The first stage that leads to this is Awakening, where biological evolution stops and instead you control a tribe and lead them through cultural and technological evolution.
Eventually when tribes settle into cities you will start with one and expand to as many as you can manage.
Cultural differences will be represented by different cultures. Cultures originate by tribes, and then will evolve and merge and split from there (the design behind it is still a work in progress because it can get quite complicated and the earlier stages have yet to be implemented). But there is a thread that goes into it a bit on the old forum: http://thrivegame.freeforums.net/thread/1570/cultural-traits-brainstorming
This causes huge problems with timescales as it shouldn’t take more than 100 000 years after entering the industrial stage to reach ascension. So if you are in the cell stage one editor cycle will be many times that and the other species will have reached ascension (or perhaps they polluted their planet and destroyed it before that).
I think there will be some major limits in how far ahead another species is allowed to get before you just lose.
The way I see it is that due to the huge differences allowed in creature shapes and sizes the only way the animations can work is by having them be procedurally generated. And they will be very difficult to manually edit (or make an editor for them) so I don’t think they can be “chosen” by the player.
Any idea when the engine switch will be done? And when it is, will some sort of guide be provided on how to setup a development environment?
I’m interested in contributing but first I want to see if I can motivate myself to invest time, so a guide would be good to get me started
Thanks, I’m installing prerequisites, I’ll probably be back here later with issues/questions
Edit: during the ruby script, I got this error while setting up build files for cAudio:
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:10 (project): Failed to run MSBuild command: MSBuild.exe to get the value of VCTargetsPath: The system cannon find the file specified
What is MSBuild part of? I installed everything from the prerequisites page, but maybe I forgot to add something to PATH or something?
Edit: I checked the VS installer and MSBuild is ticked there. Do I need to signup/login to VS or something? Currently using the “repair” function, maybe that will work.
You are using the wrong branch (cAudio is only used by the thrive master branch). Currently you need to switch to the branch where the work is happening with git checkout engine_refactor before running setup. Otherwise it is completely broken.
Edit: and you might want to delete your thrive folder before switching to clean up everything.
I’m having a hard time coming up with really easy things as the compound bar display got finished recently. The AI is currently not able to move very effectively so you could have a look at scripts/microbe_stage/microbe_ai.as (don’t forget to run cmake after editing to make the change be copied) to make the AI cells move around instead of just randomly turning and maybe randomly firing if they have a toxin vacuole. The other easy part that @Untrustedlife is (maybe currently working on?) getting the freefloating organelles to spawn again.
I’m focusing on making the compound clouds work again and then working on the transition to the editor and making that work, at which point there should be some easy parts of the editor that can be worked on.