A Comprehensive Concept for the Macroscopic Editor

[Deus]

@Rathalos

(future Rathalos here: seems like in the end this boiled down to a lot of disagreements on the design, but it’s all constructively intentioned!)

Unfortunately for you I am butthurt /s

@Rathalos

I think both of these point towards saying for temperature effects we can look at just SA:V

I think that’s a fair point, and simplifies things a lot more instead of having to balance two different complex stats pointing in different ways.

@Rathalos

The trick with sail-like structures (also from what we know from animals today) is that they indeed by default increase heat loss, but by correctly angling them to catch the sun, they can also absorb more heat. (external heat being the second source of heat besides metabolism).

That is a good point, and it slipped my mind that Dimetrodon evolved a sail to assist in warming up as they start the day alongside cooling down in extreme heat. I still think that higher SA:V should generally reduce tolerance to cold just based off the fact that structurally, thinner objects are much more likely to freeze thoroughly and snap in colder environments.

But that does present an interesting divergence. Perhaps some sort of adaptation can incline SA:V to being better for heat tolerance, maybe related to a skin attribute? Not sure on the specifics, but I think that can be represented through a sort of unique adaptation, and by default, SA:V counteracts heat.

@Rathalos

Taking everything I said before together, I think I have a counter-proposal that also fixes the scaling concerns:

(assuming temperature tolerance works more or less as it does now in Thrive)

I think I understand what you’re getting at, though we would want to make sure this is clear to the player and provide a clear indicator of what is causing a greater effect of SA:V on temperature tolerance.

Related to SA:V being more important for gigantotherms - perhaps the SA:V effect on temperature is tempered by mass, so that a lower mass provides a weaker coefficient, whereas a higher mass provides a stronger coefficient? That way, the extremely low mass progenitor has almost no temperature effect from SA:V, while more progressed organisms will have to worry about it a bit more.

@Rathalos

As I alluded to before, we also want to consider how temperature tolerance should work at all in Macroscopic. For example, our current maximum temperature tolerance is rather high and not so believable for complex life, as I think you also realised:

I do think there will have to be some need to shrink environmental tolerance ranges from the extremes at the Microbe Stage. I think control related to manually sliding tolerances and ranges should be reduced in their impact since physical adaptation becomes much more important at macroscopic scales (though we do want to include the possibility of adaptations like anti-freeze and such).

If I understand your point correctly, hopefully the following is a suggestion instead of just re-stating what was already said - think instead of the sliders setting your tolerance, any sort of slider should nudge your tolerance. So instead of your tolerance slider being “I want to set my tolerance at 5 Degrees C”, it’s more “I’m adjusting my slider to have 5 Degrees C more tolerance towards the cold at the cost of 5 Degrees less tolerance to heat”.

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You bring up good points related to the movement conversation, though I do want to respond to them later since I feel that’s a much more involved topic.