First Impressions on 0.5.1.1

[hhyyrylainen]

@NickTheNick

The hitbox for iron particles should be made smaller. Sometimes I bump into the water around it.

I think right now it is pretty much the best tradeoff that can be made between going inside the iron models vs hitting air around them.
To make the collisions more accurate they would basically need like a convex collision mesh. Though I suppose I should open an issue on github for this:

Change chunk collisions to be convex meshes

@NickTheNick

A few more things should be labelled in the UI. For example, let me see exactly how much Ammonia or Phosphate I have left to collect to reproduce. When I get close to full, I can’t tell if I’m at 99% or 100%. Also, in the editor,

Make the reproduction bar sides individually turn white

@NickTheNick

ATP balance bar so I can only know how much an organelle will change it by placing one and seeing how the bar changes.

Add numbers back to the ATP balance bar

@NickTheNick

The Microbe Stage themes get a little repetitive for me , I think it would be nice to add some new music. Perhaps its because I’ve playtested the Microbe Stage so many times?

@Oliveriver

@NickTheNick

When cells swim through compound clouds, it can look a little weird. I think the pickup range for cells should be a circle not a square.

In the code I think that the grab radius is a circle and should be already in use.

@NickTheNick

Can we make it so the compounds fade out instead of instantly disappearing?

The cells basically have a really fast absorption speed and grab fraction to basically instantly grab compounds underneath.
It used to be so that you would need multiple passes over a cloud to pick up everything. I think there’s a pretty good gameplay reason that the absorption rate was made faster. Though I suppose debuffing the absorb rate would also solve your previous point as well.

@NickTheNick

Also is a way to make it match the shape of the hexagons of the cell?

I suppose it could be but it would make things a lot harder as you would need to compute all the points in cloud local coordinates that are under the cell. Right now the cell radius and center point is used to compute all the points.
This would also probably impact performance quite a bit as the cloud simulation is already the most expensive part.

@NickTheNick

When engulfing, if you touch a target with your membrane their speed should reduce by more. Otherwise I have to evolve to both be larger and considerably faster than my prey, which is hard to do. May need to playtest this one more though to confirm it.

I think we managed to improve this a bit for 0.5.1 as the speed debuff didn’t actually apply in 0.5.0. I suppose with some playtesting the speed debuff could be made even higher. @Buckly ?

@NickTheNick

The tooltip in the top right seems to grossly exaggerate the numbers in the clouds. It’ll tell me there’s thousands of ammonia in a cloud that maybe yields me 4 or 5. Is this a bug? Is this just me?

They are completely different units, cloud density and compound storage are off by factor of at least like 1000.
Not sure how well it could be fixed as the clouds dissipate very fast and move to near by points etc. So if you wanted to accurately calculate what you would get, I think we’d need a sampling method for the points around the cursor and then convert that to the cell storage units.

It’s very difficult, but at the same time other people have also talked about it. I could perhaps open a hard issue for solving this (though nobody please don’t attempt it if you need implementation help as I would need to first implement it myself before being able to guide someone on it, which would be a bit pointless).

@NickTheNick

We should replace the static bubbles with 3D bubbles. With the amount of improvements we’ve made to the visuals, I think the 2D bubbles are one of the vestiges of the old aesthetic that we could do well to finally remove/improve.

You mean in the background layer?

Improve backgrounds

@NickTheNick

I feel like the recent updates have made organelle upgrades more important. I felt the need for organelle upgrades a lot more than in earlier versions. At the moment the only way you can improve your cell is to get bigger. But there is no way to refine your cell while staying the same size, such as by evolving increased efficiency for your existing organelles.

Organelle Upgrades

So organelle upgrades have been discussed a lot in the past, but no finished designs (to my knowledge) have been made. So let’s make a complete design before deciding to include the upgrades in some release. Here’s an older quote about the upgrades: We already have a bunch of organelles added, so it is time to make some designs for upgrades as it seems quite a popular feature.

@NickTheNick

Locked organelles should be hidden. I think this adds to the sense of discovery by only showing unlocked organelles. It also makes the early game easier by reducing the number of organelles the player first sees when first entering the editor.

I can kinda agree with this, but if we do stuff like have photosynthesis and other organelles locked behind being in a specific patch, I’d like the locked organelles to be shown along with how to unlock it.
Right now it’s pretty clear that you need the nucleus.
Also by seeing the organelles locked behind the nucleus you can plan what to get after the nucleus.

@NickTheNick

Let the player see what range of environmental variables they can survive. For example, in the main editor screen there could be a panel showing the range of temperatures, light levels, etc. that you can survive. Then, if I select a patch the temperature should highlight red if it is outside of my tolerable zone. This feature could perhaps be combined with an update that adds organelles for environmental tolerance (like antifreeze proteins).

This is a good idea once those patch conditions are implemented, currently they do nothing.

@NickTheNick

It felt like the AI species were growing far faster than I could hope to compete with. Am I the only one to experience this? Perhaps I could test it more.

Currently the AI gets just a random number added to their population.

@NickTheNick

The list of AI species in a patch can quickly get hard to read when there are a lot of them. I think if you bolded the species name in each line it’d look better.

Artists?