Smooth transitions proposal (removing dedicated stage moving buttons)

Future Game
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Smooth transitions between stages are a goal of Thrive. How exactly will they be achieved? Right now, the transition from Microbe to Multicellular is not smooth - you have to click a button that’s more-or-less just an arbitrary delineation. It’s smoother than in Spore, but not that much smoother. So, my proposals for the transitions:

  • For Microbe to Multicellular, you’d want a smooth transition to happen… sort of accidentally. So, firstly, you’d need a reason to add the Binding Agent that isn’t ‘I want to progress to the next stage’. I’m not sure what this reason would be; defense or offense are the obvious ones, but for the former, you’d need serious threats to the player (which don’t exist), and for the latter, well, I can’t see how having more cells would help. You’d become more cumbersome and less maneuverable, and you can’t engulf with multiple cells (to use binding as a method of increasing your cell size). It seems like the Binding Agent would be most helpful if you’re having defensive problems, so probably you’d need to have auto-evo generate strong enemies that you need a new defensive adaptation to fight to make the Binding Agent work. Once you have the Binding Agent, I’d imagine you’d then add an ability to modify it to allow your species to reproduce while bound; this places you in a limbo between Multicellular and Microbe (unsure if this is viable in code). Finally, you’d modify the Binding Agent a second time to permanently bind your components; this makes your organism more durable, and unlocks the Multicellular species editor, along with a few starting cells (3?).
  • For Multicellular to Macroscopic… I can’t think of anything that’s not a button. That’s probably because of the transition from 2D to 3D. Perhaps, if your organism grows large enough, you’d just transition to Macroscopic silently, or with a cutscene? “You’re running out of space in your editor - here, let me unlock an extra dimension.” Idk. Maybe a button would work.
  • For Macroscopic to Aware, I’d imagine you’d try to avoid having any visible transition at all - you just have the option to construct a nervous system in Macroscopic, and after a certain point, it’s complex enough to start doing Aware things. I don’t know enough about how the stage coding works or will work to know if you can have the stages not really separated like that. This transitional period would ideally line up with an analogue to the Cambrian Explosion, where large-scale predation drives evolutionary feedback loops that result in an explosion of diversification and development - if you don’t grow a brain, you die.
  • Awakening is already an intermediate stage, to my knowledge, representing the period where gameplay moves from managing a single individual and the evolution of the species to managing a society and its progression. I imagine that you’d see proto-societal gameplay in Aware, such as nest construction and herd management. The latter, specifically, would behave more like Awakening/Society management, so as you moved into Awakening, you’d be focusing more and more on herd management. As you approach Society, you spend more time on the herd level, and the timeframe would narrow, increasing MP costs. Eventually, you stop being able to control an individual member of the species at all, and are now in Society. That being said, now I can’t recall where managing tribal settlements fits in the Awakening-Society split; if single-settlement play is Awakening, then moving to Society level would just be the result of establishing dominance over another settlement, so you need a new management UI.
  • Society to Industrial could probably be about as silent as Macroscopic-Aware ideally. The differences would mostly be timescale and what technologies you have access to. Space stage would start the moment you launch a rocket into space (‘space’ to be defined by someone who knows more about space), as is the current plan; I’d imagine that you’d still be focused on the Industrial-level manager while you’re still too early to be doing serious Space level stuff.
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Microbe stage cannot afford to be extended anyhow at this point. So this would have to come after a more solid and stable devforce is formed.

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Feature creep, feature creep…

I think the button is fine, gameplay-wise, and it’s much cleaner. Thrive really needs to just push forward right now, getting bogged down in minutiae isn’t worthwhile. Like the Proteome proposal; yes, it would make the game cooler, and better, but it’s more useful to just try to get the rest done. Better stage transitions can get implemented post-7.0.0. (Assuming we ever reach that point. It’s basically just luck, and trying to attract more devs.)

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I hope this does not happen to Thrive. Hytale is already delayed by so many years because of feature creep, as well as changing game engines, and what other excuse the Hytale devs are coming up with these days…

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While smooth transitions would be very nice, I don’t think the concept should be taken this far. It is impossible to make sure that meta knowledge is not a huge benefit for the player. Or at least it is close to impossible, and would require an extreme amount of work to fully apply this to any mutation the player can make. Just the way to advance stages is not the only action the player can take that with meta knowledge gives a big advantage.

What would this even mean? Just an upgrade for the binding agent to make it then possible to advance stages once you have the upgrade? But at that point I’d ask what’s the point with requiring the player to spent just a bit more MP to buy an upgrade.

And what would be the benefit here? Besides again costing just a bit more MP and delaying the player.

This would be less smooth as currently you can exit the multicellular editor by placing 1 (or even 0) extra cells. So in your idea the player would immediately jump to controlling a bigger multicellular colony than currently.

Hang on, so your problem with the current transitions is just because they are buttons? You do realize that placing an organelle or pressing the “OK” button on the organelle upgrade popup are just buttons as well? And if those cause you to go to the next stage (and we don’t plan on allowing go back stages as that multiplies programming effort related to the transition a lot) we must have a warning / confirmation popup anyway. So I only see benefits in having a special button to trigger the stage transition once the player qualifies.

This is actually exactly how it works in the prototype that is in 0.8.0 right now. Once a creature has enough brain power it qualifies for aware stage status and is automatically granted it.

