With a release out again, it is time to make another of these release planning threads.
There’s not been that much feedback yet on the community forums:
But I know that the guidance lines broke again and display as black, again for no apparent reason. So once I’m done with the last few bits of Mac support (Launcher signing and releasing a new launcher version in general, which I think I might need to justify a bit by making like at least 1 backlogged thing for the launcher in general) I’ll make a Thrive 0.8.2.1 patch release. That will be in around 2 or so weeks, depending on how fast I get stuff done.
After that I will finally get around to the MP system refactoring and after that it’s probably time for my Thrive break in June (I plan to be away earlier this year so that if we see many people wanting to work on Thrive in July I’ll be around).
Then once I’m back I’ll need some more time to work on any random roadmap items I think are quick to do:
And then 0.8.3 would be good to release in around early / mid August. I’ve created a milestone already and filled it with some leftover stuff that didn’t get done (though I also threw out a lot of leftover stuff into the backlog as many issues have been hanging around for many many releases in the milestones but that hasn’t seemed to make them be more likely to be worked on): https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/milestone/47
So what is everyone planning on working on? And does that schedule for 0.8.3 and the patch release sound reasonable? AFAIK that guidance line bug is the only serious problem in 0.8.2.
One piece of feedback I’ve been seeing a lot from the community is just how much populations crash once players enter a patch. Players will often enter a bustling environment offering lots of interaction options with other microbes, but after three or so generations, will face their own kind and a few smaller microbes as opposed to similar-sized cells.
It’s fine if there is high turnover of species because of the timescales we are representing, but I think players often aren’t seeing similar diversity before and after their arrival at a patch. This also impacts other facets of the game - the player having an outsized impact on their environment for example, being able to basically terraform entire patches reliably and consistently without consideration of the pre-existing lifeforms there.
So that might be an area of pacing in the game which someone more experienced with auto-evo can take a look at. I think increasing the rate of mutation - which was something we discussed in a developer meeting - could be useful.
If you’re looking for things to do here, there are two things which jump to my mind:
Glaciation events which weren’t global but did freeze a lot of the ocean hav happened atleast twice in Earth’s history, so adding an additional freezing event which isn’t but with a higher chance to occur is an option.
That more “hostile” meteor impact event which scrambles compound concentrations could be a nice change of pace from the more beneficial impact events. I remember you asking for more discussion on the topic before implementation, so if there are implementation questions you have, do let me know.
If you have your own ideas though that don’t involve these, then do ignore them! Just wanted to bring up areas of the existing concept which haven’t been addressed yet.
Yeah I’m not an auto-evo expert so I’m really unsure what could be done. Though one thing we don’t want to do is cause species to “churn” even faster (previous species dying out and new ones being created to fill the space), because endosymbiosis is already in the very difficult to pull off category.
I think it would be better for gameplay variety to have at least one new archetype of event, rather than making variants of meteors or glaciation.
By the end of this month I’ll be done with finals and everything, so I will finally be able to devote some time to Thrive. I’ll try and tackle most of the open auto-evo issues, and I can take a look at the auto-evo related game-design problems.
We know of at least one significant part of the problem is that the population is incorrectly calculated when a AI species migrates, resulting in the part of the population that stays in the patch receiving all of the penalty calculated for the population. I have observed it completely eliminating the population in a patch due to this.
Decreasing the Darwinian penalty would also help from what I have seen with a brief test, though a better fix would be to make the penalty scale with the size of the population so that larger organisms are not unfairly penalized by having naturally smaller max population sizes. I think this might be the main problem that causes the populations to crash.
I was discussing this with GameDungeon on the discord a while back (Discord link) but I have not had the opportunity to look into it any further, and I don’t think I can get to it this release cycle.