Would multiplying the initial Day/Night cycle in Microbe and Multicellular by 10 be a good amount? So in-game days for 3D stages can vary from 10 minutes (600 seconds) to 50 minutes (3000 seconds).
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I think 50 minutes for a singular day is too extreme, the 10 minutes seems closer to what the developers would choose.
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Would a 5x multiplier be better then, so 3D stage days vary from 5 minutes (300 seconds) to 25 minutes (1500 seconds)?
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I suppose that could be more reasonable, though the gameplay loop is yet to have been figured out, only from which the proper guesses on the day cycle length could be taken.
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I think 5-25 minutes a day, times 4 if one a season, being 20 minutes to 2 hours per round (default in the middle with 1 hour) sounds reasonable to me.
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I suppose we’ll figure it out eventually.
Speaking of time, if your creature molts like an arthropod, the how fast should a molt last for the player so that their gameplay isn’t too dominated by molting?
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On that note, how long should it take for a Eusocial creature to build a hive? Or a bird to build a nest? A beaver to build a dam? A spider to weave a web?
Maybe there could be a feature where, after you gather a few resources, you pause the game to design it, and it just builds it all at once?
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I suppose it should fit within one gameplay cycle…
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I had just brought up this topic on the Development forums actually: 3D Day/Night Cycle Length - Gameplay - Thrive Development Forum
My main concern that I brought up there is that in the 3D stages, having a short day-night cycle can cause significant visual issues with the entire sky rotating too fast. The absolute fastest day-night cycle I could find for a game with a similar 3D camera view as ours is 16 minutes, not a lot slower than Minecraft’s 20 minutes. Perhaps we would want that effect for planets that rotate quickly, but for typical Earth-like planet days we want to have the day-night cycle as slow as possible, or at least appear that way. One of the suggestions I came up with is instead of playing through entire days, you play segments of the day in a sequence, which would allow the in-game planetary rotation rate to be more realistic as well as being able to skip to different important segments like day-dusk-night-dawn and then repeat the segments in different seasons.
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So you’d play those segments in one round? How would the game know when to go to the next?
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Believe it or not: wood-y.
To me, whether one species is able to be eaten by another is a separate question from the classification of the biome. Eucalyptus trees are quite a bit more resistant to herbivores than other tree species, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Eucalyptus forest is a forest.
As for how stony plants could still feed an ecosystem: meet corallivores. Of course, coral is actually a fairly small percentage of living (animal) polyps in a big stony skeleton they build up around them. A hypothetical multicellular organism with stony cell walls would probably have a much higher percentage of living cells compared to stone mass.
I am not sure whether the actual stem hardness is worth looking at compared to just looking at the size and shape of the organism? We only need biomes for broad categorisation of areas, they’re not supposed to affect the relationship between species. But in order to grow truly tall in the first place, sessile organism probably need some toughness? I suppose if we’re talking about just short plants, being tough or flexible is a significant factor in how the ecosystem operates, so you might be right there.
And looking at what you mentioned, I suppose it is worth saying that obviously our cellulose-walled plants can be both herbaceous and wood-y (if they use a lot of lignin). But a macroscopic organism using one of the stony cell walls would probably not be able to be truly “herbaceous”, stone is not flexible. They would simply be either fragile or tough, but brittle either way.
It’s a good question, and it might not actually be necessary to define. It could be that “grassland” can be any field of relatively low (herbaceous) plants. Then we just take the position that as long as “trees” exist, they probably occupy the places that could be “grassland”, unless there is a combination of favourable conditions and the right type of small herbaceous plant that can displace forests in those conditions. (As far as I can tell, for real life grasses this is because they are extremely resistant to grazing)
Did you see in our discussion any particular need to define algae?
To add onto what HyperbolicHadron said, my own suggestion in that thread was that at minimum we can skip through the time you’re asleep (with possible “you’re attacked in your sleep!” random events). That can easily cut playtime in half while keeping a longer day/night cycle for a more natural look. It’s basically a less extreme version of the “day segments” idea.
