I think once the first photosynthesiser evolves 100 million years is enough to reach oxygen equilibrium. So a game “speed” option would only work by just forcing a specific AI evolution if it hasn’t happened quick enough.
Hello I am new here so I don’t know everything that has been discussed here.
But I like the reply by ThriveLover which mentions oxygen resistance and toxicity.
Although we often view oxygen as something that gives life and life can’t exist without it, it is also toxic. Basically every organism is filled with enzymes and other defenses against oxygen. For early cells, sudden increase in oxygen level would be a threat instead of just a new good energy source.
I think there could be some oxidative stress mechanism - like some specific oxidative stress value proportional to the envirnomental oxygen concentration (and maybe other molecules like hydrogen peroxide, I don’t know if there are plans to add new compounds), and inversely proportional to the size of the cell/colony. If it gets too high, it will damage (or somehow penalise) the cell. There would definitely be cell parts for denfese against oxidative stress - like catalase in the protein category and peroxisome in the organelle category.
Something like that could force the player and AI to evolve diverse mechanisms to survive the high amounts of oxygen - some could stay anaerobic and live in low oxygen areas, some would invest in molecular defenses, some mitochondria, and embrace their new oxygen overlords. Some would have to get bigger or make multiple cells closer together to reduce the impact of the oxygen. Multicellularism might have actually been a reaction to the oxygen produced by photosynthesis
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So after playing a game for a while, my game lagged hard as my cell was massive and one cell’s population is in the millions. I think a lot of this could be solved by simplifying the cell visuals. Just because a cell has 20 organelles does not mean it has to show all of them. Simply having 1 show if they have it and then showing a few of the most common as large organelles will work just fine. For those 1 offs (nucleus excluded), just make them small.
As for the massive amounts of entities, most games only mark their positions unless they are in view of the player so no models need to be rendered. Not sure if thrive does this but if it doesn’t, that will fix most performance issues.
Edit: Forgot to mention scaling storage size. I think a good way to fix the lag caused by this at larger sizes is to remove the big bubble and just add it into to left sidebar. To check progress, you just see how near it is to a line on the bar that tells you the amount required to split. Once all requirements are met, then the split button appears. I think the issue right now is that ammonia and phosphate go into the left bar but are then subtracted to go into the wheel causing a lot of extra background use that is unessasary.
According to my profiling, the actual rendering part doesn’t take any time at all (well at least not enough to measure). Physics simulation for all the cells and updating their scene tree position data seems to be the biggest time sinks. Both of those seem to be as big as all of our own C# code running in the game.
See my above point that the physics simulation and position updates seem to be what actually takes time.
The only thing we could do is freeze the physics entities entirely that are too far away from the player / remove them temporarily from the scene tree. This would have the major downside that the number of cell on cell interactions would be greatly reduced feeding less real gameplay data into the population numbers for species.
I doubt the GUI rendering is even less of a problem than the 3D graphics rendering in terms of performance.
It is nice to know that it is not my large cell. I only noticed it when it was about 100 parts big (especially when eating large groups of organelles) so thought it was related.
1: I have an let’s say you made this cool creature and you just gone extinct and there is no way of getting that design back well there should be a menu which shows your past crearture (also most likely will show all edits to)
2: mass extinctions
3: let’s you went extinct and you gone far into the game and you don’t want to restart there should be a way to play as a relitive of your species of course it won’t be all than you can just be anything let’s 30 evolution later the species what you split of form won’t be available
pretty sure ALL of that is planned
About patches and gas vacuoles…
Imagine that some patches were so close together that they would have some kind of map transition. That may allow the gas vacuoles to have some use in the game, since you can change the depth. Otherwise, it might allow the player to go two patches upward or downward as well as changing layer to avoid predator attacks (a bit like the flagellum but for the Y axis).
So i have a bunch of different ideas for thrive’s microbe stage. Here’s a list of them and some concept art.
- Lysosomes that give you additional compounds when engulfing other microbe or microbe parts
- Additional patches; some ideas I have include maybe lukewarm sea surfaces and the hadalpelagic zone
- Maybe the ability to customize planet names and which patches spawn in the planets?
The above image is a now updated image for lysosomes, featuring what they might look like in the editor itself (still rushed and poorly drawn).
While I do hope for these ideas to get implemented into the microbe stage, I understand if they don’t make it in. I also have other ideas I might add to this post.
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someone with mod powers please merge this.
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You’ll be happy to know that lysosomes are already in the works and function about like how you describe.
We’ll probably have planet customization too, but for now we’re just working on patch map generation.
New patches are a possibility, but they’ll probably remain tied more to terrain features and geography than things like temperature unless it has a big impact on how the environment works. (Such as how the arctic sea has alot of ice, thus constituting a unique patch type). For the most part, temperature will be independent from patch type.
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Perhaps temperature could have something to do with both the average temperature of the planet, and its range of temperatures, as well as the patch type.
for example, on a on average colder planet the arctic would be more cold then on a warmer planet.
Another example:
If X planet is on average 30 degrees celcius, then it would have on average warmer patches then Planet Y (20 degrees celcius), and for example in some cases a patch could have more exposure to sunlight, making a certain patch warmer on planet Y then planet X.
Maybe initially? I’d like to see us have actual climate modelling in the game eventually, though.
Hello! It’s me, and I’m back with more ideas! Didn’t feel like updating the original post, so just gonna list them here:
- Cilia (I’m aware they are being added, so here’s an idea for how they function) would add more speed to the cell, which might sound like just extra flagella, but this time, the water’s contents move across the cell, resulting in more being absorbed. That means that if you used cilia in, say, phosphate, extra phosphate would be collected.
- More compounds and organelles to collect them, rather than only glucose, phosphate, ammonia, iron, and hydrogen sulfide. Sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, hydrogen peroxide, and others could be added, each with their own function for the cell, or maybe some are just there to be there.
- New objects, similar to the iron chunks found across patches, might have an impact on certain cells. Maybe huge bubbles or something.
- The ability to modify genetics of certain organelles to change color or function. This feature is already implemented with that one organelle that detects compounds for you (i forgot what it’s called), so other organelles having this feature isn’t too far of a stretch.
As mentioned before, I understand if none of these features make it in. These are only suggestions.
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I believe cilia are planned to increase turning speed when the physics engine is revamped. (Being revamped so you can’t become a death helicopter, among other reasons)
I think you are talking about the chemoreceptor, right?
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Hello! Yes, i was talking about the chemoreceptor
thank you for correcting me :]
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There will never be an absence of active people with ant profile pictures.
And im more then fine with that.
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Well we all follow the pheromone trail
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I saw someone post here about sexual reproduction. It made me think about what sexual-reproduction based mechanics would be fun to add.
What if, every game turn, rare organisms from your species that are born into the world have slight mutations that make them different to the blueprint that you went with during the previous editor session. Then, if you reproduce with one of these rare cells, you gain half of the ‘extra hexes’ that have been added to the blueprint, and then can add your own changes to the cell on top of those.
This way, the hex layout of both cells becomes important when designing the offspring organism. it also creates sexual selection where the player will either reproduce with cells that are available, if they need to reproduce quickly, or if they can afford to they will only reproduce with cells which are more impressive. It could also add a behavior slider where cells either prefer to mate with more impressive cells, or instead will mate with whatever’s available.
The thing that isn’t in 0.5.9 that I want most is a dynamic atmosphere that starts similar to the prebiotic atmosphere, ie no o2, and fills up with o2 when photosynthetic microbes evolve
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