How does the development work? (evolutionary and otherwise)

Meta
1

Sorry for the generic title. I’m having trouble finding resources for my questions.
Until I know where to look it up and how to navigate this forum properly I’d like to beg for forgiveness and have this thread.

In the distant past I preferred to keep the OP updated so ppl new to the thread don’t have to read the entire conversation to understand what’s going on or what the present situation is. Is that allowed/desirable here?
(edit: yes.)

Atm I am trying to understand the general development, direction, methods and ideas in order not to waste time thinking about meaningless stuff. HyperbolicHadron(edit: sorry, got the wrong person at first) was kind enough to send me a link to the Design Ideals & Maxims and it’s a pleasure to read. Navigating that part of the forums is giving me some trouble though rn.

Anyhow…

I have made a little thing to guide my understanding and I’d like to ask for a quick look whether I’m completely off the rails. This is the highest level I can think of atm. (edit: not complete but not too far off)

First_throw
First_throw1443×180 16.9 KB

Is energy being taken into consideration for more complex lifeforms? (edit: yes.)

Going into further questions.

I will update my diagram for visualization but that may take until well after work. For now: text…
Have you considered break-off points at the evolutionary stages?
Context: you’ve thriven in your niche and Auto-Evo determines that you are evolutionary stable (like jellyfish or flatworms). Would you consider a pop-up congratulating on the achievement and asking whether you’d like to continue or re-do the stage in a different direction or other choices?
Also plays into having a “proper” ending for each stage while developing which I’d consider a benefit to be just left in the game. edit:needs more info by me, link when it’s available

Is this programmed in a modular fashion with interfaces between modules? (not asking whether it’s OOP or not and It’s not meant in OOP-interpretation. :sweat_smile:)
More context: It looks like it is, just by all the different biomes and the niche map. But is it in code? I have a couple of thoughts regarding the Planet one’s on and an non-modular structure would probably make them too costly to implement.
edit:yes.

1 Like
2

In order to become multicellular, you not only need a nucleus but a binding agent too. Macroscopic is entirely tied to getting enough size as a colony in multicellular, aware is unlocked by evolving a proper CNS, awakening is entered by becoming sapient / “civ-capable”. Also do note that descension is a thing, taking you from the end to the beginning.

2 Likes
3

You can add updates to your post, just mark them with update: so people know what was original content and what’s new.

I think it is mostly correct.

The source of truth for the stage transitions are the primary wiki pages for each stage. For example here’s the society stage page:

From which we can read the starting point:

The Society Stage begins when your first Society Center (settlement) is built. Collective Residence enables the forming of Society Centers. The Society Center building acts as the central hub for a settlement, which is a group of buildings that behave as a collective and get a procedurally generated name.

This is the core problem that sentient plant fans don’t want to accept.

I personally hope our simulation of metabolism is good enough that it naturally prevents sentient plants.

2 Likes
4

I think to truly prevent sentient plants autoevo would need to be capable of actually extincting the player for making an organism too unfit. Otherwise a player could just be able to develop a rather high-energy-demanding organ on a plant whilst using the small population boost from moving on to the next cycle to avoid going extinct from “unfitness” of what they designed.

5

actually, if you find a workaround for the problems of oxygen poisoning them and humans probably not being able to use their short term energy storage compounds, and make sure they get cooled quickly enough, green sulfur bacteria would let you power up to 13 whole humans and have energy to spare with 1m^2! since they’re 95% efficient with their photosynthesis in optimal conditions! however, they probably can’t survive in full sunlight, so they’d likely have to be in the subdermis to not get fried[1], and even then that’s hundreds to thousands of times more energy than they normally receive, since they live in the anoxic parts of ponds and lakes and around hydrothermical vents![2]

they get efficiencies that good by using chlorosomes and living in conditions where each chlorophyll molecule only sees a few photons a day!

and even with plant chloroplasts, you only need 7-15 square meters of surface area (assuming 100W needed)in the light earth receives from the sun, which is quite reasonable for a species of giant butterflies, which likely wouldn’t be warm-blooded and would probably have much less energy cost for its body than a human, even if it had the same brain size and body mass as that human, so realistically it’d be less, or they’d have some crazy energy storage, or nitrogen fixing bacteria in an organ for fixing nitrogen with the bacteria

AND, on top of that, adding chlorosomes as a thing you can evolve by getting forced to the bottoms of lakes and into the areas around hydrothermal venrs, you’d incentivize the player to risk staying anaerobic when the GOE happens, so they can get that Sweet, High efficiency photosynthesis, if they want to be a sentient plant!

Without lugging around Gigantic wings, that is

anyways, that means that, unless there’s another problem, sentient plants will just be a challenge to get to, if chlorosomes are implemented, since you’d have to survive the GOE without adapting to oxygen, as an anaerobic photosynthesizer, and then become multicellular, and then figure out how to survive in an oxygen rich atmosphere without letting yourself get above a 10th of a percent of oxygen, and then evolve into a sentient plant. but it’s not impossible without living on an island devoid of predators

  1. though that’s only with modern, irl chlorobia, since chlorosomes aren’t inherently weak to light, but the pigments would need to change, or at least have there be different ones specialized for different light(possibly even having multiple layers of chlorosome filled membrane?), to survive bright white light ↩︎

  2. 0mg Smeltal the Meltal with the HydroThermical Ventical Algae??? ↩︎

2 Likes
6

I have a feeling this argument is not enough to justify the (unconfirmed) viability of SPs to the devforce.
Btw, you said chlorosomes are so efficient due to each chlorophyll only getting a few photons a day. Wouldn’t the efficiency decrease then in brighter light?

