Comments on Specific Development Forum Posts

Meta
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On the recent dev posts in Handling Scale, while I understand the jump from 500 Micrometers to 1 Centimeter from a design perspective, I have to ask…
What about insects?
Some insects get bigger than a centimeter, sure, but most are less, and universally have features on the millimeter scale. Insects and other small organisms are pretty important in an evolution game.
And for the sake of the editor I think being able to edit at a scale of a millimeter if you are at 1CM makes sense.

I do agree that a few of the multicellular organism should still be visible if you’re below a specific size, but it’s probably not to big an issue to use a ‘generic’ model of multicell organisms;
and you are going to encounter the same issue where you will have to cull ants or something because the is player 100x bigger anyways, so I don’t see the issue if the multicellular organism show up if you’re really small.
I also don’t think anyone would fault you for having all single-cells disappear into clouds macroscopic, because even at 1mm a gigantic microbe is still 10x smaller, and players would likely have to go bigger than 1mm immediately anyways.

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83

Am I the one who started to fear a bit that the stages to come might end up being “rushed” somewhat since their completion dates now seem just as important as their actual contents?

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84

From a realistic perspective, 10 μm is still too large for LUCA and Prokaryotes.

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85

I don’t think we’ll end up with the desired “smooth” transistion from multicellular to macroscopic…

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86

I think half the reason stage 2 was split was to increase the time frame to work on it. Even a few of the devs seem worried about it.

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87

I do worry about a less well-rounded Microbe Stage considering our blistering pace of development. But I do think the features mentioned on the road map are basically the fundamental mechanics behind the Microbe Stage, and so balancing them in a concise way will result in a replayable game. Balancing is also something that could happen in any update, so there will be refinements in that regard to the Microbe Stage beyond the completion of the road map as we notice things which can be improved by tweaking some numbers.

Regarding size and bugs: that is a tough issue, yes. Having very small organisms on land could be an even tougher hurdle than having them in water. I’ll bring this up on the forums.

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88

I wonder how would mosquito-like creatures be simulated when you’re, lets say, playing as a sauropod-sized creature.

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89

I like the idea of having Nitrogenase (and Nitroplasts) and Hydrogenase work inversely with oxygen. Perhaps if combined with Experimental Features, an unintentional Low Oxygen World Scenario could created.

I also like the idea of implementing the use of Mucocyst for adapting to inhospitable conditions. It makes sense since Auto-Evo is already being “fixed” to evolve Slime Jets. I wonder if the Mucocyst should use less mucus when an organism enters “relative inhospitable conditions” to better last those conditions, or even hint the Player to “hibernate”.

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90

It still can only last so long before the cells need to leave their mucus blankets in these unfamiliar patches…

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91

On Flora generation Constraints, I think it would make sense to render flora/grass as 3d objects with physics, if you are playing at a smaller scale (insect size, centimeters to a few decimeters, the gameplay should be similar to the gameplay of Drunk on Nectar).
Basically the complexity of the flora should be dependent on the size of the player characters.

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92

Exactly. No need to render it in as complex way when you’re a megafaunal species.

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93

What about any foliage your player is within limb’s reach of is fully physics simulated, and any foliage larger than half the size of your creature is rendered as a 3d model. You can actually get full like wind simulation from billboards. Billboarding trees and such is a LOD problem, but billboarding leaves or grass is just a requirement.

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94

We’d need to make sure that there aren’t any strange things going on with the physics engine if the players interact with too many physics objects at the same time (so perhaps there should too be a cap to the amount of foliage which can be simulated at a time).

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95

I am sure speed runners will find some strange interaction that is useful.

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96

Not sure if being launched into the space or slammed into the ground will be of much use to anyone…

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97

At the very least, it will be entertaining to watch!

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98

Assuming the physics simulation doesn’t just kill your critter on the very 1st frame of the launch…

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99

Backwards long jumps are one of the most famous speedrunning tricks of all time, so getting launched up is worth it. In a genetic algorithm study, I don’t have a link but I could find one, they tried to evolve simulated bodyplans that could move the fastest, and the dominant strategy was to slam oneself into the ground, because the physics engine responded to objects clipping inside one another by creating a force to push them out, and unless the force was calibrated to perfectly match the incoming motion in direction, that was a source of free energy. So, yk, maybe we need to worry about auto-evo doing this too. Though, imo, so long as auto-evob basically never finds cracked techniques and it’s pretty hard for casuals to stumble upon them, speedrunners noclipping has no downsides, and fixing obscure bugs shouldn’t be a priority.

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100

Also, I wonder if speedrunners would end up running into the problem of the surface not having any flora to sustain their critters…

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101

Manipulating the ecosystem to prevent their unhinged maximum efficiency creature from crashing all sustainability will likely be part of routing.

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