It is really not, because (once again the wiki to the rescue, which I think should be mandatory reading before theorizing anything):

The Society Stage begins when your first Society Center (settlement) is built. Collective Residence enables the forming of Society Centers. The Society Center building acts as the central hub for a settlement, which is a group of buildings that behave as a collective and get a procedurally generated name.

So the first settlement you form makes you become a society. (this is also exactly how it is modelled in the prototype that is right now in the game)

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So I have been wondering something for days, and given this new topic . . .

Given the current teams struggles with the AI and Auto-Evo, is it possible a smoother transition between Multicellular and Macroscopic might actually be easier and faster to program than getting the AI and Auto-Evo to jump a whole ecosystem without immediately starving all of the non photosynthesis users?

I hope I’m wrong, but . . . that seems like the jarring transition would be a more complex AI issue.

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I think the opposite is true: it will be much harder to make the AI and auto-evo support all the intermediate forms. With some auto-evo improvements to take more things into account being completed recently / about to be completed, I think you can’t really say that auto-evo is really neglected. That title goes to the Microbe AI which doesn’t get much love at all. I think it would be even harder to push the microbe AI to try to act sensibly in conditions that were totally unimaginable when the code was originally being written, than to just jump to macroscopic and have a new AI system and just approximate like algae blooms for food.

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Alright, good to hear the Hhry thoughts, which are ‘this is a bad idea’. I figured it wasn’t that good. I haven’t really been using the wiki at all, but that’s because I was assuming it was probably out-of-date or rudimentary. Will need to look through it.

I suppose that having a complicated Binding Agent-based transition is probably a bad idea, but at the very least I think that the ‘Advance to Multicellular’ button should be made into a Binding Agent modification. It just feels better to me. The current Advance to Multicellular button is based on having an arbitrary number of bound cells; I think that making it a Binding Agent upgrade makes more sense.

Microbe AI definitely needs love. Alas, I cannot provide. I don’t know C# and don’t really have the time right now to teach it to myself.

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There are a lot of Microorganisms that are multicellular. Should the number of cells be increased for Macroscopic? Or should there also be a requirement for having at least more than one cell type to go to Macroscopic?

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Also related to this topic, shouldn’t the player be required to have completed their reproduction progress before moving to the next stage if it’s locked behind a button?

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I think there are good starting points for polishing the game transitions here, but I think the focus on replacing special buttons with general actions is not the right choice. I’ll rename this thread a bit to clarify what this is actually about.

The most outdated pages have a prominent warning on them. And the other pages, even if quite basic still have a lot of key information like the overall goal of each stage and the transitions to and from that stage, which are still the plan we are aiming for.

And what would enable that upgrade? If there’s no condition for it the player would just immediately place a binding agent and upgrade it. Then if that was all it took to get to the next stage the player would just get there without ever playing with the binding agent. That just seems way more wrong way to do it than currently.

I think so. That proves the player has made a viable organism. If there was no such requirement the player could just slap together the bare minimum to fulfil the conditions and “skip” to the next stage. I think it is much better to have the current approach where the player needs to manage to reach conditions while playing to qualify for the next stage. (I realized writing that currently going multicellular doesn’t require you to be ready to reproduce but I think it would just be a bit annoying and a beginner trap if you had to be ready to reproduce and in a cell colony to go multicellular, mainly because you cannot get reproduction progress while in a non-multicellular colony)

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Maybe have the player first fullfill the reproduction requirement and only after that form the colony for getting into multicellular?

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That’s exactly what I addressed: it would be confusing for the new players unless there was a lot of tutorial stuff there. Like for example there needs to be a popup tutorial when it becomes possible to advance stages that warns the player needs to be ready to reproduce before starting the colony to then qualify for the later stage. And a tutorial would be needed when the button is blocked because the player is not ready to reproduce and the tutorial should tell the player to unbind, wait and then bind again. This second tutorial is needed if someone forgets or skips the earlier tutorial.

So it would be a ton of work to make the game more convoluted. So I think that’s a lose-lose situation…

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What about in multicellular, if the player designs an organism bigger than 20 cells (for symmetry or statistic reasons), not letting them move to macroscopic until they have reached there full size? Seems a little strange that you can have a 21+ celled organism evolve at only 20 cells.

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Please no, the game performance can barely take a couple of 20 cell colonies going around. (though with ECS and people not playing on laptops the situation might now be a bit better).

I guess so but currently multicellular can become a huge slog so I think it’s better to give the player the choice to realize that it is going to take forever to grow fully and just hit the button early.

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You could make it really expensive, I guess?

I still don’t really feel like the current multicellular progression is sensible enough. Maybe just giving a reason to have the Binding Agent without wanting to move to Multicellular would work, but other than defense I can’t think of one.

Multicellular is currently the worst prototype exactly because of this: it’s a slog and the game cannot handle large cell colonies. They take forever to grow and go off the screen in all directions. I think the only way to do it in a reasonable amount of time would be minimising your cell size, living off photosynthesis, and then AFKing repeatedly.

Obviously, complaining about a prototype isn’t productive, or relevant, though…

I think that the Multicellular->Macroscopic phase transition being locked behind full growth would make sense once Multicellular was better-developed and much more balanced. If it doesn’t take ages to grow to full size, people would tolerate the wait more.

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But it’s unknown how much will multicellular really be developed in the year or so when it’s being developed…