Can they even force their way to buying our beloved studio?
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I don’t know, and I am afraid to find out.
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Hopefully their eyes aren’t on us. Yet, as if we do succeed, they will be drawn to us sooner or later.
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This carries big problems (Revolutionary Games Studio is registered as non-profit organization, Thrive is open-source + license) for EA, they won’t do such a thing.
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You meant to only type one “non” in here?
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Even when the patent expires, it still doesn’t make sense for individual creatures to be downloaded for Thrive. Maybe for the museum page it would make sense, but putting a random species into a planet it didn’t evolve on should either kill it or disrupt the ecosystem (if that doesn’t happen then we haven’t managed to make auto-evo correctly). The only exception I see is that space stage planets could be downloaded so that the player doesn’t run out of potential planets to explore:
I remember there being a newer discussion as well but that thread showed up first in search.
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I think AnthropocenianAge meant something like the sporepedia feature…
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I don’t remember having used that, so what’s the difference in that?
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Pretty sure sporepedia includes not just creature-sharing, but also sharing of other creations the players can make in-game. So like the whole sharing system that is, and I am fairly sure that it’s the said system that’s patented and not just the creature part of it.
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So basically it would be an online version of the Thrive museum page, with added sections for non-species creations.
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Exactly. I can imagine if we do commit to something like this following the patent licenses’ end, we’d add such features accordingly with the development (so we wouldn’t add spaceship sharing if space stage isn’t completed or worse, doesn’t even have the focus on it yet).
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From HyperbolicHadron:
Some aspects of customization would include:
- Mouth shape
- Aspect Ratio
- Length
- Internal symmetry
- Radial- Most basic, a lamprey mouth for example
- Mirrored- Has two planes where teeth can be attached
- Tooth Parameters
- Count
- Size
- Material Type
- Shape (Useful for defining herbivore vs carnivore teeth, or more advanced options)
For the types of symmetry, would be it possible to create creatures in the game with trisymmetry (a la Trilobozoa) using the Radial Symmetry? Or even make creatures in Thrive with derivates of Mirror symmetry, like four or six-fold symmetry found in Conulariids?
Also, I am assuming there are plans to include early lenses made with Calcite, like what seen in the Holochroal eye in some Trilobites?
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Will fractal symmetry seen in some Ediacaran-era organisms also be possible?
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I would expect more advanced or differing symmetry types to be a feature somewhere on the roadmap. In fact, I would expect pretty much every possible unique feature would be on the roadmap somewhere, as the 3D Organism creation is going to be the heart of Thrive once we finally are able to focus on it. There is a near endless amount of different features, from the complex to the simple, that we will want to add in order to make it the best editor possible.
The difficulty here is in creating the right order and priority of different features so that we know what order in which to develop them. I see us being able to create enough of a full and enjoyable experience for the Macroscopic-Aware-Awakening stages with only a relatively small subset of the total amount of wanted features simply because of how dynamic and flexible those features will be in allowing for a vast diversity of different organisms created.
And yet we will still want to continue adding more for as long as Thrive is able to continue as a project. This is a great strength of Thrive: it was able to survive for so long with barely more than a hope of any real progress made on it; now that it is actually progressing at a great speed how much longer will the project be able to continue? It has survived more than a decade so far, how much work could be done on the next decade when applied to 3D organisms?
This is all to say, it would be easy to simply say that we will eventually add in complex symmetry or that we would eventually add in different lens types, but the more difficult part is to figure out when. On that front, we are beginning to try to categorize the different features required to emulate certain real-world organisms as well as determine any relations, similarities, or dependencies between them. Then will come the task of prioritizing them and making a roadmap.
This will certainly require interaction and polling of the community. Should the team spend more time creating a lot of different types of tooth types and shapes or on adding feathers and the many features that covers, like warmth, flight ability, and so on. Or is just one additional tooth type wanted before moving on to other features; different tooth types being split across the roadmap, some more important and others less.
So I would suggest to the community that whenever you make a suggestion or ask if a specific feature would be considered that you would give it some context in terms of priority. We would like to know what features really make you excited, and which ones you think would be best included in the final game but not necessarily worked on in the short term, deserving of a spot on the roadmap but not at the front of it.
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So for now, bilateral symmetry and radial symmetry are a top priority?
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As of right now, the roadmap is not yet defined enough to say that for sure. But to focus on the typical animals first, we would likely focus our efforts on bilateral symmetry. Radial symmetry will be important for plants, but where exactly we focus on that set of organism types is yet to be determined. We might decide to focus all our efforts on first getting a good animal type of organism designer first, as that is what most players would be expected to want to design and would be most fun, as well as it being the focus of most of the development effort for the future. But I could easily see us deciding that it would be good to focus on getting basic plants working early in development in order to have the ecosystem able to be properly populated and full.
And it might turn out that the effort needed to implement one type of symmetry is close enough to a more general set of symmetries that we would get other types working as well with similar effort. I doubt that this will be the case, but we will see once we get further along in the development process.
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You are talking here about the 3D roadmap, right? How’s the state of the multicellular roadmap then?
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Consider the following. Crustaceans, Echinoderms, Molluscs, Brachiopods, Jellyfish, Jawless Fishes, and possibly even Nautiloids are all thought to have evolved before terrestrial plants, and that a few arthropods made it to land before them as well. At some point, I would love to see vascular plants get properly represented in all their diversification, but in the macroscopic stage, I think macroscopic marine algae (seaweed), freshwater algae (both macroscopic and microscopic), and maybe terrestrial microscopic algae, possibly, might be needed. Other plants could easily wait until aware.
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I mean, should we assume the evolution of plants vs evolution of animals would go in a similar fashion on different planets?
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No, but I think since animals evolved to awareness before plants evolved to land o Earth, and there will be more people interested in playing animals than plants, the focus of macroscopic should be on animals. Though seaweed will still be needed in macroscopic.
Edit: Also, wasn’t there a way to edit who a post was responding to? I clicked the wrong post, then somehow duplicated my post trying to fix it, and couldn’t find the option to change it. I am almost certain I have changed it from responding to a specific post to responding to the topic in general before.
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