Still could take too much time for it’s worth…
I was thinking that they target and disable certain organelles
The goal of a virus is to use the cell for reproduction, not act as agents that disable specific organelles for no apparent reason, unless they disable them as a co-product of them taking over the cell.
They do target certain organelles are hijack them
Hmmm then. Not sure if that’s good for the prospect of coding viruses in as that’d mean they would need even mode features coded.
It depends how bad the community wants it. If a lot and or a large majority of the people in the community wants it to be a feature in the game to the point that they are willing to wait a bit longer for the cell stage to be complete, then it might be worth it to add.
I don’t think that we would want to delay the release of 1.0, as we are on a tight schedule there. After that release, when the focus switches to multicellular, we could evaluate how much time to spend on further microbe stage specific features, though I imagine the community would be more interested to have as great of a focus on multicellular features. I can see us continuing to add larger microbe stage changes in the future, but we will probably not get around to those until the macroscopic stage is well underway, as that is basically the key to the success of Thrive’s main core gameplay.
Exactly. No matter how hard the community wants it, we need to move on, for otherwise our long-term future is doomed.
I wouldn’t say no matter how hard, If the community wants it enough that they can fund an extra developer specifically to continue working on the microbe stage features while the rest continue onwards…
But eventually even that developer would have to move on.
Also I hope 1.X.X era doesn’t end up becoming “multicellular + microbe” oriented instead of just multicellular oriented.
But microbe and multicellular are pretty similar, so it may actually not too bad for 1.X.X to be multicellular+microbe
I guess that could extend the time period of 1.X.X, but I’m not sure if that’s what we want…
I really only see this happening if the release of 1.0 gets us into a financial situation where we can afford like, 4 full time devs or something, and it being clear that the community wants a continued focus on microbe in the near term. But the breakdown would still be like 3 devs working on the main roadmap to 1 dev continuing to work on adding to the previous stages. Such a setup would only decrease the time to complete each stage’s roadmap, as the main devs would not be distracted by the microbe stage maintenance anymore. (At least, in the ideal case).
I don’t expect this to be the case, but I think we would be open to doing this if all the events line up perfectly to give us an unusually successful 1.0 release.
Speaking of, in what ways do you plan to reinforce 1.0 for it to achieve it’s views-gathering goals?
I started some ideas on this post: Evaluating Thrive 1.0 Release Goals - Meta - Thrive Development Forum, though it seems like they would not be able to be made a fixed part of the roadmap due to time constraints, which I agree with due to the summer really being the best time to release.
There are two spheres to the 1.0 release that need to be considered: the actual game itself, and the 1.0 release campaign. We are still considering how we will manage the release campaign, and I expect that more effort in that direction will begin once the release gets a bit closer. I think your question was more about the game itself though, and this is more my area anyway.
I think that any more dedicated focus on features specifically for ‘views gathering’ would come from volunteers as I interpret these features being ones that do not necessarily help the microbe stage itself, but instead increase the overall draw of Thrive. I for example am still hopeful that I will be able to integrate a full 3D world generator into the prototypes by 1.0 release. If this happens, it will not add anything to the Microbe stage or any playable game but will instead add to the overall completion of Thrive as a whole.
I think a similar and more important feature is the 3D organism system. I think we would really want to get a more solid demo for 3D organism creation in Thrive 1.0, but this would require a significant amount of effort from volunteers to finish it soon. And we are still trying to come up with solid plans for how the system should be created so that a solid plan is available for anyone who wants to take on this task. I believe that it can be done in time, but I can’t say that it is likely to happen. I mostly plan to focus on just developing the World Generator and helping plan for the 3D organism system up to 1.0, so at least one person is working on this area.
Isn’t the 0.8.X era supposed to last until the planet generator is properly put into the game due to it being a 0.8.X feature?
We just talked about that recently with it being a bit confusing to the community as previously layed out on the roadmap. We just changed the link on the roadmap to The Planet Editor because the real focus of that roadmap item is on customization of the patch map based world that actually affects the gameplay of the Microbe stage.
Blocking the release of 0.8, or even 1.0, for the full World Generator would not be very useful as the full World Generator will change almost nothing in the Microbe and Multicellular stages, while being a huge task to complete.
The roadmap still lists the generator in the 0.8.Xs, that probably needs to be updated.
I suppose that “Planet Generation and Customization” could still seem to imply the final generation being added in. Perhaps we should change it to just “Planet Customization” as we aren’t changing the current patch-map based Planet generator until later?
Yeah, leaving it with the simpler part is the best option most likely.