How will the time in the future game work? Like if the time for the evolution stages of the game is 1 million years but what if there is also society stage creature if it’s 1 million years than they are propaly in space
I think the progression of time will change for different stages based on what is thought to give the best balance of enjoyability, complex involvement, and realism for that stage. This will probably be something that is easier to decide on later on, when the gameplay for Society Stage is more concrete.
I do wonder, though, If the game will play as a world being simulated like real life but in fast motion, or if it will play as if everything in in real-time, but with major changes like building construction and scientific advancement happening at an accelerated pace.
I hope the latter, as it seems like it would be more player-involved and fun, and also let Strategy Mode mesh more elegantly with Organism Mode.
Having it be simulated like real life, but with in-game time controls that can speed things up really fast or slow them down to real-time could be an OK in-between that would allow for more realism while also allowing for an acceptable pace to get to the next stage, involved gameplay to the point of optional micromanagement, and smooth transition between Strategy Mode and Organism Mode (which would just be in real-time), but in this case the player would still have to choose to pretty much abandon control of their civilization if they wanted to speed things up for a bit, so I’d still prefer my second suggestion.
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I feel like that should be a choice to the player, two choices for play style depending on what they pick. Also how will the frames work, having such a complex amount of things would require a complex system to make sure it doesn’t lag everything and crash immediatly. We should first find a way to make as many programs run at once but make sure the frame rate doesn’t plunge into utter glitch damnation.
There will be some issues with this as a laptop can’t handle as much as a high end gaming computer. So how do we design the simulation to work on both, without acting totally differently.
Could we run a background application that plays a simplified version of the game, like oregon trial. just text based for the ai so no processesing for visuals. It could keep track of progross from other species. When the player gets to the next stage then the application implements whatever data it made into the game.
Maybe there could be a “laptop” mode like in the sims 4 which is optimised to run better
That’s exactly the problem as we have limited resources we can’t really do 2 different systems for different types of computers. We need a single simulation that can run even with quite limited resources and still be accurate.
Yeah, understandable
Is it possible to have a collected data source via internet with the games processing? Like an entire server dedicated to individual evolution paths.
Unless we can get free computing resources from somewhere, perhaps fans running a thrive simulation program while their computer is idle, we can’t really offload the simulation from individual players’ computers anywhere.
I could try to convince the school district to support this game as educational, thus providing us with storage. But then what will happen if they later decide to stop supporting. hmm. I think a fan made server would probably work better long term. Also this way there could in some way be a multiplayer aspect to the game. Other player’s species would be interacting with another player’s species through the sored database. And the species that go extinct are deleted and possibly put onto a leader board of sorts? Maybe.
BlockquoteHaving it be simulated like real life, but with in-game time controls that can speed things up really fast or slow them down to real-time
i really like this idea.
as you said you need to let go control over the dos and donts of your species if you really speed things up, but if like micromangement and stuff you can slow it down so you can observe and interact with erevy change that is gonna occur while evovling.
also i like the idea of having the players asked, wether they would like to share some computer resources when their computer is idle so you could have the simulations for every other game that is running at the moment be done, when they download the game.
I mean, if you wanted to micromanage the whole stage and it was being simulated like real life, you’d never get to the next stage
Yeah, it would take wayyyyyy too long Hahahah
Waap such a mouth fu
So what about the idea I had about 5 comments up, about the fan made server?
Maybe the amount of change to a creature should also affect how much time has passed once the editor is left. Like changing pigment takes a lot less time then the steps toward establishing sight.
It is quite unrealistic to have a server helping slow computers with simulating as it would have to be powerful enough to run like 100 simulations at once. So almost whatever we got we would run out of resources once the player base grows.
that is why i would still prefer the idea of shared computer recources by the players themselves. when the playerbase grows the recources of the simulating network grows too.
So they have the option of multiplayer and single player?