Also I am going to say that 2 hours is definitely too long. 1 hour is pushing it. Thrive is supposed to have ”control a creature” and editor gameplay. Spending too long without entering the editor will probably feel bad, and the longer the time, the more you need to be able to change in the editor per session (which is something we want to place some limits on) to get anywhere in a reasonable time. Of course voluntarily staying in one generation for longer is a different question, and I think that should be allowed.
So, if we want to show seasonality, I think we should first go for the shortest day cycle we can get away with (~20 minutes?), skipping about half of it as sleep time (~10 minutes?), with four days, one per season (~40 minutes?). And then see if that 40 minute play time feels good. Extending it more would be easy, shortening it more would require sacrificing something. If we do not show seasonality, there’s more flexibility obviously.
For something like molting (if we have it at all), it would probably have to be pretty fast. I don’t see any reason to artificially add non-active time to gameplay.
You’re right that it should absolutely fit within one gameplay cycle.
Something like building a web or burrowing could I think be accelerated enough that we can easily fit it into the day-to-day gameplay. Making a big nest is also feasible when many individuals are digging it like in eusocial species.
Extremely large long-term projects like beaver dams might be difficult, if we can have them at all. But maybe you can make some progress on them during a day, and they get finished in-between days? Could do the same for things like full metamorphosis (again, if we have that at all).
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Maybe you would spend not one but 2-3 days on such a dam instead?
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On Earth, pretty much all single microbe plants (hereafter reffered to as Microalgae) are “algae”, as are Seaweed/Kelp (Macroalgae). Interestingly, there are terrestrial Microalgae, but no terrestrial Macroalgae (at least on Earth). This begs the question: Is it possible for Macroalgae to be Terrestrial on some alien world, and, if so, what would differentiate Terrestrial Macroalgae from Bryophytes (Mosses, Liverworts, and Hornworts)? I think answering that will be enough for classifying the relative biomes (example: a Kelp Forest vs a Barrens filled with Moss).
And that’s half the issue. There are plenty of easier to eat herbaceous plants, so in a world where grass had evolved and the specific adaptations modern animals evolved to eat it had not yet appeared, that would really effect that ecosystem.
Eucalyptus are “wood-y”, officially. Consider the following:
A few species of Herbaceous Grasses can reach 3 meters tall. I think 1 can reach 4. Those are not trees.
Most Banana plants grow to around 2 meters tall, but some can reach over 9 meters. And the whole “forest” can easily be uprooted by a decent wind due to their soft, herbaceous nature. Because they grow fast, that is not a huge issue, but most “forests” are more stable than that. I have seen a 60 lb Poodle uproot a 2 meter Banana plant for fun (roots and all).
A number of plants have Wood-y roots but Herbaceous stems (Subshrubs), Often, the plant withers to the ground and becomes a stump every autumn, sprouting anew in the spring (I am not sure how tall these get).
Trees have stems (trunks) and branches that usually survive winter. They can be climbed, and a nest built in one will usually not need to be rebuilt from scratch yearly or more. I personally think there should be another name/subtype for “forests” that so quickly get torn down and regrow, as opposed to the sturdy and longer lasting trees that animals actually live in/on.
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Should there be transitionary zones between some biomes where the values for those biomes would be inbetween? Like the edgezone of a forest?
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3 terrestrial zones come to mind. A Woodland is mixed Shrubland/Forest. A Savannah is mixed (Grassland/Herbland) / (Shubland/Woodland/Forest). A Mediterranean climate can support a patchwork of Forest, Woodland, Shrubland, Savannah, and Grassland/Herbland.
Wetlands are more complicated.
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Maybe the “medi climate biome” should just be divided into multiple at this point?
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I think it’s should be it’s own. In my suggested alterations to the Holdridge system, there are 13 hexes that should, in a modern climate, usually produce a “Forest” (if you exclude Rainforest (3 hexes) but include Taiga (Boreal Forest) (also 3 hexes)) and 6 hexes that should usually produce a “Scrub/Grassland”, and there is only 3 hexes that can make either and/or a patchwork.
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Is is possible to split those hexes down to even smaller units?
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Sort of, but:
- I am not sure that would fix the “problem”
- We are trying to “simplify” things
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So we would have the medi biome get randomized for whatever type of medi bio-scape it gets?
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