It looks amazing! The only thing I can think of for adding in the feature, besides the point where we try to make them move dynamically, is varied colourations for different species, and allowing the player to change their colouration in the editor. The texture especially looks very nice.
Incredible work! I can’t really tell from the screenshot, but how apparent is the 3D-ness of the cells when playing? Have you made any progress on finding a way to map the flagella to the membrane edge?
The next release is going to be epic.
Well, as I mentioned before, I’m using a colored texture instead of a shader, so it’s not that easy to change the color. But now that I think about it, I guess I could use a black and white texture and then color it in in the .material file.
It’s not apparent at all—the center of the microbe is completely transparent, so you only see a rough outline. But isn’t this how microbes look in real life under a microscope?
I’ll get working on it as soon as I have some free time, but I already have an idea of how this could work.
Edit: Okay, I’ve started working on the flagellum. It seems to be a lot easier than I had originally thought.
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Sorry to revive this thread, but my post is 100% related to this topic, so I didn’t want to start a new one.
Anyway, I was reading this interesting paper about how cells maintain their shape (basically, they have a high pressure on the inside, which inflates them similar to a balloon), and I thought that it would be interesting to code that in c++. Anyway, here is the result after a few hours of tinkering.
Possible improvements that I see: add drag forces to fix the unnatural acceleration (just friction looks really wonky), add springs on the inside that will act as microtubules, giving the cell a nonspherical shape, and allow the membrane to be manipulated by dragging.
Cheers.
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That looks cool.
IMO the trick to the dynamic membrane is going to be doing the calculations for it on the gpu. That way they can be super fast when you have a lot of microbes on screen.
Looks great! Though I do strongly disagree with the idea of clicking and dragging to move the membrane, because I feel it’d get really annoying and tiring after a while.
Yeah, that might not have been the best idea. I think we agreed on the community forum thread to only have engulfment be drag and drop and have everything else be normal WASD or click where you want to move. Would be easier to code that way too.
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IMO, engulfment should be WASD too. To me, click-and-drag engulfment in a game where movement is based around the WASD keys (assuming you’re gonna use those for regular movement) seems really awkward and counter-intuitive.
Actually, WASD movement plus click and drag might lead to some fun situtations where you’ll be able to create a large wall with your body by dragging a portion of yourself laterally and moving forwards.
@TheCreator, that video is really cool! I’m kind of curious if it’d ever be able to displace the membrane like this:
I’m not sure we need something as detailed as dragging the membrane over whatever’s being engulfed. My vote still goes to just moving over something to engulf it.
(Note this post is also meant to test the Discord API integration thing I just set up)
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