Will multicellular stage be open world (generated of course) or will it use patch maps like Microbe stage is? Will it switch from patch map to open world when it switches from 2D to 3D?
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It will probably switch to open world when it goes to 3d. Patch maps are more necessary for the cellular stage because cells are too small to travel across such distances in their lifetimes. Whereas say something like a lion can travel across many different biomes in its lifetime. Now when we talk about a 2d multicellular stage or semi 3d multicellular stage where the multicellular life is still quite small and is mainly focused on building of tissues, then I don’t really know. One idea that would be cool would be a mix there, like you can travel to variations within your patch, but to get a completely different environment, you still need to travel across patches
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I think even in later multicellular it’ll probably depend on how we want to do it:
- We could have a quite a big planet where you can freely move around (would also be useful for the space stage)
- Or we could have really realistic sized biomes
If we were to go with the latter a patch map would still be necessary as no player would have the patience to otherwise move to different biomes (and also we might just be technically also unable to make an open world work with such large biomes).
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A workaround for this would be to load the chunks as your creature goes into them, and exits them.
For a whole planet simulation, we need to probably keep things around in a spherical space. We can’t do the exact trick of assuming an infinite flat world that can be made out of chunks that can be loaded and unloaded as the player moves.
Reassembly can have a 400x (1000 with mods) map and uses patches (though not in the Thrive way) and when a player is 3-5 patches away from a patch, all entities are stored in memory but aren’t rendered.
Factory Ships still make ships and battles still happen, it just isn’t rendered and comes down to number crunching when the player isn’t in view.
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This is something brilliant that I did not think of, although the planet will not seem to be a sphere while on it (Unless your at extreme altitudes), it will actually be a sphere, like earth! This may be a question that deserves its own thread, but…will gravity increase/decrease the higher/lower you are on a planet? And how will this affect mobility/organisms that live there?
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What about No Mans Sky. Even from the beginning it had an open world.
Isn’t their approach that they dynamically generate more and more detail the closer to the planet you surface you are? I don’t know how big their planets are, but I think they could get away with really huge planets as they don’t need to store that much data per planet (probably just a seed number and a list of any terrain changes the player has made).
maybe, as an option, make a procedurally generated map of biomes, which, depending on the conditions, could change? That is, at first there is a normal such map of biomes, but then, for example, a cooling occurs and everything changes
of course, one could try to generate only the relief at the very beginning, and then, together with auto-evo, calculate the movement of lithospheric plates, and let the biomes themselves be created by life from this planet, but, it seems to me, such is even the most powerful computer that currently exists , in the presence of the normal size of the planet, will not pull 
I assume that, at some point, the current patch system will be partially or completely replaced with a proper world map, with a randomly generated planet and geological history*. How exactly is this world map going to work?
I can see a world map running on some sort of coordinate system, but that would make it a lot harder to simulate… well, anything. It would be a lot easier to give the player a selection of patches at interesting points on the world map, but doing that would, in turn, reduce fidelity to real life, and would make spawning fossil fuels in the Industrial stage much more difficult.
*On the geology front - is there going to be a time limit on the planet’s lifespan? The Earth’s oceans will boil in about 1b years, and life first appears in the geological record around 4.7b years ago, so someone who dilly-dallies in the Microbe stage, where every step is 250 or 500myr, don’t remember exactly, might end up running down a lot of that timespan. Would that be a game over?
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Evolutionary step in the microbe stage is only 100 million years, so I don’t think we need to worry about that.
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I moved this post to this thread as the current plan is that microbe stage will forever be patch map based, but the later game will probably move to some other way to represent the map. So even once we get a planet simulation going, the player will play on a patch map representation of that world in the microbe stage.
Exactly, things are basically calculated to take as long as on earth as 20-ish generations is 2 billion years, which is about the planned max duration of the microbe stage.
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What will happen if someone hits the max duration while they’re still a prokaryote?
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There’s a separate thread talking about the player running out of time:
but tl;dr; my opinion:
We’ll need to handle it carefully, and I’m of the opinion now that at least on easy mode we need to waive any time limits so that the game doesn’t end before the player manages to complete it (again at least on easy difficulty, and even on medium I think the time limit needs to be very generous).
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I don’t think there should be a hard limit on up until when can you evolve as a microbe, you should be able to theoreticaly last until your star scorches your planet.
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Isn’t that contradictory? If there is a limit for when the star destroys your planet that’s like 60 generations or so, so there is a hard limit on the max generations if you “last until your star scorches your planet.”
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I was reffering to this:
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Oh right, yeah I’m not planning on adding a time limit that arbitrarily forces the player out of the stage, even if they have played longer than the stage “should” take.
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PlanetSmith was able to create chunk based generation on a spherical planet.
Also, as long as the world ends spectacularly. I don’t mind having a hard or soft limit before your sun explodes. As long as you’re not forced out a stage.
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