The MacOS version of Thrive is still old (0.6.3), so I booted it up on my main computer and observed the insides.
I actually do like the old compound clouds, although they don’t accurately represent the amount of compound, sometimes. The old microbe textures are simplistic, the auto-evo of the era a habitual crack smoker. There are no ferroplasts, even though the thermoplast exists. It’s not too different from modern Thrive, just a bit less complicated, slightly less polished.
Curiously, the (x312) message duplication stuff doesn’t exist in this version. In more updated versions, the game will send an endless quantity of ‘Too small to engulf’ messages if you’re in engulf mode and touching something that’s too big. In this version, it sends it only once. I wonder why. It also doesn’t have the ‘multicellular creatures cannot spin’ issue, and reproductive compounds can spread through a bound colony without being completely slashed in rate (although I’m playing with unlimited reproduction rate).
Does anyone out there think that older versions of Thrive were more fun, or fun in a way modern Thrive can’t get?
If someone can come up with a better math formula for how fast a cell colony should be able to spin, feel free to post it. Current math for it:
Can you finally please explain what it is with the colony reproduction stuff you keep commenting on with the latest Thrive?
I’m almost totally sure that there wasn’t some super secret reproduction thing for colonies in 0.6.3 that I somehow missed when converting things to ECS (and would have accidentally removed). So I’m almost certain that the reproduction passive gain would not have been there in the old version, especially as I’m quite sure the issue for handling early colony reproduction was opened before 0.6.3 was released. And the logic for averaging all compounds (except ATP) between colony members should still logically do the same thing (as in the old version).
When you’re in a cell colony, your reproduction slider progresses extremely slowly. I’m not actually sure if that’s a problem, or a necessary side effect of something, or something intentional, or even if this earlier version actually didn’t have it or if it was because I turned off the setting.
I’d guess it’s probably the Limit reproductive compounds setting, to be honest, so it’s a moot point in this context. I don’t consider this issue very relevant to dev in any case, since as of right now, you don’t generally bind with other cells unless you’re planning to progress to the multicellular stage. If there’s other uses for the binding agent implemented, then at that point I’d say you’d want to take a look at whether this problem actually exists.
When you are in a cell colony, there is no reproduction progress happening at all. Instead the bar switches to showing a prediction of sorts of the current progress plus your stored phosphates and ammonia. This way the bar still will move a bit while in a colony instead of being totally frozen. Then to not confuse the player there is a tutorial that triggers if you are in a colony with full ammonia and phosphates telling you need to unbind to continue.
Why the bar fills slower is that, passive reproduction progress doesn’t happen at all in a colony (I think I posted the link to that issue already). So you need to be collecting compound clouds, which then get distributed equally to all colony members. And finally the reproduction bars show a prediction based on the stored compounds, which fill up a lot slower in a big colony when more cells are sharing the resources.
Unless there’s a bug I’m unaware of that setting has no impact on cell colonies, as again they don’t do any reproduction progress whatsoever (because the colony cell binding and location logic absolutely cannot handle cells changing their organelles while in a colony).
The plan is to allow the passive reproduction compound gain to continue working while in a colony, but it’s been pushed off my immediate TODO list due to everything else I’ve done like since the passive reproduction mode was added.
Fair enough then, that it hasn’t been anywhere near the top of the list of stuff that needs to be done for Thrive.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I was running a test to see if I could replicate my 0.6.3 colony on 0.7.1, but my computer crashed and I probably lost a lot of the notes I would be putting into my next battery of complaints.
I’ll check later, but that was a decrepit version of Word I was using so it probably didn’t autosave, which would be depressing.