Is there a reason why photoreceptor won’t be added until macroscopic. As it doesn’t make sense why something which a single cellular eukaryote can do, to be pushed back so far away
I think it’s because it’s only purpose would be to tell night and day apart which doesn’t seem very useful when compared with a chemoreceptor for instance. In macroscopic it would instead be the baseline of a sight organ.
But the issue is chemoreceptor aren’t like a signal to where the compound or species are at. They can only guide a organism to go from less concentrated to more concentrated area of that compound. For this they need to actively be interacting with the compound. Not being able to randomly locate the distance of the compound cloud. It make more sense for this to be given to be photoreceptor, which would also add an element only being able to judge where the compound is, with light only.. While chemoreceptor can be use for beginning area, where i believe compound are diffuse more, apart from concentration skyrocketing near the source of compound
I am not sure microbes can use photoreceptors like chemoreceptors but “better” in real life…
They can sense light gradient, don’t know how that will effect gameplay, unless change are made to facilitate its use. But they also sense colour which compound already have. So it could point not the distance but whether their is quantity of that compound ahead of it. So it can locate compound far away from it
The problem is the game can only simulate areas so far and pretty sure chemoreceptor already checks pretty far
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I have been meaning to ask. Are you are developer? Cause you are really knowledgeable about the game. Or were you previously a developer?
No I just happen to have been in this community for a good while. Developers have a special rank of their own.
for how long? Do you wish to be part of team, like media or a community centered job?
As you can see I’ve been here since apr 2022. Maybe one day…
I wish you the best of luck, so you add things i want
Maybe you can add the things you want yourself too one day?
Wanna apply right now? They are currently looking for applicants.
I have got other things on my head. Also this is getting offtopic of the thread.
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If a developer is reading this i want to ask three things, firstly why not an intermediate between multicellular and macroscopic similar to my suggested. Secondly, why aren’t thing which can provide unique gameplay like many toxin and photoreceptor, which can be developed by eukaryote being pushed to other stages. would this also occur for other stages as well? finally, you hope to end multicellular in less than a year. Is it because it already planned what going to be in this stages, or because you want to finish it as quickly as possible to move on to the next one? Cause apart from the first question, the rest i don’t understand why?
Have you not tried to mess around with a toxin organelle before? They have a few options in there.
i mean new toxin you recommended for nematocyst?
So essentially the main reason is because the multicellular stage as planned has both some benefits and limitations. For one thing, we can’t handle multicellular organisms of more than ~20 cells well, most people’s computers would not be able to run it. That limits how complex we can make this stage. For a lot of things, including just larger size, we realised we cannot do that with these mechanics. For that we need to move a different system, like the Macroscopic Stage 3D engine.
The benefits are that it can use existing Microbe Stage Code, and the existing Microbe Stage environment. Those cells are 2D gameplay objects. That environment is also 2D. By leveraging the existing stuff as much as possible, we can develop it much faster. That’s how we get to the “1 year” figure.
So essentially, we settled on Multicellular Stage being a supercharged Microbe Stage as transition to Macroscopic.
Moving between layers like in Outterfly is something that could perhaps be done. But while it looks nice, it’s not immediately apparent to me that it would be worth the cost.
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Other toxin types are already a thing with the toxisome and the toxin organelle, it’s just that unless I’m blind you can’t customize the injectosome with them.
Did you mean “multicellular” with the first stage term?
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Extreme development difficulty / effort required.
The multicellular stage ends when basically the game performance is stretched to the limit, so we cannot simulate more cells at the same time. And most of the cell graphics are not optimized for any kind of side view or anything like that so we’d need to redo the stage graphics if we unlocked the top down camera.
So it would be an extreme amount of work whereas with the same effort we could probably almost complete macroscopic… So the question is do you want macroscopic or an intermediate stage that we somehow might get working between multicellular and macroscopic?
More of the latter, because we have only about 2-3 years of money left and then we’ll lose 90% of development speed. So we must reach macroscopic and get a very effective outreach campaign by players sharing their silly creations with each other. Otherwise the future of Thrive is not guaranteed.
But also the multicellular stage is planned to be just microbe colony gameplay pushed to the limit. For that we hopefully only need a few handfuls of special features.
I think that’s a typo and you meant “Multicellular” here.
I think this feature might be more hassle than worth it, because animation problems and layer population problem as we’d be splitting the active gameplay area into 3 zones (at least if not more layers people want). And also this again is a problem that our graphics are not optimized for this so we’d need to at least rework the microbe backgrounds and some chunks for this to be possible.
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