Auto-evo on alien planets

[thriveuser1454 (Occasional Thrive Player)]

It seems like it would be pretty difficult to run a full auto-evo regimen on alien worlds you encounter, when you encounter them. So I propose this:

When you start the Space Stage, auto-evo starts running… basically perpetually. It’ll create planets in areas you haven’t explored and evolve aliens on them to a certain stage. For instance:

• You enter the Space Stage. Auto-evo decides to generate a Space stage civilisation on a planet 10 stars away. It does so while you’re setting up your moon outpost.
• Auto-evo completes its generation. It decides to generate a Microbe stage biosphere on a planet 4 stars away.
• Auto-evo completes its generation. It decides to generate an Aware stage biosphere on a planet 12 stars away.
• Auto-evo completes its generation. It decides to generate an Industrial stage biosphere on a planet 14 stars away. While it’s doing this, you’re starting FTL transit. You encounter the Microbe stage biosphere in the process.
• Et cetera.

Eventually, when auto-evo can’t find any more areas where it can generate biospheres/civilisations in a reasonable timeframe before you get there, it stops. Your galaxy is finished. This means that the longer it takes for you to explore the galaxy, the more aliens there are in it.

Auto-evo’s space biospheres would be pretty thin. A microbial biosphere would generate in a small cluster of patches, containing all the relevant environments. When you arrived, there’d only be a dozen or two microbes to examine. More advanced biospheres would need to be larger, but they’d still be much smaller than the biosphere you developed.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

@thriveuser1454

This means that the longer it takes for you to explore the galaxy, the more aliens there are in it.

I can see this being abused to have no alien space empires generate, unless those would be handled in a different way.

[thriveuser1454 (Occasional Thrive Player)]

There’s a few ways to prevent that being abused in such a manner. You could design the game such that it’s very difficult to work fast enough to explore enough of the galaxy that no alien empires can generate. You could start alien empire generation before the player reaches space, to ensure that there are at least some. You could also artificially limit the player in some way - perhaps by throwing aggressive roadblocks if they go too fast.

I think, overall, just designing the early Space Stage such that making it out of your solar system is a massive achievement would be good enough. Honestly, auto-evo might run out of planets to put life on, given that, presumably, the Space Stage will not be Stellaris. (The save file will be bloated enough as-is.) That being said, if auto-evo is working too fast, you could just make the biospheres and histories bigger… although that doesn’t scale to different players in the same way that basing the alien count on your expansion would be.

Actually, since I’d expect that you’d see life signs on other planets from your own, auto-evo should definitely be evolving life on alien worlds in the Industrial stage. Perhaps after you build your first space telescope… no, wait, that’s Space stage.

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

@thriveuser1454

There’s a few ways to prevent that being abused in such a manner. You could design the game such that it’s very difficult to work fast enough to explore enough of the galaxy that no alien empires can generate. You could start alien empire generation before the player reaches space, to ensure that there are at least some. You could also artificially limit the player in some way - perhaps by throwing aggressive roadblocks if they go too fast.

Here’s a method: if you colonize space at the speed of fast, so will your neighbors. If you explore outwards like a plague, you won’t meet kind explorers, but instead massive empires. Once a species is evolved for space stage the game will decide weather they’re little babies grinding away FTL, or building their first good ships, or dominating half a galactic arm, based on how you’re doing. Expand like hell, meet hell. Alternate method: DON’T GENERATE STEP BY STEP! Skip a few steps. Microbe stage has little bearing on aware. Start at late multicellular. Measure what events in cell stage cause effects in aware, make a table of all of it, and choose with RNG! If you generated a species that was going to rule the planet next to you then you made a new save, use them here! Etc. Or, possibly, reward speedrunners.

[hhyyrylainen]

I don’t think it is reasonable to assume that running auto-evo in the background to generate enough planets while the player explores can be done.

This has already been kind of talked about (but I won’t merge the threads as this is kind of different):

Another thread about Alien life

Also it’s way too impractical to try to run auto-evo on 100 planets at the same time. Other planets have to be pregenerated in some form, so that they can just be loaded from disk when needed. I’m too lazy to look for it but I’m confident I’ve said somewhere on these forums before that something like a planet pregeneration tool might be something we release and then when we have a bunch of planets generated by many people, we’ll just bundle some reasonable amount with the game. That way loading …

Generation of other planets

Inspired by the discussion on discord let’s talk about how other planets could be populated with life. So in the space stage we’ll want the player to be able to explore a lot of different planets. In order to have cool, different, life on the planets there needs to be some way for the planets to be populated without resorting to some random generation or placing random community made species on the planets. And as we aren’t planning on making Thrive only run on super computers we cannot simulat…

@Deathwake

Alternate method: DON’T GENERATE STEP BY STEP! Skip a few steps. Microbe stage has little bearing on aware. Start at late multicellular. Measure what events in cell stage cause effects in aware, make a table of all of it, and choose with RNG!

