Conveying information about extant species in a patch to the player without a new screen

Copied from slack: One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how we provide , for example species name information to the player (once we get around to re-implementing the scientific name generator we had in about version 3.1 or 3.2 ) should the player know the species that likes eating them is called a “Primum Toxispikeum” or not?

Does it help with immersion to be provide this information?

Does it not?

if it does where do we display it before we add the thrive-pedia. As it’s not very fun to have to open a new screen and search in it for specific species names.

I can see it helping with immersion because you can know a species evolved from another by its genus. And ithe information would be right there.

Do we do it with tooltips? Do we have a little windows with a list of all species currently on screen on it?

Do we only tell the player when they kill one or get killed by one or an event happens? (That species being “devestated by disease” for example. )

So many options.

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I like a lot of these ideas. I agree that it’s a nice immersive feature. I like the idea of tooltips, I like the idea of telling the player when they die who killed them.

With a window on the screen how much real estate would that take up? If it’s not much then it might work.

With telling the player what they just killed how would that be displayed?

Nice ideas :slight_smile:

I’d like to incorporate this into an idea I had before in response to the colour blind mode requests (and helping debug the compound clouds):

(which I totally didn’t open just now)

The best place would be in the thriveopedia once that is done. But I think that hovering over would also be decent. Quite a difficult to implement choice would be to show like a name tag over each cell, but I don’t think that is worth the effort to do.

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I think it would be interesting to give players the ability to name and write notes about the species they encounter instead of us generating that information and giving it to them. Perhaps when they encounter a cell they can click on it and whatever notes they have on the creature show in a small box (not pausing the game) near the cell. If they haven’t written any notes on the species then it does pause the game to allow the player to write what they want. This way the player can write things like “This cell’s toxin is really dangerous. Give it a wide berth.” or “This cell is really fast but not very dangerous. I’d like to find a way to hunt them.” The idea being that this species needs to discover the world and provides an adventure aspect as the player encounters a new species and observes it so that he can write notes. Basically you get to be the scientist watching the world evolve as you evolve with it.

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@andross That does sound like a good idea, however I’m not sure it’d work well in the way you explained. Imagine being in a jungle where, no matter where you put your mouse, it’d be hovering over some random plant, and slightly - but constantly - obscuring your view with a little text box, which would take up even more space if you were to actually give the organism a note. Instead, it might feel less intrusive if it’s somehow combined with the Fossilize feature we have planned, which pauses the game when it’s in use.

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Awesome!
We will also need ui for Oxygen Percentage, and co2 percentage, and the hovering needs to tell you a species name when you mouse over them i think. That seems like a solid solution.