1 Like
7

they’re so efficient because they need to be, because each chlorophyll only gets a few photons a day. not directly because each chlorophyll only gets a few photons a day. however, oxygen does make them less efficient, tanking their efficiency to 43% under even 1% oxygen

if they weren’t as efficient as they are, green sulfur bacteria and all their descendants likely wouldn’t exist

8

And how would they avoid oxygen in an atmosphere oxygenic enough to allow fire and mettalurgy?

9

have skin you can’t breathe through and don’t have respiratory organs since you can just cycle co2 inside your body
but then there’s still the problem of how they’d drink water without dying
which could be solved with going into anoxic waters, but it’d require they not go too far away from them

however
they could have facultative aerobes that they feed sugars specifically to use up all the oxygen in any water they drink, but they’d still need to not be able to extract anything from the water until it’s anoxic

another option would be to have proteins with A LOT of heme iron, that bind Very strongly to oxygen so it can be turned into CO, and then used by Carbon monoxide dehydrogenase, in a plastid specifically for that, if either of those are added
and if they’re not, then feed the oxygen to bacteria in an organ for burning oxygen, so you can rid yourself of oxygen quicker

or just make your bladder put any oxygen in your body into itself through some pores or kidneys, but that also means you can’t extract water from your bladder to adapt to drier climates

10

Do you think most players would go through the effort to get such a sentient plant?

11

First of all: How do you make these […] speech bubble things? They’re awesome but not available by button.

Second: more questions popped up. I updated OP with these:
I will update my diagram for visualization but that may take until well after work. For now: text…
Have you considered break-off points at the evolutionary stages?
Context: you’ve thriven in your niche and Auto-Evo determines that you are evolutionary stable (like jellyfish or flatworms). Would you consider a pop-up congratulating on the achievement and asking whether you’d like to continue or re-do the stage in a different direction or other choices?
Also plays into having a “proper” ending for each stage while developing which I’d consider a benefit to be just left in the game.

Is this programmed in a modular fashion with interfaces between modules? (not asking whether it’s OOP or not and It’s not meant in OOP-interpretation. :sweat_smile:)
More context: It looks like it is, just by all the different biomes and the niche map. But is it in code? I have a couple of thoughts regarding the Planet one’s on and an non-modular structure would probably make them too costly to implement

Consider a Nitrogen-Methane-CO2 atmosphere. Have minerals that release oxygen upon heating and boom: fire
Metallurgy would also be possible by just making oxygen through electrolysis, storing it in bottles like we do and then oxygen is your fuel.
With enough time I think I could make that work (reasonable or not).

1 Like
12

The conditions can deviate due to slow environmental changes or rapid events. So there wouldn’t be a case where the player finds themselves in an “eternal niche”.

13

We still have jellyfish and flatworms. It appears that my phrasing was bad. I’ll fix that. But need to go to work rn.

1 Like
14

There have been some notabky different offshots in their lineages. Those could be what player ends up as if they evolve in a niche so stable.

15

This sounds like the saving system already in the game, but with extra steps.

I’m not sure what exactly you are asking. If you are asking whether there are exactly defined data models that are not allowed to change that transfer data between the stages, the answer is no. That’s because it would be a ton of extra effort to do that, and we’d need to update the data models anyway as more features are added. So it is just easier if later stages just use the same classes as other stages. For example we have a base class called Species and then derived classes like MicrobeSpecies and MulticellularSpecies to add stage-specific information to a species based on which stage is in. The plan is that even microbes still are simulated even in the society stage so that for example diseases could be done leveraging the earlier microbe simulation. So the plan for Thrive is that the stages are all linked together. This is why I think it is pretty silly when someone suggests that we should make the stages as separate games, or try to work on multiple stages at once (which will have issues due to earlier stages changing and impacting the later ones).

3 Likes
16

Good point. Too specific a question without context. I’ll work out my idea more thoroughly and present it in the appropriate topic.

OK, the latter is what I meant. I’m long out of the accurate OOP terminology for this sort of thing. My apologies. The interface I meant would facilitate the information transfer between stages. So yes, exactly as it is. May I assume that it is the same for the environments?

This sort of caught me off-guard. Was about to write stuff that wastes everybody’s time… I will have to read up on this on the wiki.

17

Though some smaller additions will still be getting added to the “complete” stages.

1 Like
18

I’m still not 100% clear on what you are talking about, but we are making Thrive as a single codebase. Not trying to modularize everything to fit neatly into stages. There’s no environmental data for the later stages, but my plan is to just basically put that info into the GameWorld class that is already used by the microbe stage. So again there won’t be a clear interface between the stages, they’ll all just use whatever other code in the project that is required.

The wiki might not even have this info (or at least explicitly), because the wiki doesn’t get a ton of updates as new stuff is discussed. For the later stuff you’ll basically have to read the dev forums at: https://forum.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/ and talk to us devs (as some ideas just float around in random discussion threads or even on Discord). I know that isn’t optimal but as long as we don’t have an enthusiastic team member for documenting all finished discussions on the wiki, the wiki will stay outdated.

2 Likes
19

We’ll need a “wiki-keeper” eventually, assuming the project doesn’t die out.

1 Like
20 
^[text]

you can also put images and links in them

3 Likes