So to kick off the Thread of the Week [TOTW] discussions I thought a reasonable one might be to mirror a discussion we are having on the dev forum at the moment. Feel free to post in this thread:
Which features are you most excited about for the microbe stage?
Which features do you think we should be prioritising now? Remember we are looking for features which have a good effort to awesomeness ratio, so if it’s easy to make and is going to make a big difference then it’s a good thing to focus on now. Feel free to suggest anything even if it’s a lot of work though as everything which is reasonable can be considered.
It’s great to get the communities input on things like this as there’s often good ideas so thanks for any contributions in advance. Please don’t spam this thread, if you want to get deeply into discussion about one specific idea it would be a good idea to make a thread about it elsewhere (after looking to check if there is one already, of course).
Predatory pilus, aswell as cell walls which could proove defensive
And maybe sorta kinda sorta fix the multiplayer, I wanna destroy ensyn’s species
Perhaps in the future the possibility for dedicated servers focused on a stage (since a spaceman and a microbe dont exactly interact much with one another)
2 Likes
Biologicah
(Only occasionally interested in Thrive)
4
Based on my experience, the ability to toggle the ability to see clouds on/off. It adds a fun bit of challenge when you can’t see the clouds, having to mouse around to find them.
Could always try implementing the organelles in Untrusted’s “suggest your own unique organelles n stuff” thread.
Few thing, which i would like, is way of getting some extra ATP, at a “something” cost
Secondly, would be turning movement, flagella are slow to turn, hope cilia would be added.
Ability to upgrade organelles would be nice, like faster flagella.
Like “Who changed my nickname” said, ability to switch of visibily of clouds or a Thrive hard mode.
Finally, ocean currents, that sometimes pull u to another patch or biome or somewhere in your patch,
they should be random and change over time.
Multiplayer is still quite a way off. For now I’m done working on it so unless someone comes along to work on it, this is the state it is going to be in for a long time:
Basically only cell movement is shared, nothing else is shared, and even that has some engine issues where those clients would disconnect if I hadn’t disabled error checking.
One thing I’d like to see is aerodynamics. If I remember correctly, it was planned to be added in 0.3.4, but was scrapped. Currently, it’s a pretty strong tactic to just make your cell as wide as possible and “vacuum clean” the clouds, since the width and length doesn’t matter for your speed. If a system like aerodynamica is added, you’d actually need to balance out your cloud-gathering vs your speed.
A possible way to do this is to check how thick your cell is, and how big the steps are each time is goes 1 down.
(Using squares because it’s simpler and paint doesn’t have hexagons turned the way they are in Thrive)
(If it goes 1 down and 0 to the left/right, it will count as a 0 wide step.)
I like playing wide, I almost always make a big delta wing cell for nomming clouds. I agree though a simple drag calculation would be pretty interesting. Would it result in all cells looking a bit similar, i.e. cigar shaped? Another issue is the AI would need to be taught to use it and make reasonable cells.
Multiplayer is awesome and can add a huge amount to games. However I think it’s an ultra-huge amount of work to get it running well and keep it running so it’s effort to awesomeness ratio isn’t that high. For that reason it’s hard to prioritize it. What hhyyrylainen has done so far is awesome and I agree with him that we’d need some enthusiastic networking people to come along to really make it worth it. Also servers cost money to keep running.
Yeah we have bacteria now and tardigrades will come in the multicellular, it looks like moulds are multicellular too. As for viruses one question is how to represent them. So are they so big the player can see them which is a bit unrealistic but quite cool, or are they too small to see but are a cloud, or something else? Also what would they do to your cell? If they are instant death that’s not very fun, maybe they hijack you a bit or something?
Additional stuff for turning is an interesting idea, I think the plan is cillia could make you faster at turning. Also there could be multple types of flagella maybe, some which use more power but make you even faster.
I’m not sure about toggling clouds but in the abyss you might not be able to see much at all so that might have a similar vibe. That’s until you get bioluminescence of course, which I am really looking forward to.
Lots of support for the pilus which is cool, I’m excited for that too. Hopefully it’ll make combat more dynamic.
Right now in the current code the area around you in which you can grab compounds is based on the distance of the farthest organelle from the center of your cell. So you need to just build one “spike” to have a huge compound grab radius.
We need a saving/loading feature! Perhaps like the one in Skyrim or XCOM : Enemy Unknown.
EDIT #1 :
More explained description of organelles. I mean, some of them are complicated. Maybe there could be an in-game “wiki” that would explain biochemistry, chemistry and biology notions and/or that would explain the related process and the description.
EDIT #2 : It would very cool if the game would really pause when we “pause” the game. Because it’s not the case right now.
EDIT #3 : The game would support AMD and, thus making chemical compound clouds visible.
What about random environment situation? for example temeprature variation, amount of solar energy, and other different types of particles that can modify evolution but so force you do go in different ways, or you can resist by moving around and escape, so some kind of strategic decision about what to do
Foreground texturing. Like the background, a few translucent layers above the layer of microbes and compounds.
More active differences between biomes. Right now the only difference is the background, but I assume it’s not too difficult to change individual compound spawn rates for each biome. This should make the game more tactical as players can choose to stick with a biome or change to a new one, even if this switching system is overhauled by a patch-based system in future.
Persistant light spots. Chloroplasts in these light spots would work more quickly. Could also be tied to the above as they’d be more common in lighter biomes.
Bioluminescent organelles. We already have the editor icon for them, and while they don’t serve a gameplay purpose yet, it would be a cool visual addition to cells.
Bump up the role of cell inertia and change how fast cells can move with and without flagella. At the moment there’s little advantage to adding flagella as the speed difference isn’t considerable. I would like to see it so that flagella-less cells are more or less stationary, at least at some point. Until currents are added this wouldn’t be fun at all, so for now cells should still move at some rate without flagella, but only with flagella will they actually be able to turn and move effectively.
More readability of reproduction and health. There’s very little going on to tell me how close I am to entering the editor unless I watch all my organelles closely.
2 Likes
Biologicah
(Only occasionally interested in Thrive)
16
What even is the purpose of bioluminescence in microbiology terms?
In not-microbiology, iirc they’re for ambush purposes, and perhaps mate attracting. Would it be the same in microbiology?
Actually bioluminescent organelles would be good if: you could attract other creatures (maybe ones who have chloroplasts and need light) , provide light in the abyss or something (unlikely since cells dont have eyes) or it could be useful in later stages so you can make a firefly or angle fish
(on a side note i was reading the wiki and it said in the future you could customize cell appearence with color so when that and bioluminescent organelles are implemented maybe you could have colored light)
