Biomes

crodnu · December 31, 2016, 12:54am

I just finished a basic implementation of biomes in the game, and we were wondering in the slack what exactly should the biomes do or represent or have.
So far i made it so that each biome has a different amoun of compounds, and different values of sunlight or temperature (which should later be involved in photosyntesys and thermoplast magic)

tjwhale · December 31, 2016, 11:24am

Awesome! That’s really cool. I’ll be back on slack tomorrow night and will have a proper read then.
IMO build something you think is cool, don’t worry too much about what I think!
I was thinking about this last night and this post is mostly what I’ve been wondering about. I think the pictures basically say it all.

So basically the microbe stage is meant to last like 1 billion years in an ocean. So it would be cool to have a representation of an ocean. We could go for realism but I think schematic will be nice and approachable and gamey. The patches / biomes are then distributed in the ocean.

Patches near the surface of the ocean have a lot of sunlight, those near the bottom have basically none. The abyss is completely black and requires bioluminescence. The ocean vent patch has Hydrogen Sulfide and none of the other patches do.

Then have species in the patches. That would be a great start, with everything fixed in place. Allow the player to spread their species to multiple patches.

What would be awesome, IMO, after that would be to have the climate change over time. So I wrote this prototype for planet generation

github.com

Revolutionary-Games/thrive-prototypes/blob/master/Planetary_Model/planet_generator.cpp

#include <iostream>
#include <math.h>
#include <random>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

bool const ExtraDetail = true; //print light spectra and habitable zone calcs

//in this program 0 = randomly generate an answer, 1 = False and 2 = True

//list of constants
double const GravitationalConstant = 6.674e-11; // Newtons Meters^2 / kg^2
double const LuminosityOfOurSun = 3.846e26; //watts
double const MassOfOurSun = 1.989e30; //kg
double const RadiusOfOurSun = 6.96e8; //meters
double const RadiusOfTheEarth = 6.371e6; //meters
double const Stephan = 5.67e-8; // Watts meters^-2 Kelvin^-4 constant
int const LengthOfArrays = 50;
double const hc = 1.98e-25; //planks constant time speed of light
double const hc2 = 5.95e-17; //planks constant times speed of light squared

This file has been truncated. show original

Which is a bit of a monster but basically should do everything for you. So it will create that big struct called “GeneratedSystem” which contains all the info on the star and the planet. Then, over time, if you vary the oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere you can call “SetPlanetTemperature” over time. This will let you know how the temperature is changing with the atmospheric gasses.

If the temperature goes below 273.15 K ( 0 degrees celsius ) then freeze the oceans over and dramatically reduce the amount of sunlight in all patches (image 2).

A carbon cycle could move carbon from the ocean to the lithosphere, from the lithosphere to the atmosphere (volcano) and from the atmosphere to the ocean (when it is not frozen over). This way, when the planet freezes, over time carbon dioxide will pool in the atmosphere (because it can’t get from there back into the ocean when it is frozen) and that will help to thaw the planet with a greenhouse effect.

Anyway yeah that’s as far as I got with it. I wanted to put some sliders into the planet generator prototype so that the player could set certain values (like the mass of the star) if they wanted, or they could choose the earth, or they could have a random planet.

I also thought it would be really cool to have a way of loading exo-planet data in. So basically have a big file with the info in the “GeneratedSystem” struct but for loads of different, real planets. And then the player could load one of those and attempt to live on it. Of course the game will be impossible if there is no ocean (temp > 373.15) and will be a bit lame if the planet is permanently frozen over (temp < 273.15) you’ll have to live by an ocean vent and have no other choices as photosynthesis won’t work. However if it’s in the habitable zone some of the time then it will be a good place to live.

Hope this isn’t too overwhelming! Basically do what you like, these are just things I was playing around with. I hope the planet generator prototype is useful, it’s really good at calculating planetary temperature (and light spectra). Even something as simple as “climate changes over time” → “potential freezing over” → “saved by carbon cycle pooling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” would be super awesome.

So yeah do what you want with it! Just a basic, static, layout of the patches would be cool as a start IMO.

NickTheNick · January 4, 2017, 4:46am

Additionally, this page of the wiki may be useful for you:

http://thrivegame.wikidot.com/gdd-microbe:appendices

In the biomes table you can see the different planned biomes and the features of each one. Ideally it should include all of them, but recently we’ve talked a lot about biomes so there might be some new ones we talked about not on there.

crodnu · January 4, 2017, 4:54am

Thanks! There is the tidepool biome to include in the game, the other two are already there. Also the list is missing the abyss biome and the tutorial biome in the game (btw what does the tutorial biome represent? Mid ocean?)

NickTheNick · January 4, 2017, 5:13am

I think the tutorial biome is just a remnant of the earlier versions of the game, I’m not actually sure what biome it is, but I think mid-ocean is a good guess.

Also that’s a good point, I’ll see if I can find any discussions on the forums or slack regarding the abyss biomes and other biomes and add it to that wiki page. In the meantime feel free to fudge the numbers as you want, we can always come back to it later and tweak the settings to more realistic/agreed-upon values.