Cell Specialisation and the Dimensional Shift

[Buckly]

@hhyyrylainen

I’d prefer it to be explicit “go to next stage”, like an additional button that appears above the normal editor button, to highlight that something big is going to change.
Though, if the early multicellular editor is simple enough and doesn’t yet the force the player to, it might be fine to not tell the player. But then the explicit new button would also serve as a way to tell the player “hey, your colony is big enough now”. And also the idea is that the editor button is explicitly disabled (cells won’t grow) in a colony.
So all in all, I think that a separate, go to multicellular stage button is better.

Hmm curious, I was under the impression that such an explicit “advance” button was unwanted so I was thinking of ways to avoid having such a thing. It’s a little on the nose, but having such an alternate button reveal itself when the time comes would be fine by me.

@hhyyrylainen

I have a problem with this: the later sculpting of tissues, is really different from placing single cells. I think the hex layout (where each hex represents a cell, or maybe multiple hexes for bigger cells?) is preferrable to not require us to write an intermediate editor. Though, we might have to do this anyway if we want to have different cell types take different amount of space.

I was thinking that the single cells would be converted to tissues once you hit that point but I am not confident about how that would work out.
You are right about avoiding making a specialized “intermediate” editor but it is also important to consider that a hex layout might be rather awkward in a 3D environment as opposed to 2D. This is certainly something to be discussed in greater detail eventually.

@hhyyrylainen

The early multicellular species will still be rendered as individual cells, so this is not a concern really. At that point we’ll have the working cell rendering code which will be used.

My concern here was that the player’s cell could take on many shapes and sizes which wouldn’t fit into a uniform grid. Of course, I now realize that the current cells do infact already fit into a uniform grid (atleast in 2D) so I suppose this is a moot point.

@hhyyrylainen

Will creating the cell types be the third tab then?

My idea is to basically allow the player to enter the microbe editor and edit the chosen cell directly via clicking tabs/buttons located near or on each icon representing a cell. This is exactly like the tissue editor I proposed for aware, and effectively mirrors the other in function. The only difference is that you will be placing single cells instead of tissue. I am unsure what making a new tab for this would achieve. Unless you mean a new evolution screen tab, and not just an editor tab specifically.

@hhyyrylainen

I think this should be coupled with the change to tissue types. So once the player hits a thresshold of cells in their body plan, they’ll have a button to go macroscopic. This is because I still fear that our cells will never fully look good from all angles. So to me it makes very much sense that you would couple moving to 3D with switching to tissue editing.

Hmmm if I recall correctly, Narotiza may have pondered a bit on a way we could have visible cells in a larger multicellular critter.
We could potentially “cheat” a bit and give the organism’s parts a bumpy texture that would effectively mimic the appearance of a large amount of cells in a cluster, while remaining as one physics body, bone, joint, whatever. The effectiveness of this would definitely depend on the talent of our artists though. Infact, I think I actually saw a graphics artist post a 3D texture of something exactly like this a while back before disappearing into the void, and I cannot for the life of me find it.

Edit: Narotiza Found it.