren’t empty, but they don’t have any interesting errors that would be relevant.
Yep, this was confirmed. I’ve since bumped up the glucose production way up to compensate:
And this was also addressed by that PR, so again it should be 4x better.
Yep. Also nice to see someone was able to find the GitHub issue relevant to a problem before I had to dig it up.
It’s intentional that the benchmark results core section cannot be translated as otherwise us developers would have no clue what the numbers were if someone posted their translated benchmark scores.
“ASCENSION” in Thriveopedia has no translation string.
Organelles list in Thriveopedia has a repeating organelles list with multiple copies of organelle buttons (notice how it does not end after “Vacoule” and the scroll bar is very short). I had this occur when entering it from Microbe Freebuild Editor.
This is actually a bug. And investigating this I realized that accidentally I had forgotten to extract translations from a new source code folder. Surprisingly ascension was the only stage that got hit with this as apparently all the other stage names are referenced from elsewhere as well.
So yeah, actually a bug that interestingly enough only affected ascension stage which is why I didn’t notice it when making the related changes originally.
As a side note all translation keys ARE_ALL_UPPERCASE, so in almost all cases when a full caps piece of text (especially with underlines in it)in the GUI, that’s a bug indicating a problem with translations (even with the English text).
I think I got the bug to trigger: you need to change language and that duplicates all of the buttons (actually just reopening the Thriveopedia is probably enough) when opening the Thriveopedia gain, instead of just updating the button names. I’ll do a quick fix to clear all the existing buttons before adding the freshly created new ones.
