0.6.1 Release Planning

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With 0.6.0 out now (and a feedback thread open) it’s time once again to talk about the next release. I think we should aim to have 0.6.1 out sometime in February (maybe around the middle?). With me taking last 2 weeks off in December and other people also being seemingly pretty inactive I don’t think there’s any way to squeeze in a small fixing release.

With that preface out of the way, I’ve opened a milestone for 0.6.1 already and I put some stuff from 0.6.0 that didn’t get done in it.

Here’s the milestone: Release 0.6.1 Milestone · GitHub

And here are some of the things I put there for me or other people to work on:

Besides those I’ll be working on:

  • Updating the NetAnalyzers in Thrive to 7.0.0, which results in about 1700 warnings about fields not being disposed. That’s all NodePaths and Godot resources. I’m thinking that should be handled by actually disposing everything properly
  • main menu needs the main news feed in it
  • making menu buttons expand to accommodate really wide translation texts without making the buttons appear uneven
  • popup a warning if Thrive steam initialization fails, right now just outputs message “Failed to init Steam”
  • Thrive package platform handling in PackageTool.cs should be moved to the common file so that people who add new values will realize to add them there as well
    ThriveProperties.GetBasePlatformPartOfFolderName was forgotten, also the steam build handling names should probably go there as well

And if I have any time left over I’ll maybe get back to the prototypes as well if there aren’t other important stuff that keeps popping up / I can get through enough of my long term TODO list.

I did promise we’d also start on the roadmap now. So I think the first about 8 issues (before the toxin customization) could be picked for this milestone:

That might be a bit much but anything that isn’t done will just be moved back to 0.6.2.

So that’s basically from my side all the things related to 0.6.1. Any thoughts about this? And well if there’s anything else you’d like to focus on you can let people know what you are hoping to work on / finish.

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My plan is to wrap up my upcoming designs for an expanded behavior editor and later, the impact of sensory abilities in gameplay.

Once I’m done with that i’ll be taking a good look at our plans for upgrades and unlocks to make sure everything is good, maybe pick out a few upgrades in particular to best showcase the feature as we probably won’t get them all at once.

Finally, I suppose it’s time I start trying to wrap my head around autoevo as currently very few people understand it enough to make meaningful changes.

As for features I would like to see worked on;

I think that the unlocking system is higher on my priority list at the moment as it will go a long way in softening the learning curve for new players.

Other than that I would absolutely love to see @Nunz’s models for iron and salt finally make it into the game. While it’s not the objective of our 0.6.x releases, it would be nice to have some new life breathed into the visual elements of the game.

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I’ll first focus on making sure we understand how to deal with balancing growth while in a colony. We always almost reach a conclusion but then forget about it, so I’ll put it in a thread to make sure our line of though remains.

Then I’ll give some further thought to the environmental tolerance discussion we’ve had recently and make sure it makes sense. After that, I’ll think a bit about making the different membranes a bit more unique in playstyle, continuing a discussion we’ve had on Discord.

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I opened issues for the roadmap items that were still missing and put everything in the milestone. Let me know if I forgot something or if someone wants still to post some feedback about the plan.

Edit: oh and I set the estimated release for 0.6.1 to 18th of February.

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I’m gonna replace the iron chunks, and add some new ones (for the aesthetic)

I also have been transferring all my current 3d membrane code piece by piece to a branch (membrane_overhaul.) That will take probably a month or 2, there are many .cs files, some being failed experiments. It won’t be usable but, it will allow you guys to see exactly why.

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I think I’m just going to keep working on my multiplayer prototype as a fun little side project.

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As usual, my focus would be auto-evo for the time being.

  • I’m still working, slowly but steadily, on evolutionary tree filtering, although I’m struggling with making a user-friendly and broad enough logic for the future. I may be seeing a way out of this though, at least as a temporary step.

  • Otherwise, I’d like to make sure that the auto-evo is up-to-date with new mechanisms (I don’t think anything has been done for mucilage, has it?).

  • Perhaps as a longer-term plan, I’d also like to broaden the scope of auto-evo, moving beyond simply sharing energy between species.

Obviously, all this will be heavily constrained by available time, which has been scarce as of late. Still, fingers crossed for this release!

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I wouldn’t normally post since I don’t expect to contribute to the product directly, but I expect to be able to debut my new auto-evo algorithm by Febuary GitHub - adQuid/Thrive at selection_pressure_based_auto_evo

I’ve noticed an increase in auto-evo among devs recently, but I don’t think there will be much toe-stepping because:
a) Until my code works and is actually brought over to the main repo (which could be a year or never), the current auto-evo is what Thrive has.
b) The new architecture has something pretty analogous to a FoodSource and the lot of the heuristic logic will probably be useful in both algorithms.

Still, if anyone wants to really dig deep into auto-evo, keep in mind we may be in competition :slight_smile:

I’ll also be working on some fork-specific stuff, but I don’t know exactly what that will look like or if it will matter for the project as a whole.

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Considering that there’s a lot of work about auto-evo, I guess during winter vacation I will continue on auto-evo exploring tool, finishing

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