Currently, you can choose your Microbe color from a palette, meaning you can have any color independent of anything. From what i know, organisms in real life inherit their color from traits in their body. Of course, the game being like this would heavily limit creativity, but the way it is now also takes some of the realism, at least for me. Seeing a bunch of colorful organisms floating about, it’s weird. Is anything planned on the subject? Will it be the way it is? A discussion on this would be interesting.
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Yes, it makes sense. I think so, too
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I agree! It drives me crazy seeing creatures with bright green pigments inside them, floating around as a dark purple color. It removes the realism and will poorly impact the simulation of evolution. I mean for example the reason plants are green is because they need to be to photosynthesize properly, since the chlorophyll in their cells is naturally green. If cell color is based purely on choice without the presence of things like pigment, organisms can just randomly evolve camouflage with no consequence and stuff like that. Color should be included as something to consider during evolution, and it should be related to pigment, especially in the cell stage.
During later stages making it a bit more abstract makes sense because it would be tedious to create and place individual pigments to place on your organism manually to form the desired colors and patterns. But during the cell stage, color can be as simple as whatever organelles are most common in your body.
They can just implement a system in which the more of a part you have, the more the light in your membrane refracts to match that color.
You’ve got a lot of thylakoids? Congrats, your membrane has now shifted to a more green color.
Got a lot of rusticyanins? Congrats, your membrane is now a rusty red/orange/brown color (idk which.)
They can even implement a generic pigment system if you want to manipulate yourself to be a color not like the organelles you have. But that’d be a whole separate evolution… As it should be. Color is as much related to the biology of the organism as the shape of the organism is.
Implementing a pigment system would also be helpful for adding patterns and colors to organisms in the macroscopic stage. If you’ve already evolved pigments, you can add color to your organism more quickly. As for how the coloring system would work for a macroscopic organism, I’m honestly not sure. But the cell stage should have a basic, yet scientific system- which it currently does not.
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I agree, too. But I’d also propose the ability of editing thylakoids/chloroplasts with various photosynthetic pigments. The game will take place in different solar systems where planets will have different distance from their suns and suns themeselves will come in distinct sizes and types, thus changing an optimal wavelength for photosynthesis (on earth it’s blue - green). I think it should be made like this: you can open “Modify” tab on any photosynthetic organelle and add pigments in order to change the color, in cost of osmoregulation. Adding pigments of one type will increase effectivity in this wavelength, adding pigments of different types will mix the colors.
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Are we sure the developers’ll have the time and reasoning to put this into the game? It is a nice idea
Why not have some sort of a new “photosynthesis color” tab if you have photosynthetic organelles? That way the change would apply to all of such organelles.
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I remember this being brought up years ago. And the conclusion was that we don’t need to have this kind of complexity in the game. We can just assume that the photosynthesis pigments are automagically evolved to be the correct colour to capture the player’s sun.
It would of course be possible to add but it needs to be considered how much more annoying placing thylakoids becomes. And what situation auto-evo would have to not automatically pick the most optimal pigment. Because if AI works like that then we’ve just added a manual task for little reason that is automated away anyway for the AI…
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So pretty much the same reason why rubisco isn’t planned either.
It’s fair, but also, needless complexity for the purpose of scientific accuracy is kinda Thrive’s thing? There’s five types of toxins, which are mainly differentiated by what specific trait they target.
I think that there should definitely be more reasonable reasons for cells to have the colors they do; it seems unrealistic to have it be purely cosmetic (not a problem right now but it will be later).
So here’s a proposal for splitting the difference. Once planetary generation is added, the wavelengths of light your star emits will matter. This means that there will be an optimal wavelength for photosynthesis. Simply color photosynthetic parts accordingly. In some worlds thylakoids are green, in others they’re red or blue or yellow. No complexity added for the player, simulates the effect just as well, and means that photosynthetic cells will all have similar colors.
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Will the color be very strictly defined or will there be more like a spectrum where near 1 color is the optimum?
I’ll be honest, I don’t actually know enough about how the coding for this would work to judge personally whether it’s feasible. I’m just saying it and hoping it is.
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There are other things whose output values depend on other values changing across a spectrum of posibilities. It’s certainly not impossible, but it very likely would be considerably harder to code than simply “1 optimal color, 1 option” method.
Generally, two ranges of colors work for each star, except for a few extreme stars. You could make the AI choose whichever one was closer to it’s membrane color, or choose randomly when they first photosynthesize and stick with it. The player could simply have a toggle they could switch for aesthetics.
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I agree with this. I think we should have plant colours vary by the star. The most relevant properties would be the star’s colour and its brightness on the planet’s surface (which is reduced by distance and atmospheric density).
The photosynthetic organelles could easily be made greyscale, and a base colour variable added to the shader. There would need to be code added to select the hue based on the star colour, and the brightness inversely to the star’s brightness. This would be set as the photosynthesis colour for the planet, and would be the base colour for the shader for photosynthetic organelles, and also the default skin colour for photosynthetic tissue in macroscopic organisms.
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Should you still be able to get those dark-purple leaves some plants have despite the optimal colour being green (as an example)?
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Maybe if your plant is specialised for some niche (like how these purple leaves evolve only on plants that grow in wet and dark enviroments)
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I’ve heard they have such colors because they have bacteria-killing compounds in the leaves…
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There should definitely be some variation. I think at first, it would make sense to implement just one colour, and have a small random variation for each species. Once the colours seem right, we could consider what other colours might be right for each setup.
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Exactly. But when will come the time of upgrading such features?
It’s too far off to say. The only plant in game right now is the placeholder tree.
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And whatever the player/autoevo come up with…
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