I think our goals with auto-evo will need to be considered to have failed if this is possible. This would mean that the microbial life wouldn’t be connected to bigger life and that space planets could be unrealistic where the species aren’t simulated to be actually able to survive in their environment. So yeah I think the design of auto-evo has failed if we can skip any (significant) steps in it as unnecessary.

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

@hhyyrylainen

space planets could be unrealistic where the species aren’t simulated to be actually able to survive in their environment.

I personally think any species the player sees should have to have been checked to see if it won’t die, I’m not saying spore, I’m saying that generating from LUCA to sapients is a long, slow, inherently serial nightmare, and any parts of it that can be precomputed or speed up should be. For example, instead of running cell stage, run parallel checks on many common late cell stage creatures. Whichever ones in each niche area do well can be evolved to fit specifically in a mere few rounds of auto-evo. And non-microbe eating multicellular creatures could be designed in parallel, as the cells that make them up might not matter too much (I could be wrong, but my understanding is unless they aren’t a normal photo-synthezier/heterotroph they’ll just specialize tissues for anything the base cell lacks.) Plus the table idea I had was too run the autoevo normally until you got a clear cause and effect relationship and could skip everything between. You would be able to specifically check if using the shortcut changed anything.

[hhyyrylainen]

@Deathwake

parts of it that can be precomputed

Like I said in that other thread I linked, I think entire space planets need to be precomputed and bundled with Thrive releases so that there are planets to quickly load in when needed.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

You mean there will be pre-made planets?

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

Honestly, makes totally sense. If you don’t want a static feeling space stage, we could make it a distributed computing type thing. Allow any planets your game precomputed in the background that you didn’t discover yet to be shipped off to add to the pool of spare planets for other people. Kinda like Spore now that I think of it.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Would that work like creation sharing in Spore, where you could view the creations of other people (in this case, a generated planet)?

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

Dunno. I’m spitballing here. I feel like it would be best if you could elect to show some number of worlds, explore them in an ascended sandbox or whatever, jump straight to space stage playing in said world assuming you’d unlocked that, ect., but the ones you looked at wouldn’t spawn in in any save file you make soon.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Btw, the whole creature saving and sharing thing from Spore is apparently a patent, so it can’t be used in Thive.

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

I am going to burn Electronic Arts to the ground with underwater thermite for use in smeltle le meltle and possibly the US patent office while I am at it.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

How would smelted EA be used in the US patent office?

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

To prove that they can no longer hold dumb patents that you shouldn’t be allowed to own. If you’re smeltled you have no legal rights.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Oh I see, so showing the office that one of it’s visitors has been slain.

Returning to the topic, there should be lots more planets with microbial life than planets with “advanced life”, right?

[thriveuser1454 (Occasional Thrive Player)]

You shouldn’t be allowed to patent game mechanics. That’s stupid.

I mean, I’d imagine that Thrive can’t really be held accountable if it provides a tool for generating planets, a tool for taking your save and turning it into a planet for Space Stage purposes, and a tool for uploading those planets. There’s nothing Thrive can do if, even if those are all taken down after Space Stage is done, people continue saving and uploading planets to independent mods…

God. Would EA really sue Thrive for allowing its users to upload worlds to be downloaded when playing the Space Stage? I mean, I think it’s reasonably different from Spore’s method, and not inspired by Spore but rather necessitated by game mechanics. We aren’t sharing creatures, we’re sharing planets. But at the same time, in American courts, the person with more money will generally win. So unless Revolutionary Games is based in, like, Finland, I don’t think we’d win an EA lawsuit. Not unless a bunch of people chipped in money for legal defense.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

It could make Thrive more popular, but I’d not go for the road resulting in a lawsuit.

I do wonder if EE is at risk of a lawsuit through…

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

EE is at much mire of a risk of a lawsuit. The patents are mostly made for the sake of having patents. It’s an announcement of “don’t mess with us”, so that if your game makes billions people expect clones to be crushed. Thrive is a several decades later complete reimaginging, I find it hard to believe the deciding factor will be the ability to save worlds. Hell, we could make it a feature where you can just put “cache files” in a specific folder and it’ll load them in the game, with no central server or official support in game, and I’ll (or anyone else) either write some javascript (BLEH) and throw together an electron app, or I’ll whine at SDL and mess around with the c++ libraries till I have an app that’ll throw stuff in automatically from a website, and upload your stuff to a website. This isn’t a thing we should spend time worrying about is what I’m saying.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Well Spore wasn’t all that good at “crushing the clones”, especially mobile games.