Will multicellular be open world or patch map based?

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?

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 :face_in_clouds: :pleading_face: