Comments on Specific Development Forum Posts

Meta
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Just saw this, apologies; that’s a conversation on life cycles as a whole. It would be interesting to see in Thrive, but our ability to adequately represent life stages depends a lot on what is possible during implementation given manpower. I can imagine an implementation method for life cycles, where you have to basically have to play as your two body plans with a fade-to-black cut to your grown lifeform, but again, implementation. There’s also a question of how long we want the average lifespan of a macroscopic animal to be in Thrive. But to answer your more immediate question, I do think introducing life stages would allow for some loosening of editor rules.

Thanks for the input! With this specifically, that was kind of what I was going for with the “Keratization” attribute - I do believe that toads generally have more keratin in their skin, but I can’t find a source that states that absolutely right now. In my head, respiration through skin for mucoserous organisms in Thrive is tied to surface area effects, so taking away the impact of surface area also takes away some impact of that respiration.

That’s part of the reason why I didn’t make bring that up as a concept yet. There’s a whole conversation to be had about internal organs, and there’s an overlap between internal organ systems and integumentary systems via attributes that is important to clarify. I think once we have some conceptual understanding how how organ systems work, we’ll be better able to understand when an attribute or organ is better to represent certain adaptations. Of the catalogue I brought up, those are mostly things which I generally think are best dealt with via a generalized system like an attribute. There are still ideas there that might be best represented through appendage or organ editing however - for example, the “Spined” attribute for fish scales.

Yeah, that could be an interesting way to represent such phenomena. This was something that was giving me a bit of trouble. I’m not sure if such hard sectioning off of your body plan will be easy to do - what if auto-evo disagrees with you on where your organism’s sides, back, belly, etc. start? - but something along those lines could be part of it - for example, appendage specific adaptations.

Attributes are meant to be general qualifiers of skin, so there are complicating manners there. For example, who knows if attribute A can co-exist with attribute B, even if they are on different sections of the body. On the other hand though, there are animals which do have integument variations across their body - us having more hair in certain regions for example, or certain species of porcupine having more quills on their rear.

I think if anything, this is where more traditional brushing tools can come in. Players could perhaps be able to specify the thickness or sparsity of certain attributes, how much of their body is covered by it, and where the integument effect is concentrated. So a player with a “Quilled” attribute could reduce how much of their body is quilled, and drag a sort of “marker” of the center of their quills wherever they want on their body.

Pycnofibers are traditionally interpreted as some sort of “proto-feather” I believe, and are potentially a very basal adaptation found at the root of archosaurian divergence. For that reason, I see it as being appropriate to list as an attribute of keratinous scales, since it kind of represents the first steps in the evolution of feathers.

I didn’t count it as an attribute of the feather skin type because it would have probably been the unattributed feather type, which I think is somewhat limiting for the player. And I didn’t count it as its own skin type because it generally appears to be less common than other major skin types, found in Archosauria. I actually counted unfurred glandular skin as its own skin type for a bit while typing up this concept to represent synapsids and the evolution of fur, but realized similar things about the prevalence of the adaptation and decided that it would be better to represent it as an attribute of scales.

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Also, would skin characteristic-per-area customization go as far as selecting where does your creature feel various skin sensations the most for example (where for humans their hands usually have the keenest skin senses)?

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We know of at least one significant part of the problem is that the population is incorrectly calculated when a AI species migrates, resulting in the part of the population that stays in the patch receiving all of the penalty calculated for the population. I have observed it completely eliminating the population in a patch due to this.

So this is why AI populations crash, as a result of improper Darwinian Penalty on migrating populations. I wonder how the Darwinian Penalty affects the Player’s population, as the Player can both migrate and move to occupy two additional patches at once, effectively splitting the population into three subpopulations.

Decreasing the Darwinian penalty would also help from what I have seen with a brief test, though a better fix would be to make the penalty scale with the size of the population so that larger organisms are not unfairly penalized by having naturally smaller max population sizes. I think this might be the main problem that causes the populations to crash.

Good idea, as it seems balanced. I do wonder how small the Darwinian Penalty would be for absolutely gigantic player made cells if this new version of the Darwinian Penalty is implemented. Would those super-sized cells even be affected by a Darwinian Penalty due to having such small population?

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Perhaps to combat big cell resistance it would target the energy of the species instead?

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Seems unrelated. Because if I understood the original dev forum post correctly. The way it works is this:

  • A species gets negative external effects, let’s say 600 population
  • It has currently 1100 population in a patch so it could easily survive that
  • However, the species has migrated 600 population from patch A to patch B
  • Now the species only has 500 population in patch A and -600 external effects
  • The end result is now that the species is extinct in patch A and has 600 population in patch B

From the wording the suggested fix is:

  • Instead of getting the full penalty, the penalty is scaled to ((1100 - 600) / 1100) * -600 = -272.73
  • So now the end result would instead be that the species has 227 population in patch A and 600 population in patch B

So the species did not in fact go extinct in patch A due to external effects.

However the final impact of this kind of change would be limited to external effects not the player throwing an AI species out of all miches. That would still totally result in a patch extinction. So this extra “kindness” to the species would only help in the case where the external effect size was small enough so that when it gets scaled it is low enough not to cause patch extinction.

