Cilia scaling and assorted related bugs

While recently decided to give Thrive a go, and I noticed that the cilia rotation is a bit weird which led to a few bugs and odd interactions, I have certainly enjoyed playing so far and I hope to help when/where I can.

Firstly, cilia effectiveness scales with distance from the origin way too quickly, and/or the decrease in effectivity from the size of your cell can’t compensate well enough, so you can get astoundingly quick turns for massive cargoship cells; and you can achieve max rotation speed creating a single line of organelles around 27 tiles long and with just 2 cilia at the end. (The rest is more bug related)
Secondly, there doesn’t appear to be any rotation penalty when connecting additional cells to a colony, so you can rotate the main cell freely while all the attached cells are being dragged along leading to some general bugginess and strange interactions like:

  • Passing through objects when rotating fast enough

  • New cells being attached to an area out of the screen, so seems to overlay the new cell on top of your cell

    • This occurred when there was a very long line of organelles, I was using the editor just to see how effective the cilia were at long range, I only needed 1 cilia for stupidly massive cell provided it was far enough away, this seemed to occur after the vanishing membrane bug.
  • Perpetual increase in local compound concentration when spinning a large colony (this got a bit laggy)

    • (new cells will spawn enter the circle of attack they are eaten and when your colony is full the compounds are released which attracts even more new cells)
  • Lag/stuttering, with an out of bounds error in the logs when attaching large cells to a large colony together while spinning fast (here are some of the logs for that issue Logs - Pastebin.com)

1 Like

Thank you for providing some pretty solid testing and feedback. And welcome to the forums!

I’ve been dealing with personal issues so I haven’t been keeping track of GitHub for the past 2 weeks too tightly and don’t have links, but I’m pretty sure the bugs you have mentioned have issues attached to them on GitHub. Regardless, I’ll make a note of the issues you have listed and double check soon to make sure.

I’ll also note that cilia (and physics based rotation in general) are very much a work in progress as well. In the future, the plan is to essentially present cilia as an alternative to flagella, with the former serving to be more agile and multidirectional, and the latter being quicker in a straight line. Right now, cilia only alter rotation speed, so there is still some work to do. This doesn’t even account for the more unique adaptations some eukaryotes have attached to cilia, such as chemoreception, that we might still add on as well.

So we will appreciate additional feedback on cilia as they get more fleshed out.

Awesome, I did do a quick serach for cilia/rotation issues on the github before I this posted (no point doubling up reports) but I could have missed them.
Anyway I will keep a look out for more cilia improvements in the future, and I’m slightly hoping for a cilia modification to allow the creation of proper ciliates.

1 Like

There is a penalty, but also a benefit as the cells in your colony actually help you turn. I tweaked things down to be pretty generous so that even large cell colonies can turn relatively well even without cilia.

Those physics errors are just stuff that happens very often, it’s a Godot engine bug they don’t seem to want to fix, instead 4.0 will have a different physics engine.

1 Like