0.4.3 Features Discussion Thread

Ok I hope everyone has had a chance to contribute, seems like a good time to boil this down into a plan.

  1. Gui. Lets move to the new design which looks awesome and get that change finished. Also re tutorials and player support I think the tooltips are really helpful there so I think it would make sense to do dynamic tooltips which recalculate what they say based on patch conditions and maybe warn the player if an organelle is useless. Lets put Nick’s energy bar in the editor too which shows how much energy you are producing vs how much you are using when still or moving, I think that will help a lot with cell design. That would get the gui into a really good place I think. The reproduction progress bar has been a big success so good job everyone there.

  2. Let’s have a final discussion about species splitting and moving patches, resolve that and then implement it so we have AI species migration. We’re all largely on the same page I think we just need to boil down what we have into a set of mechanics we can implement. I think re auto-evo we should keep discussing it and try and make some prototypes for getting it working, I don’t think we’re ready now to implement this release.

  3. Lets get the basic pilus in, lets teach the AI to use it and then balance that combat. I think it would be good to continue the agents discussion and if there is time finish that and implement the cloud based agents (though I doubt there is time for that). The X’s are a bit of a problem late game and so moving on from that would be great.

  4. Several people have brought up that compounds are too abundant from dead cells late game. I think we should address that by working on the AI to teach it to stop moving when it’s low on ATP, get it to more actively seek out energy sources and get small cells to run away more effectively. Also we should change the spawn system so giant clouds of large Eukaryotes are rare (though they are great occasionally). I think Lysosomes could have a place in that so lets keep discussing them, we need a good design for them. We can also reduce the speed of cells being engulfed.

  5. Lets work on the star and planet generation, get some gui for that made and then discuss what sort of disasters we want and how we want the planets to evolve over time. I’m hopeful I can do most of the implementation on that.

  6. hh your list of small features looks nice to put in for when people are looking for something. Also your personal todo list looks cool, it would be great if you could put pilus relatively high up on it.

  7. Re backgrounds I think it’s cool if we can improve them, I think we need a bit of a plan of how we’re going to do that, I’m not sure what the options are so it’s great if anyone wants to work on them and maybe experiment with what is possible. For example if we want dynamic things it would be nice to work out what and prototype it. Hopefully the star and planet stuff might give us the ability to do procedural lighting which might be cool, though I am concerned it might come up with crazy colours.

  8. Sound: if anyone wants to work on sound feel free.

  9. I think gato said they are working on an appearance tab so that’s a cool thing to include too.

  10. I think we should have a discussion about bio-luminescence, how should it work, can we do glowing clouds, what should the mechanics be, does it tie in with the eyespot etc.

This is quite a lot in the end so we may not get through it. It’s fine to push stuff we don’t have time for I think.

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