I think we should have different names for general in game help encyclopaedia detailing what organelles do, tips etc. and another for viewing data about the current game the player is playing, their species, other species, the planet etc.
We could steal the names from civ and have Thriveopedia and maybe something like Catalogue of Life (which is an actual website) or something like Current universe (which would cover everything the later stages unlock information about).
I think as microbes can’t really draw maps the map should be like a connected graph of different biomes the player can move between.
So there would be squares with images of the biome backgrounds and lines between them. That would be enough of a map for cell stage and early multicellular. And as a plus it wouldn’t reveal information useful for later stages that the player can’t find out by moving between biomes as a microbe.
Perhaps the playthough-unspecific things should be in Help or the Thrive Guide or whatever, and info about the current universe, the planet and species and such, could go in Statistics. They’re two completely different things, so I think they should be in separate places.
This is an idea worth investigating. Basically you‘re suggesting something between what I proposed and what TJ proposed in his old thread. If I understand you correctly this system could in earlier releases stand on its own, the game would just generate a grid of biomes. In (much) later releases that feature an actual heightmap of the planet the game could check which biomes have a border to one another and create a grid based on this information. I made an exapamle of such a grid and the schematic map that this grid would be based on:
This approach, however, poses some problems:
A large benefit of this grid „map“ would be that biomes that are on top of one another could be represented more easily. The ocean surface biome is linked to the twilight zone, which in turn is linked to the deep ocean.
All of this feels quiet speculative at the moment. I don‘t even think it‘s clear yet how exactly biomes will be implemented (exept for the various nice backgrounds, which are already in the game.)
I don’t think it will be possible to have a very huge number of neighbouring biomes. So if the graph is circles that are on a 2d plane and can move freely it should be possible to clearly display a whole planet that has a reasonable number of smallish biomes. Perhaps looking like this:
For that we can represent that as weights on the vertices between the biomes, and a higher weight would indicate that it’s easier to move to that biome, which would be calculated from the amount of shared border, currents etc. Basically I want the biomes to be a mathematical (unfortunately the wikipedia article has no graphs with weights) graph that is displayed graphically to the user.
As was mentioned I think it’s actually quite important to distinguish the Help/Game Rules/Thrivepedia from the stats of your current playthrough info (Statistics?/Demographics?), because they are quite different topics.
The map idea is good for later in the game with the discovery of cartography and then later with Satellites/GPS. I think the node web that hhyyrylainen suggested is a good idea, because it will show you the biomes and how they are connected without giving away geographical info that you don’t have. And yeah we’ve got to find a way to calculate which biomes are connected to which to display that graphically.
@hhyyrylainen That looks awesome, that type of layout would be perfect for presenting the biomes/patches to the player in the early stages. That screen may also be needed after reproducing, if the player chooses to migrate their species to a neighbouring biome before spawning.
I agree with Nick on pretty much everything. I think a node web is a great way to represent the planet’s biomes without revealing the its geography.
I like his reproducing idea too; would it let you spawn in a biome where your species isn’t present at, or one where they couldn’t survive? Or would it restrict you to the biomes your species already exists in, and it’s up to you to adapt your species to those environments in order for them to migrate there automatically? Or would it be manual?
May i suggest that we move the biome discussion to the biome thread so it doesn’t clutter this thread?
Alright, in that case don‘t mind the ? symbol in some of the images. If we‘re going to put those two things in seperate places we‘ll have to figure out how to access which. I‘m going to look at the GUI of the current game to suggest a place to put the two menus (I think we already have a very tiny help/? window, don‘t we?) For that, I‘m going to have to actually play the game again some time.
I think the plan is that Statistics will be a Bar Graph icon on the UI, and the Thrivepedia will replace the Help icon and be shown as a question mark or book icon.
This is a great idea. I like how you included the species names. We do have a faux Latin name generator already. It just isn’t used for much.
One thing I hope for is something like a Clade diagram.
Yes, I’ve already planned a Tree of Life for the encyclopedia, I‘ll draw it once I‘ve got enough free time on my hands. Could you give me a link to our name generator? I didn‘t know we had one, but that sounds awesome!
I believe Nick already has a tech tree concept but also not sure if it’s been updated with new ideas or how old it is. In my opinion every conceivable technology that could be developed would only increase the potential for unique game experiences, even a period where your species has to develop simple tools as a way to flow into the later aware stage until you form an early society structure that continues to grow.
I’m curious, will the encyclopedia include humorous random descriptions about certain things like (landmasses, rocks, resources, etc) when your creature reaches enough mental development to know these things or they are discovered? Will the player be able to put in their own description and name for species and other discoveries they find along their journey through thrive?
I believe Nick already has a tech tree concept
A tech tree isn‘t what I was thinking about tho. I believe untrustedlife was talking about a tree diagram which shows how species would be related to one another.
This sounds very entertaining. Potential names & descriptions include:
HolyShitMonster - “Giant predatory terror that ate 3 of my 4 children”
TastyGreenThing - “IDK, some type of lettuce?”
CuteFluffyMeatball - “Like a tripedal rabbit”
Would be highly entertaining to be able to name and describe. First we need the faux scientific names back, i put an individual named citrusite on it, they haven’t gotten back to me in awhile so I might just go ahead and write it unless we get a new programmer some time soon.
Well thats all back in now.
I wonder if we can get a rudimentary version of this in for 0.4.1 ?
That’d be pretty cool and it’d really help to tie the game together, but it feels like 0.4.1 would be too early for this sort of thing, since there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be refined/working beforehand, like patches.
Here’s a quick concept I made of the different “layers” of the statistics menu, mostly based on the work @MirrorMonkey2 has been doing in this thread, which has been pretty nice so far.
I’d be interested to know if others agree but a principle I quite like is that “in each stage you should only have access to info your creature has.”
I think it’s quite a good principle because it means that discoveries can be made later in the game. The first creatures that get above the sea can look up and maybe see the moon or a gas giant the planet orbits. In the society stages you can discover and unknown continent and astronomers can discover what planets there are in your system etc.
So for example a microbe could know it’s patch’s: temperature, salinity, alkalinity, light level, light spetrum, other species living there etc. However it wouldn’t be able to know: the size of the patch, the absolute location of other patches in relation to this one etc.
Which I think means maybe it’s worth having a patch diagram which is quite abstract rather than geographic. So rather than showing you where they are in relation to each other it shows more which ones are neighbours (so you know where you can move) and the local conditions of each one. Like mirror monkey’s blocky one above is great because it’s just giving you the info you have access to, however I think a map is too much info.
I guess on the other side I do really like clade diagrams for keeping track of the species and maybe it’s unreasonable for microbes to have that but I think they add a lot.
I like your idea of having something hierarchical @Narotiza, that makes a lot of sense for organising the info.
This is exactly what I want. Starting with limited info and then giving the player more will be more interesting than the player having tons of stuff to look through as soon as they start and then not getting anything new to look at for the rest of the game.
