Quick Question Thread

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Btw how are liquids planned to be simulated like in the 3d stages?

[AnthropocenianAge (𝒜𝓇𝓉𝒽𝓇𝑜𝓅𝓁𝑒𝓊𝓇𝒶 𝓌𝒶𝓃𝓉𝓈 𝓉𝑜 𝑔𝒾𝓋𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒶 𝒽𝓊𝑔!)]

Would solids made of many small individual fragments, like sand, be more difficult to stimulate since solids like this can also behave somewhat like a liquid due to the many number of particles?

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Probably. I can assume if anything those would only be simulated in a small area around the player

[AnthropocenianAge (𝒜𝓇𝓉𝒽𝓇𝑜𝓅𝓁𝑒𝓊𝓇𝒶 𝓌𝒶𝓃𝓉𝓈 𝓉𝑜 𝑔𝒾𝓋𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒶 𝒽𝓊𝑔!)]

I wonder if quicksand will be added to the game at some point?

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Will probably depend on a developer’s goodwill

[hhyyrylainen]

Sand will not be simulated for performance reasons.

And any water simulation will also need to be really basic to be possible to calculate.

That could be different if we targeted high end gaming computers or datacenters. But people try to play Thrive on laptops so we can’t have any more CPU-expensive simulations than we already do (the compound clouds simulation is a kind of fluid simulation but the simulation area is very small and the simulation fidelity is not very high).

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

So for instance would the surface of the water be simulated to have waves? Since that’d seem like the most barebones thing to do alongside underwater currents perhaps

[hhyyrylainen]

Sorry to have to break it to you but basically all games that show waves, purely calculate those for graphics or at most adjusting the buoyancy force based on current wave height. They are absolutely not running any kind of fluid simulation whatsoever.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Yeah should’ve guessed that.

If you’re an animal creating shelters in the soil for instance, you will have the ability to distort the terrain right?

[Poodelicus (Crazy, Curious, and Stubborn)]

I am guessing there will be an ability to create a void (dig a hole). And likely you could create several voids next to each other in a layout like building blocks. The void would be like an inverted building. That would probably be a semi load friendly way to handle that.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Makes the most sense. The inverse could be done for animals which build stuff like beavers?

[punctdan]

How will patches work in Multicellular stage? Will they be exact copies of Microbe stage?

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I think they (will) use the same system

[Zixvir (Zixvir Zjghamn, the unpronounceable)]

@hhyyrylainen

However a pretty key question is that could a new multicellular life branch evolve after many multicellular species already exist? If not then being a single cell when multicellular creatures are already prevalent would be a permanently locked to the microbe stage scenario, which at least needs a big popup telling the player that they can no longer ever beat the current save.

I would actually be fine with this sort of softlock, it would be fun to try and see how long I could survive as a microbe while the environment gets polluted. As for the time gap, I think having time move forward without the player being able to evolve would be fine, though if not, microbe evolution speed could be sped up to allow the player to continue; bacteria can evolve within the lifetime of a single human, so on the scale of one or 2 stages above microbe, the player would still be able to evolve without much unrealism. By the time of society stage, perhaps the player can no longer edit their organism: I would be fine with this, by that time, I would have already stopped changing my organism much, having already settled into a miche. Still, as this is only hypothetical, I’m sure that you and the dev team will all come up with the optimal solution when you get to later stages.

[hhyyrylainen]

It’s just a ton of work to make the “dead end” paths in Thrive work. So I don’t think it is worth it to try to make them rather than working towards completing the game.

But as always, Thrive is open source so if someone really wants some feature they can program it themselves and send it to us. So far nobody has really taken up my challenge, everyone just loves to throw out ideas instead.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Wasn’t it suggested that if anything life in stages above yours should only be allowed to evolve up to like 2-3 stages after the one you’re in and then it couldn’t evolve further before you progress?

[hhyyrylainen]

That too due to the timescales.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

If no one ends up volunteering for making this “catching up” style evolution when something is in a stage ahead of you, the baseline would be to either have an another species entering the stage prior to you be a gameover condition or have the autoevo species never be able to progress to a next stage before you do?

[Rathalos]

@aah31415

the baseline would be to either have an another species entering the stage prior to you be a gameover condition or have the autoevo species never be able to progress to a next stage before you do?

Those seem likely to me yes, and I would strongly expect in the former case, there would have to be a setting to turn it into the latter.

Perhaps there could be a slight delay in the gameover, where we don’t evolve the newly multicellular species either.

[hhyyrylainen]

I always imagined that the player would be given like a warning “You have 5 generations to reach multicellular stage” or something like that to prevent a sudden game over screen. And of course on easy difficulty we should totally disable the AI overtaking the player to reduce the difficulty.