He specified that they wont implement visible genitalia, this is not about what is considered obscene or not, but about what was said.
Maybe it’s better to discuss this further when the multicellular/aware stages are more developed.
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all this thrive talk makes me want to play thrive some more! This time i will make a carnivorous plant
this has no relation to the discussion at hand, but i just figured I’d say it.
sorry.
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Every time I play thrive I always somehow end up as a carnivorous plant.
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isn’t the main element going to be making parts from scratch
If you have external fertilisation and you play as a female, you can lay an egg and leave, and if you are a male, you can approach an egg and click it in order to turn it fertilise it. If there is internal fertilisation, you can approach someone belonging to the opposite gender, heart symbols may appear in the air, and then the game can say that the child is conceived.
Here is another idea. There can be two different types of DNA points. One of them is from natural selection, used for designing organs and stuff. The other one is from sexual selection, used for placing colorful feathers on your species or designing the flower if you are a plant.
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What’s the point of all of this anyways? Is ESRB actually ever going to rate Thrive? It’s not like most games actually need official age ratings like that (except for very obviously explicit ones). Even if someone does encounter a species with human-like genitalia, most people would probably be fine with it.
Also, I checked the Youtube and Twitch guidelines. There being human-like genitalia for auto-evolved creatures would not really break any rules. At most pointing the camera away from mating would make it perfectly fine for people to make videos on and stream it.
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I don’t know what to reply to, so I’ll reply to this. If the player is designing the reproduction system, and Thrive supports it, it is incredibly likely that there will be completely different types of sexual reproduction in thrive than are present in animals in real life. I would reference troll romance and how trolls reproduce in Homestuck, but real life has a much more comprehensible example: plants. Plants have genitals, and while you may say this is poppyrooster (that got censored, the word that would go in its place would be replaced by belgium or belgium, though I would personally reccomend rooster as another way to refer to one is belgium.), I say look again; I think you should stop and smell the roses, and if you do, think about their purpose: sexual reproduction. People smell plant genitals all the time, but nobody stops and thinks about how lewd that is, because plants have an effectively alien reproduction system that is not at all visually similar or appealing to the same senses that animal reproduction may be. I would discuss further how to implement different forms of sexual reproduction, which would all likely have in common the idea of trying to mix together DNA in order to produce variation in a species, but that would be unrelated to this thread, and would be best for its own thread; I have made my point in saying that people smell plant gentials, and that it is age apropriate. In other words, drawing the line for what not to include would not be necessary if Thrive decided to go towards a path of realism and allow the players to produce whatever reproduction system they feel is necessary.
Edit: After reading the entire thread, I apologize for this post. I would like to say that genitalia would likely have to be scrapped, or at least the penatrative kind, though I don’t see the problem with displaying egg laying. Also, if Thrive gets popular, then that will immediately solve the problem of lack of realistic reproduction because that’s how popular games work. Thrive will likely become popular if does not include those features. This is incredibly counter-intuitive, but is just how things work I guess.
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As far as I am aware, most of this discussion ended up going to making solutions for a case when some animal-like genitals do end up evolving randomly. The chances of them emerging are very low but they’re not 0.
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I’ve been reading back on this thread, and I have a few questions. What about organs that lay eggs and such? Like what was talked about earlier with some insects; their ovipositors are adapted to lay eggs in hard to reach places. Would these kinds of organs be ok? What about organs that produce eggs?
And I also have a problem with the drop-down menu idea; I feel like an immediate switch-up of reproduction strategies would be somewhat inaccurate.
To summarize, this thread is long and I’m a little confused about the consensus of the developers. I don’t mean to stir up the argument.
I believe it was decided in the thread that ovipositors would likely unfortunately be scrapped. People would be forced to move their eggs by hand… or tongue or whatever body part is made.
Edit: If ovipositors were not lewd, I think it was decided in the thread that pre-made reproduction would have to be the way to implement them, as the ability to design a reproduction system IS lewd, I think was agreed on.
Who said that? I don’t remember such an official conclusion. We’ll be limited by whatever arbitrary age rules ESRB and PEGI use to determine game age ratings. So if they consider ovipositors or realistic looking egg laying to be inappropriate, then we cannot show those in the game. But if they don’t consider those inappropriate they can be in the game without issue.
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Wasn’t there also an idea to include various things above the age line in some sort of an “official 18+ mod”?
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That is possible, like many games already do on Steam (and I haven’t heard that those games have had any issues from that). But that’s again one more thing that we need to develop and always keep up to date to work with the latest Thrive version.
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The thing is is that if Thrive becomes popular, such a thing is inevitable to happen, and the community would probably have more struggles with keeping up to date with itself than with Thrive, because that appears to be how Homo sapiens works as a species. Jokes aside however, unless I am correct with my assumption of how humans work, I do think it would be quite difficult to keep such a mod/dlc to Thrive functional, so it would likely be a passion project for whichever Thrive developers feel like working on it, and some community members will probably make their own mods as well.
It wouldn’t be more difficult in comparison to many other features. Though it being separate from the main game would increase the risk quite a bit that someone makes a pull request that accidentally breaks the mod if I don’t notice it when reviewing the changes. Even now there’s a bunch of features that accidentally cause problems quite often like having the game translated already in this early stage, trying to keep keyboard and controller GUI navigation working, and save compatibility not randomly breaking (only when planned). That’s just a short list of other features that are about as hard to keep working as such a mod would be.
In my opinion, it’s not worth doing a mating animation because it will waste resources that could be spent on more priority goals. Moreover, according to the basic philosophy of thrive, thrive is a simulator of evolution, not a life cycle, and in the context of evolution, mating animation is absolutely not important
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