Ok I’ve made some decisions about this. Feel free to keep suggesting ideas but they won’t make it in until 0.4.2. Here are the ones we’ll save for later, lots of good ideas here:
-
Switching guis. Naro’s concepts are awesome and if there is any chance the gui rendering engine needs to be changed I think we should do that first before committing to a big gui rebuild.
-
Light and darkness: I think there’s 3 great features here, eyespots, biolumiescence and light spots in sunlight patches. I think it makes sense to do this later when we have the biomes already separated and we can have some be dark and others light.
-
Saving: I think it’s up to @hhyyrylainen to decide when this should be tackled as it’s a deep engine issue, feel free to put it in this patch or leave it for later. We can continue to live without it, we could offer little things like maybe a freebuild button in the main menu where you can choose any patch and have unlimited MP in an editor session before starting to play properly. This would mean you could jump to any part of the stage. However clearly we need Saving at some point so maybe now is a good time.
-
Options Menu: I think this matters less than Saving. It would be nice to have a discussion of options that would be in the options menu to know how much they would make things better.
-
More multiplayer: What hh has done is awesome and doing more is a huge amount of work. Multiplayer is a great thing and it’s awesomeness to effort ratio is actually quite low I think.
-
Fluid drag based on shape: I am not sure about this as I’m not sure we want every cell to end up cigar shaped, I guess this is realistic but might make the game too uniform, crazy shapes are quite cool I think, not sure, open to discussion. I think the fluid drag based on size we have now might be better.
-
Environmental changes over time: this is a great and important feature and I think we need to sort out the patch map first before getting into it.
-
Clade diagrams: this is a relatively straightforward bolt on once the patches are seperated
-
Other features: Visual improvements, cilia, viruses, appearance tab, environmental oxygen and co2 levels (I think we should leave this until we have a basic patch map working before linking it to the processes), organelle upgrades, process panel, fluid dynamics, toggle clouds on and off (I’m not sure about this), having contextual organelle unlocking (like absorb a photosynthetic bacteria to get chloroplasts) this is cool and best saved I think, multi-nucleus cell (sounds cool as a late microbe stage feature)
Here are ones we’ll put in 0.4.1, I think it’s a decent chunk of work but not ridiculous:
-
Interactable iron rocks for iron respirators to use. One problem this helps with is getting life to spread out through the ocean more easily which is nice to have. We need to discuss the precise details a bit.
-
Overhaul cell death mechanics + first step towards osmoregulation as discussed here
-
Basic pilus, as a community favourite, with cell walls giving you extra defences to it. We may need to start on an appearance tab for selecting your cell wall, not sure.
-
Pause game when entering menu, not sure if this is already done.
-
Start as a single hex of cytoplasm, add a prokaryote version of the chemoplast (otherwise life will not last long!) and lock the membrane bound organelles until you have a nucleus. I hope we can avoid making copies of every organelle for prokaryotes, I’d like to not have too many duplicates though having some is cool.
-
Add patch map with species spreading. I think there’s two pieces here, I think we should make 1 map and build all the mechanics required for that (different species stored in a binary tree and different conditions per patch based on location, splitting and moving species between patches etc) and then after this, if there is time, build the procedural generator to make many maps. The generator is something we should 100% do but it may have to wait until next patch depending on how long this all takes.
-
Get the particleFX plugin working if we can and experiment with adding particles to the game.
Work on moving towards a more solid game by:
-
Modulating game difficulty: including making some biomes harder than others, decreasing compound availability over time, more aggressive predators and more frightened prey when appropriate. The hardest patches should have scarce resources and aggressive predators, though also there should be easier, more relaxed areas too.
-
Tackle organelle gluttony and over-viability of basic builds: make sure that having too many organelles is clearly bad and also make sure having too few becomes unworkable over time. I think reducing compound clouds over time (esp. glucose) will help and separating biomes will help reduce energy sources. Also chloroplasts may need a nerf to maybe slow you down, maybe switch to drag per hex rather than drag per organelle? Also more balancing of energy production so having a large cell is very costly.
-
Slight movement rebalance to make flagella more impactful though it seems we’re in a pretty good place with this already.
-
Rebalance time to reproduce: change phosphate and ammonia availability, balancing Nitrogen Fixing Plastid, add reproduction progress bar while swimming.