But the small details still need to have some attention directed at them…
The engulfing system is the single most complex part of the game and a constant source of bugs and minor glitches (even now basically any log sent in by a player for any reason has at least some engulfing-triggered problems in it). So an attaching mechanic would be an absolute nightmare to make in terms of programming complexity.
But yeah I just wanted to add that tidbit, I fully agree with @Rathalos .
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Didn’t think anything could be more complex than the auto-evo system…
Auto-evo is just a bunch of math that is hard to tune to get the results you want. The engulfing system has a ton of actual gameplay bugs with inconsistent engulfing object state, animations, attach status etc. that consistently causes an issue at least with one of those. Some people have recently reported the zombie cells bug, which is caused by the attaching entities part of engulfing not working 100% correctly in all cases (or at least that’s my guess before the bug is fixed and the real root cause is known).
And so with auto-evo “problems” people just don’t really see them. Occasionally some people talk about cells existing that shouldn’t or bad variety of species etc., but many of these are just auto-evo doing the calculations as designed but the results aren’t always good for gameplay. So there’s no real “bugs” in auto-evo, just results that would be better to be tweaked. (there are occasionally auto-evo run failures but those are super rare)
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Wasn’t a zombie cell bug already fixed before? If it just keeps getting revived, we might need to find what really lies at the core of the weakness that causes it to arise…
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I have seen a zombie cell in SonOfMowgef’s recent playthrough of Thrive. I think it was two or three episodes ago, so the issue is still present. Also, if engulfing/endocytosis in the Microbe Stage is this complicated, I hope Macroscopic digestion with digestive secretions combining from different organs and cell types does not break the game.
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I think the two will be completely different systems
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I think aah has the right of it here. From what I can guess, the biggest difficulty with the engulfment system is the whole “entity still exists as an object kind of inside the cell until it is fully digested” thing. From Macroscopic, it’s probably sufficient to when eating just add a type of compounds to your organism that then need to be further processed into more useful things.
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Since you can’t see what is being digested anymore?
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That, and the prey is less frequently still alive after being eaten. (as is relevant in microbe and multicellular stages for cell walls and toxic species)
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Though I wonder, if you vomited what you ate, would we take the effort for it to still look “accurate”?