Inspired by the discussion on discord let’s talk about how other planets could be populated with life.
So in the space stage we’ll want the player to be able to explore a lot of different planets. In order to have cool, different, life on the planets there needs to be some way for the planets to be populated without resorting to some random generation or placing random community made species on the planets. And as we aren’t planning on making Thrive only run on super computers we cannot simulate the full evolution on a ton of planets.
So what I propose is that we’ll make a separate program for running thrive simulations that can be then saved. These simulations could then be loaded as entire planets in the space stage for the player to enjoy. The major downside is that we’ll need to be vary of taking up too much diskspace, but at the same time avoiding having too few generated options.
I actually have put a video on science for Planet generation (which is episode 1) but you will have to scroll up for a few seconds (probably) anyways I hope this helps but I don’t know about the life filled planets and that a separate program for running thrive simulations that can be then saved and that the simulations could then be loaded as entire planets in the space stage for the player to enjoy but over all I love the idea for the separate program for life on planets on Thrive
One faking trick from DnD is to have a stack and then pull off the top of it whatever happens. So you say “you are at a fork in the road, do you go North or South?” and then whatever they say they then meet a troll bandit on the road, doesn’t matter which way they went. Obviously the larger features of the world need to be consistently places but these little interactions can happen anywhere.
Maybe a similar thing might work that the game could generate the next 2 planets for you to discover and then when you discover a new system it pulls the top one off the stack, places it in that system and then starts generating a new one. As the player it would still be random which planets were in which systems and you wouldn’t know that if you had 3 choices to explore it would give you the same thing whichever you chose.
That way a background thread could always be working on the next planet / system to be discovered. Not sure if that would work or be reasonable.
I suppose that would work if the player would go to the next planet after 5-10 minutes. Of course if we made a much simpler algorithm for it it would be much faster, but again that’s maybe twice the effort compared to reusing whatever happens on the players planet. And I’d imagine that that algorithm could be as slow as maybe 30 minutes per planet. So, really, in that case the planets just have to be pregenerated. But we could enlist the help of the community to run thrive simulations on their computers.
If we had to wait so long to go to another planet, how the player will be engaged and not just close the game. That’s why I uninstall most of mobile games.
One thing is by the time you’re in the space stage discovering planets it’s not so much like you fly there in an individual ship. It’s more like you order a fleet into that area and it reports back on what it’s found, you’ll be running your space empire. There could for example be multiple levels of scanning needed, so if you just fly to the system you get a general outline of what the planet is like. Maybe you can only see what microbes are there if you perform a detailed scientific survey.