I realized that I didn’t yet make a thread for this after 1.0.0 was released yesterday.
I don’t really have anything to add yet (other than I’ve been trying to fix “small” bugs today that were reported after the release and looking through new reports). But I thought I’d make this thread anyway so people have some place to discuss this.
Once I’m back from the Christmas break next year, I think we’ll need to have some pretty hardcode discussion threads about what is the most important new things to do for multicellular first and then I’ll get started on those. I’ve yet to set a release date for 1.0.1 or 1.1.0 (I’m not sure yet how big the first release should be) but I’m thinking along the lines of February or March 2026 might be good.
But in the meantime what are other people planning to do for the next release?
One thing that jumps to my mind is that it would be ideal to have a good representative starting point of the Multicellular Stage developers can jump to. We thankfully have the free build tool already, but the cells there start with hydrogenosomes, which does not represent the energy balance of the average playthrough multicellular starting point (aerobic respiration).
So if it can be made so that the multicellular free build tool starts with a preset amount of oxygen in patches, I think that would be very beneficial going forward. Designers can obviously have a save ready for testing something multicellular, but that would be very world specific.
Beyond that - there are obviously larger design questions to be had, but I think we can make sure that the multicellular isn’t painful right now. For example, two things that jump to my mind are making sure that colonies aren’t moving like molasses, and making sure timed reproduction isn’t way too long. Targeting a 2-3 minute lifespan I think would be ideal.
Firstly I’ll continue working on the general re-balance of auto-evo that I am working on. As we are moving into Multicellular, I think it’s important to make sure that auto-evo positively evaluates the developments necessary to get to the point that life can enter the Multicellular Stage. (mid-size eukaryotes) For the same reason, I want to take a look again at making the nucleus itself more useful.
For Multicellular Stage design, I think it would be nice if we can distil a semi-definitive design out of what Deus and I have been working on over in the concept thread. If we can agree on what should actually be done at all, we can go from there to decide on what should be implemented first. I think it would also be very useful at this point to have some programmer input there on what is actually feasible, especially considering our ambitious time schedule.