That is of course the biggest issue and if it happens too early or too late in a species technological development and isn’t strong enough it would have little to no impact on them. However I did just make an edit on my dev forum post about the loading screen idea about a way to make ascension unconnected from a fallen empire. Perhaps we could apply the same reasoning there to why a number of species become space faring at the same time
Maybe, if no other solution was found, we could say that there was a galaxy-wide empire that ascended just before the player species became industrial?
I recall Hyyrylanien saying he wanted the player’s species to be the first ones to pull off ascension when I had first brought up the idea of a fallen empire a year or two ago
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Right. That also feeds into the idea that letting an another species ascend would be a gameover condition.
From the top portion of the post:
I would think that fallen empires would only exist with certain universe generation settings at initial configuration, or would be under non-LAWK option, and thus couldn’t be relied upon for all universes generated.
Has any of these ideas settings been expanded upon for possible further development?
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Maybe there could be some ancient ruins of space civs which failed at lasting, but the question would arise why did they fall?
There’s another benefit to having the macroscopic editor be to some degree a parts-based system:
Thrive’s microbe and multicellular editors are already parts-based systems.
I imagine that has benefits for auto-evo implementation, among other things (you can use a lot of similar solutions). But such a consistent design principle also makes it easier to understand for players.
In general I think it would make the game feel as a more unified whole. You can already feel this in the microbe → multicellular transition. When you go from editing a cell made up of parts to editing an organisms made up of those cells, it feels quite natural.
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And hopefully it will feel just as natural when going from colonies to tissues in larger organisms…
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a way it could specifically be better than spore or a similar systems if making parts segmented and allowing segments to be added or removed or edited.
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From a section of my latest post on that thread:
I think that most of the parts would be Hybrid Parametric Parts, and only a few would be completely Pre-Made if they are really complex, like eyes. We would try to keep these to a minimum, but even then I think that we could have a lot of useful variants and customization for these that they wouldn’t feel lacking in the same way that Spore’s parts did.
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I just hope our vision for an alternative to spore won’t end up degrading to it’s level…
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I am very interested to know how the community perceives these ideas, we certainly don’t want to make it seem like we are giving up on Thrive’s vision to settle for a Spore-level or just an increment on what Spore did.
I can see this procedural generated parametric parts system being incredibly powerful, and a massive leap above what Spore did. I think it would fit the vision of what Thrive wants for its 3D Creatures: complex and detailed customization, while at the same time trying to make an intuitive and enjoyable UI for building them. But this is what I see as being a good choice for Thrive; the difficulty here is that everyone sees a slightly (or very) different vision for what Thrive will be, and whatever we choose could disappoint some section of the community. Striking the right balance there will be difficult I am sure, I can imagine some people wanting to place each individual hair on their organism while others wouldn’t want anything more difficult to deal with than a hair:yes/no toggle.
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This looks incredibly interesting.
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And incredibly hard to properly code in to hurt the least…
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While certain to be a very difficult, this is one of those areas of the game that is an interesting challenge to tackle from the development side. The World Generator is a very difficult system as well due to how high performance it needs to be while generating very complex worlds, yet I am certainly enjoying working on it. I would expect the phase of development of the 3D organism system to be an exciting one for the developers too, and not ‘a slog that we just have to push through’ or something like that.
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By the way, as 1.0.0 is supposed to have multicellular become a part of the non-prototype game, will the same be for 2.0.0 and macroscopic?
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Due to how fast we expect 2.0.0 to go, I doubt it. Unlike how Microbe stage development also made progress for Multicellular, making progress on Multicellular will not have progress transfer to Macroscopic at the same time. And marking Macroscopic as non-prototype will require it to be in a far more playable state than even a functioning 3D editor would be, it would need good gameplay as well.
It seems like Thrive can be split into three different groupings: Microscopic Biological Evolution (Microbe, Multicellular); Macroscopic Biological Evolution (Macroscopic, Aware, Awakening); and Society Evolution (Society, Industrial, Space).
It seems like most of the work for each stage grouping is common to all stages in that grouping. So, for Microscopic Biological Evolution it will not take much time (relatively) to finish Multicellular now that Microbe is almost done. It seems like that will be the same for the other two groupings as well.
(Awakening is kind of different in it being more transitional from Biological Evolution to Societal Evolution, so it doesn’t quite fit perfectly into this grouping. Work on Society stage is what will make up the basis of the rest of the Societal Evolution Stages)
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I can guess awakening will still be mostly in the macroscopic evolution but will do introduce things from Society Evolution as time goes on for the player.
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If you want to know what awakening stage evolution would be like, play Ancestors: Humankind odyssey.
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You are right, Awakening has far more in common with the Macroscopic Biological Evolution stages in terms of how it works, not sure why I put it in Societal Evolution before.
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