You missed the keyword population; it is not the size of the species but the population that the external effect would be scaled based on.

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I see this will greatly boost the popularity of using the migration feature, especially if this property of the feature is mentioned in some tutorial, since with it migrating can be used to extend the stay of your populations in less favourable patches. (I myself haven’t been using migration at all)

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The external effect scale is already only like 10% for the player species. So the effect would be miniscule. I doubt that anyone who cares about optimizing their gameplay would even realize this is a thing. Even now when using the migration manager each editor cycle allows you to double the speed of your species spreading, I think most players are not using it each editor cycle.

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I have a suggestion for Molluscs.

A cell with Calcium Carbonate membrane could gain a Shell. Upgrades could be make the shell hinged, segmented, internal/vestigial, or otherwise change its shape/functionality, or get rid of it all together.

It needs work, but the earliest molluscs, and most molluscs today, have/had a shell, and I believe Calcium Carbonate is to those as Chitin is to exoskeletons. Cephalopods may need some special consideration. Then there is snail/slug mucus.

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I presume this would only manifest in macroscopic, since I am not sure how would that be supposed to work in the microscopic stages…

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Solitary players have friendly fire enabled, but receive a general MP discount. Less solitary animals inflict less damage on its own kind, while more solitary animals inflict same damage to its own as it does on others while having more of a discount. Maximal solitude enables engulfment towards your own, enabling cannibalism.

I like this idea, as it help balance cannibalism, which is a feature players have been asking for.

From a pure gameplay perspective, I do wonder if Friendly Fire could be toggled on or off in the Advanced settings. Perhaps there can be different ways to implement it. One way is to obviously just have Cannibalism work as it was outlined in the dev post when the option is turned on, and not have Cannibalism when the toggle/option is off.

Another way may be similar to how Friendly Fire works in Fighting games, like the Super Smash Bros. series. Friendly Fire is normally turned off by default in these games. Otherwise, in team modes, AI just “kill” each other without realizing it. It would be funny to see the carnage of having AI cells kill and eat other with the Ai realizing it is doing this. However, this would be extremely risky for the Player, since Players would be also be subject to the same carnage from AI cells of their own species.

An additional idea is to simply have a slider for Cannibalism behavior like how all behavior sliders work currently. This would be similar to how I have implemented this for one of my FGs. “Normal” behavior would not have any tendency for eating any of your own kind on one end, say 0. “Complete Cannibalism” would be on the other end, say 400, where a species will always attempt to engulf their own kind. Tendency would be percentage based, x/400*100, where x is the behavior amount on the Cannibalism slider. Though nothing has survived with Cannibalism yet in that FG, Cannibalism would enable a cell to engulf another cell of its own species only if the Predator cell in question surpasses the engulfment threshold (1.5x for Prokaryotes, 2x for Eukaryotes) for the Prey cell. Since cells get larger as their organelles reproduce via Passive Reproduction, Cannibalism can only take place at a certain point in their life cycle. This behavior would change along with all other behaviors at random when the AI mutates.

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How do we deal with sister cells killing eachother?

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Sensory organs are a discussion in themselves, but I’m hesitant in making that too much of a “paint” tool due to how messy it can be, as well as how we can realistically attach differences in gameplay that are accessible. I can easily imagine however specifically altering an appendage so that it is primarily one dedicated towards senses, therefore making its surface-area/mass/whatever constraint effect your sense.

Something I just realized from this post and aah’s post below is that, well, you won’t be able to eat your sister cell or vice versa because size would be too similar to engulf or be engulfed. Unless you’re a grown cell with duplicated parts eating a young cell, which is an interesting dynamic.

In general though, I’m wary of having cannibalism be its own slider because it kind of implies that it is absolutely something that is constantly present, which isn’t really true. Perhaps having it be a button toggle and having aggression correspond with how likely it is to be attacked by your own, but beyond that, I’m not sure what having a slider would imply.

Your concept does seem like a solid option however if we wish to temper cannibalism in Thrive.

Unless your organism is 100% aggressive, that hopefully shouldn’t be immediate violence. If your organism is very aggressive, well, free food early on or death. Trial by fire in a way.

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Also I presume in later stages cannibalism will lead to prion diseases spreading fast amongst a species, right?

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I am fairly certain that most cannibalism in the animal kingdom involves adults eating young, sometimes those of another parent to reduce competition, and sometimes eating some of there own to increase the chance that other of their young will do well (because in the long run 1 or 2 doing excellent is better than several doing very poorly), so a grown cell eating a young cell sounds like it matches what happens on Earth in what Thrive would call the Aware Stage. Though, I have no idea how Earth microscopic cannibalism works. And Awake and beyond have very different reasons all together when it comes to cannibalism.

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How would cannibalism influence inter-civ-species relations in space stage?

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Would a Cannibalism Civ trust another Cannibalism Civ more than a non-Cannibalism civ?

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That depends on the reasoning type of that civ.

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Would some reasoning types be more prevalent for Cannibalism civs due to their diet and potential negative consequences of their diet?

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Perhaps they’d be more willing to sacrifice members of their ilk?

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Like the Amaurotines from Final Fantasy 14?

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