Have you played recently? There already is an early version of a multicellular stage mostly working, where your organism consists of multiple cells. Right now, once you reach twenty cells, you can transition to a prototype of the macroscopic editor, where initially your organisms shape is the same. The difference is you’re now in 3D and instead of individual cells the game only keeps track of tissues.
So, it’s definitely smoother than Spore, but in the end there still has to be a transition from 2D to 3D somewhere. Does that answer your question?
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Persona.Non.Grata
(God is not on our side, because he hates idiots!)
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I have turned on the game recently, but haven’t gotten around trying the new stage.
… for further discussion. Basically, for discussion to continue, a bachelors level (or similar) paper on why underwater civilizations are possible is required.
Edit: meant to post this a while ago, but was unable to. Hopefully the links prove helpful
It’s not currently planned, and we probably won’t have airborne patches to inhabit. (Ground is maybe a possibility, but it may be a while yet before we can adequately convey them as an environment. Not to mention it provides a trickier path to multicellularity)
Airborne microbes in particular might have a future as a potential migration method, whether by forced relocation via natural events, or deliberate evolution of water crystallization promoting protein structures, but representing a proper ecosystem in the clouds might be a bit out there for the time being.
I’ve got yet another quick question, you’ll be able to go back in stages, right? For example, if your species is in the Industrial Stage, you can make them go back to Society Stage, and then Awakening Stage, and then modify your organism so that it isn’t intelligent enough to or doesn’t have the capability to use tools, and then after it’s in Aware stage remove the brain, then make your species small enough in late multicellular, and then remove all the other cell but one in the early multicellular stage, so that it’s back in the microbial stage.
Okay, maybe this isn’t short, but the actual question is.
Going back in stages is going to be a tricky feature (and going back more than one stage even more so) so I don’t really want to put in the effort to program and test those going back in stages transitions. And even after they are added, they are a ongoing maintenance burden. It’s difficult enough to remember to test going forward stages to make sure it doesn’t break with some change…
Everything? Well, not literally everything, I think raytracing still uses meshes made up of triangles but the whole approach of shooting out hundreds or thousands of rays for each pixel on screen and detecting what they hit to come up with the colours for pixels is entirely different from starting from triangles, applying transformation matrices to them and then flattening those shapes onto a 2D screen before calculating colour values using shaders where shadows are approximated using shadow maps (which are the entire scene redrawn from the point of view of a light source).
So raytracing is basically how lighting works in real life? It sure seems more simple than traditional lighting the way you describe it, but I understand why it requires so much computing power.
Yeah, that’s basically the main point, by simulating how light really works you can get really realistic results very easily. Instead in traditional rendering you need to use all kinds of fancy tricks to approximate how light really works, which is much harder to program but requires much less computing power.