Now that I think of it maybe we could make a small “vacuole overhaul” for this release. Salinity and contractile vacuoles have been proposed and lysosomes would be a very nice add-on that can give more depth to gameplay.
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if we simulated waste you would output iron III ions (The ones you use are iron II ions). But i see where you are coming from i think its probabbly better to just call it iron lol (But i wanted to be as accurate and as specific as possible there 
)
Also, @DonGororo yeah i love teh idea of adding lysoomnes and contractile vacoles and such. Its just that before we add contractile vacuoles we need to have a solid plan for implementing salinity. Maybe once we have the patch map in game?
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Yep, first things first. I guess that means we’ll have to make a couple of new biomes like rivers, freshwater lakes and of course the saline sea you proposed
Sounds good!
If we did simulate waste I would suggest we just call them Iron (II) and Iron (III), but I feel like that might be a bit too much chemistry for the game so ideally I think we should avoid that.
One suggestion that made me really curious is the one about amino acids. Originally I was very pleased to see how the list of compounds has been shortened. We used to have oxygen and carbon dioxide as clouds, it was a good decision that we turned them into invisible environmental compounds.
Likewise, as I understand it, we ditched amino acids as a compound and made all the amino-magic happen „off-screen“ as a means to make the game more simple and streamlined. I think this was a very smart decision.
However, I have to admit that having a compound (ammonia) be toxic at first, but then, once it‘s refined variant (amino-acids) gets more and more sparse, becoming the primary source of that refined resource, sounds quiet awesome.
However, I‘m not sure wether or not this is worth the addition of an entirely new compound, amino acids. This would make everything feel more cluttered. Is this worth it? I don‘t know.
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I think a lot of these are good suggestions, as you say there are a lot of things we could do to make the game better.
While you have been away we have moved to a different process for planning. After each release we have a discussion about what to do in the next release and decide on a small chunk of work to do. Because there is a lot we could do the goal of that discussion is to pick out what are the most important things to do next, the things which have the best awesomeness to effort ratio.
You can see the last discussion here and also the list of github issues here. We also discussed it on the podcast and on discord. The next release is almost entirely about the patch map and it’s mechanics.
I think a lot of the fact that we have been making good progress comes from having a more focused method for deciding which way to go next.
So yes with your ideas feel free to bring them up in the 0.4.3 discussion, everyone is welcome to contribute with what they think are the next things we should do. There’s some good stuff on your list and as some of it is small things they can be good as they’re nice things to get done quickly.
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Oh yeah definitely, I’m not saying these are all things we should be implementing right away, just more a master list of all criticisms I could think of while playing the game that I could refer back to. Some of them I would recommend we put as higher priorities though (like all organelles appearing as grey hexes in the editor).
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Yeah I agree seeing the organelles in the editor would be really nice.
That is already an issue on Github:
No one has wanted to tackle it yet.
Also a few others on the list are also I think already fixed or made into issues, but digging those up would take quite a bit of time.
Yeah after posting that I remembered that we had the discussion and decided to eliminate amino acids, fatty acids, and nucleic acids, and assume them as intermediates (which I think was a good call). However I do also think it would be cool to have something like what I suggested with free floating amino acid clouds that disappear over time and force the species to evolve new ways of getting/making their amino acids (which is also very close to how science says life originated), I’m just trying to think of how to do it.
One idea is to remove/change ammonia. I was thinking about it and we moved oxygen and CO2 over into being background gasses instead of compound clouds because they are gasses and dissolve diffusely in the oceans, but ammonia is as well (and we’ve kept it as a compound cloud). Both ammonia and nitrogen gas are dissolved gasses in the ocean. From what I know, nitrogen gas is found in medium amounts everywhere, whereas ammonia is found in high concentrations in warm and alkaline water and low concentrations elsewhere (which would also make adapting to each one lead you to a different niche). If we did this, then we could reintroduce Amino Acids. This would need to be something we discussed more though.
So in case the list of features for 0.4.2 is still open, I compiled what I thought were the easiest/simplest changes from the above list to see what you guys think, otherwise they can be tabled for 0.4.3 or after.
If we agree on the suggestions I can go ahead and make issues for them on the Github.
1 - Reduce compound yielded from absorbing organelles to 25% or 50% of its current yield (then in the future add a lysosome organelle which increases this yield).
3 - Reduce speed of predator/victim during engulfment.
19 - Dissolving animation for organelles / cells.
20 - Simple placeholder Reproduction progress bar for now (until we add a nicer one with the new UI concept).
21 - Entering engulfment mode should not make your cell flash. Instead it should cause an icon to appear (perhaps the icon could flash).
22 - Iron Ions rewritten as Iron
23 - Phosphates rewritten as Phosphate
26 - Radial blur to edge of screen
30 - Icons replacing text in the mouseover tooltip (the tooltip in the top left corner that shows you the compounds in a certain spot)
31 - Subscripts for O2 and CO2 (I think Nein is working on this?)
