Render distance might have to be a ratio instead of an absolute distance. 2ft render distance is quite different experience for an ant vs. for a Giraffe. If the organism is defined as 1 Unit radius, then a 200 unit render distance would be 200m for a 1m organism, and 200cm for a 1cm organism.
We would also want to avoid a situation where the player can cheese the system by unloading other organisms strategically. For complex movable plants it might be acceptable to make them static after a certain distance instead of completely unloading them with harsh pop in/out. Would need a different system for the fauna, though that’s not really my focus.
6 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
123
Plants and stuff are generally stationary most of the time, so this is indeed a good solution to just have them freeze when too far away.
As Hyperbolic mentions above, this is more a rough concept in reference to the way the underlying simulation will treat different types of plants rather than the actual presence of motile/non-motile plants. We need to set up some sort of baseline understanding of what exactly is treated as a stationary item - i.e. something that is placed down as a part of scenery/the environment. Moving plants would be better treated as other “CPUs” similar to more traditionally motile animals rather than spawned in as assets.
4 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
125
I guess it won’t be too hard to differenciate CPUs from the stationaries…
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
126
We hope, issue is if we need to simulate enough smaller layers for the blue whale to eat krill and the rhino to have birds to eat it’s parasites, it might be more expensive to render some scales than others, and you really don’t want players to notice severe slowdowns as they go to certain sizes. The ration system seems sane and good, but you might not want it to go up indefinitely/give the player the ability to change the render distance directly.
I mean sure I could come up with a heuristic, the issue isn’t making a way to differentiate the two, it’s making a really good one that makes as much as possible static geometry. I would totally see a system simulating the roots of a venus-flytrap-like entity as limbs when that’s TOTALLY useless and roots are often fractal-like in detail, and it wastes tons of time animating them doing nothing with cpu time (I am aware this example is contrived, venus flytraps have pretty simple roots all things considered, but this is thrive, anything is possible). We could speed things up by giving static geometry the ability to change into a CPU so all the venus flytrap does every frame is consider if something meets the criteria to be eaten, and that doesn’t even involve the CPU and GPU communicating, it’s a relatively quick check that only amounts to something if the plant is going to gobble something up, and I think no one here is expecting Thrive to perform well if the entire field of grass is making intelligent movements, that’s impossible.
1 Like
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
127
Right, they’d have a small chance to temporarily switch from stationary to CPU for a moment or two…
So what has been done to make the Hydrogenosome more balanced, as I seem to recall that proper balancing was a potential issue with implementing the Eukaryotic version of the Hydrogenase.
Also, I look foward to seeing how the Hydrogenosome will be affected by current and future tolerances, as well as changes to the atmosphere over time.
4 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
129
I wonder if the hydrogenosome will be a mitochondrion variant or it’s own unique thing…
There is no issue, there is no roadmap item, just some people who have said they would want it. Getting the ferroplast even took like 3 years, and someone who really wanted to see it finally be made, and making it mostly themselves.
5 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
133
And once we exit microbe development it can be expected little to no new features will be introduced to the complete stage, especially complex organelles.
1 Like
tabat
(hhyyrylainen cultist. Waiting for ping from someone.)
134
@Juuzo_Lenz214
I’m not quite sure what the idea is, could you explain in more detail?
The idea is to have a number of loading screens that through just the images tell a story that the players can piece together. It could be seen as a story of a fellow race going through the same thing the player’s species is going through. Even if it only applied to just non-society stages, it would create a world that players would be watching alongside their own world and species.
In the end though, this is just a way I am hoping to do something while waiting to do theory related work.
7 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
136
Could Romp (the forgotten second properly named concept art creature) perhaps make a cameo as a Taur equivalent that ends up going extinct in society stage but it’s legacy continues to persist even into the space stage?
First: Whenever someone is working on a game (or other media) project, that they want to get at least mostly accurate, I strongly recommend first just looking on Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia-level concepts are the closest you can get to (sometimes beyond) the level of complexity that you can expect a non-expert to come to understand in a reasonable timeframe, while still (usually) being accurate. And what do we find there today? The pages on Cultural and Sociocultural evolution. You’ve got entire fields of study that have already done the work for you in attempting to determine and categorise how societies and the world function. Just the same as Thrive Cell Stage has the fields of microbiology, bio-chemistry and ecology to draw from. They’ve got theories, named categories with sub-options, etc. Ready to be chopped up and used to inspire or flavour your game-design.
So, I can definitely see drawing see Thrive’s “societal” stages drawing from evolutionary perspectives being a very smart idea:
Using aspects of earlier stages makes design easier (and I’m guessing implementation, but only hhyyrylainen knows.)
It makes the stage far easier for players to understand, because you’re using concepts and UI styles they’ve already learned.
You’re distinguishing Thrive from “every other strategy game out there” (especially the likes of Civilization-ish 4Xs) by doing something (almost) none of them have done).
As you can tell from Wikipedia, professional scientists have already drawn the same parallels (between evolution of countries/cultures and biological evolution) that you have, so it has backing.
So I could definitely see things like social values sliders paralleling things like the membrane sliders or specific cultural traits paralleling something like organelles (without the shape aspect obviously). You could also easily see cultures breaking off and evolving in different ways. “Technologies” in the end are also just a trait of knowledge and habit picked up by a culture. One significant difference from earlier stages would be that cultural traits would have to pass between cultures much more than biological traits pass between organisms. For fun, take a look at the invention and spread of things like “agriculture” or “the state”.
I do have some things that concern me in this outline. You accurately spot the problems with 4X games, but then only supplement them with inspiration from 4X-like RTS games and factory games. RTS games also have some issues here:
With Thrive, you’re talking about gameplay on a global scale. RTS-games are typically very small scale designs that really don’t work when you scale them up. And they usually don’t try, most of the time they make it very clear that you are controlling a small portion of your “country’s” forces in each mission/skirmish. From your inspiration list, Rise of Nations for example fixes this by adding a whole turn-based layer on top for its “conquer the world” mode.
They are almost entirely warfare focused, and I don’t think that’s where you want Thrive to go.
More than that though, forgive me if I am wrong, I think you’re missing something here. When it comes to “game that feels like you are controlling a country”, 4X games were surpassed decades ago by a different genre: Grand strategy games. We’re talking here about things like “practically every game Paradox ever developed” and (charitably) “the part of Total War that’s not field battles”. Now don’t get me wrong, I do not recommend making an actual Paradox-style Gsg. For starters they are way too complex for what Thrive is trying to achieve. Also, you don’t want to just move abstract armies around, you want to see your species and possibly other creations!
Finally, I see a lot of higher-level concepts, and a lot of understandable wishes for free-form progression. I would recommend thinking about at what level of detail you come back to static, predesigned elements, like organelles in the cell stage. In the end, that’s how things will have to be actually implemented.
5 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
138
Strategy Stages are sure going to be a next-generation type of strategy “games”… Perhaps they will become THE inspiration for other strategy games in the future?
Also:
By the way, if you can’t remember Hhyyrylainen’s name you can first write in a ping to them (@ Hhyyrylainen) and then remove the sign at the beginning once you’ve selected who do you want to ping.