It would create a big unbalanced CO2 producer in the game (photosynthesis is balanced by respiration). There would need to be some other factor that would balance the CO2 generated from all the hydrogenase or otherwise all the game worlds would be like 95% CO2. So that’s why it wasn’t added because it would ruin the dynamic gas simulation.
Most likely yes. Since the RC I’ve added a popup text in the bottom right corner that says “Current game is no longer eligible for achievements” the first time a cheat is used. That should make it easy to notice when that happens. And also there was a bug with save loading directly from the main menu making the game think the save had cheats used when it in reality didn’t. That’s also fixed for the 0.8.3 proper.
This graphics approach is like at least 10 times easier than any other alternative. So the reason is the massive difference in effort required between the alternative implementation ways.
It visually represents the cell colony structure. Each cell in a colony is only attached to one parent cell. When the parent cell is removed from a colony all cells attached to it also detach. So the visuals are made to match the actual gameplay impact the structure has.
No, but due to the physics touching requirement pre-multicellular colonies always have the cells touching. Thus this new system would actually not render anything as it skips cells that are directly touching and thus don’t need the bridge graphics.
Well there’s been no change to that algorithm so I would have been more worried if something had changed.
Not really, I think most of the big problems with achievements and other new features have been found already. I have written the full patch notes list already but I’ll hold off on posting that.
It’s just way, way harder to do the math and required code changes to shift the membrane points to appear connected. Though you are right that this approach would also require physics changes so that the adjusted membranes are used for physics calculations to ensure the graphics still match the physics. Like I said above, at least 10 times more difficult.
It was actually fixed for the rotations, but again the code skips too short bridges between cells and thus they would all be just skipped in pre-multicellular colonies (because the colony parent cell a cell attaches to in microbe stage must have been touching as the attach logic is triggered from the physics system, and there can only ever be a single colony parent for each cell).