32 - New ambient SFX
35 - Prokaryotic Structures rewritten as Proteins
36 - Renaming species not working?
37 - Reduce hex grid opacity by 50% in editor
40 - Osmoregulation Cost rewritten as Metabolism / Metabolic Rate
41 - Tooltips for bottom UI elements of the editor (speed, generations, etc.)
42 - Icons and rewrite of organelle tooltips in the editor
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How will we know when an opponent cell is engulfing?
I’m not sure I haven’t seen the code on it, is there any way to identify when a cell is being engulfed? As opposed to just taking damage from another source?
No, what i mean is we need a way (at the moment) to see when an enemy cell is in engulf mode, and an icon wouldnt cut it.
Also not all the prokaryotic structures are proteins, some are what are called polyhedral organelles (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/metabolosome) (I think teaching people microbiology/science communication are important parts of our game so our terminology is therefore important)
Osmoregulation cost is literally just the cost of osmoregulation. Metabolic rate would be covered by movement cost etc.
I do agree with a few of these (replacing stuff with icons, radial blur etc, hovering over things for more tooltips etc.)
But some of what you said i don’t think is ideal/something we should add at this stage.
Oh in that case I would tend to disagree. Engulfment is something that a cell is always able to do provided it has a fluid membrane, and something the player should always be prepared for if they approach larger cells. I don’t think an obvious visual cue for other cells that are specifically in engulfment mode is necessary. Also I find it pretty unrealistic and visually jarring to see the cells flashing.
The “polyhedral organelle” category of metabolosomes is still just a cluster of proteins (a shell of proteins on the outside and enzymatic proteins on the inside), and from what I can tell all the organelles under the “Prokaryotic Structures” section are also available to Eukaryotes. Also just to clarify are Metabolosomes the renamed version of what were earlier called Aerobic Respiration Proteins?
There are other passive costs that are included in the base ATP rate that the cell has to expend per second, such as the ATP cost of the nucleus and the passive ATP cost of certain organelles (like the lysosomes once added). Also metabolic rate doesn’t necessarily include costs of movement/activity, such as Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which is used as a standard for macroorganisms (Basal metabolic rate - Wikipedia). It’s also a term I think would be more familiar to the player. There could then be mentions during the tutorial, in the mouseover tooltip, and/or in its Thrivepedia entry with further explanation that it includes the cost of osmoregulation.
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Eh i just think the game is confusing enough for players even with the obvious engulfing/damage visual cue etc. I really think that would be a bad design descision before we have proper engulfing edges/open food vacuoles/cytostomes (basiclaly a microbial mouth) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytostome ) in game but maybe @tjwhale should say something.
Well yeah, normal organelles also have stuff like proteins in them encased in a membrane, and metabolosomes are enzymes encased in a protein shell, so should we just call them all proteins (you get my point) (I think the difference is notable) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16525780 )
Also yeah metabolsome was originally conceptualized as aerobic proteins (But as you can see from its tooltip, i intend for it to be more distinct later on)
Basiclaly i found real world analogues to our ideas and added them to the game.
Edit:
I guess osmoregulation should be renamed BMR though
The key difference though is that eukaryotic organelles, such as mitochondria or peroxisomes, are membrane bound with potentially proteins inside the membrane or embedded within the mebrane itself. Prokaryotic organelles, however, are not membrane bound and are purely singular proteins or complex collections/combinations of proteins, the latter of which are still typically referred to as proteins in microbiology.
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Maybe you are right, i just feel weird limiting that section that way
I think largely the discussion has been closed, I’m also keen to keep this release focused on the patch map as although it’s not an easy feature it’s going to be awesome to have it in.
I think I agree with UntrustedLife re names. I don’t mind changing Phosphates to Phosphate personally, unless anyone minds.
Re SFX we’ve been hoping to make some progress with them for a while but can’t find anyone to work on them. So if you can get anyone to do it then there’s a lot that can be done in that area.
In terms of what we could change this release. I agree that absorbing organelles is currently rather op, so reducing that would be a good idea to balance things. We’ll probably do quite a lot of balancing when the patch map is in (I’m looking forward to your feedback for that process), however nerfing organelle absorption before that is fine.
Also re the gui I think Nein is working on it so I guess talk to him about it. If he wants to make the changes then I think 20, 23, 31, 37, 41 and 42 (basically the gui stuff) sound like good ideas and they are nice changes to make for this release.
I like that the tooltips are currently quite sciency and educational, I also agree that adding some simple icons and bold text would help newer players and younger players etc get into the game.
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We already have a membrane that waves and ripples, perhaps we can show engulfment by exaggerating that motion and perhaps making it pulsate a little.
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