Process panel & process system design

[hhyyrylainen]

@84634E1A607A

causing the ATP falling short when moving continuously. In this case I just need to slow down any other things a bit then I can keep my ATP balance.

@Maxonovien

Well, an alternate solution would be to make ATP-producing organelle reproducing first (or even, the prioritized ones in your proposal)? It seems quite sensible to me, but I don’t know if there’s any scientific evidence for this happening.

There’s actually an older open issue about controlling organelle splitting order: Add a way for the player to control organelle split (growth) order · Issue #1622 · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive · GitHub which IMO is much simpler to use than each time you reproduce tweaking the speed controls.

@Maxonovien

More generally, I pretty much like the idea of prioritizing processes from a game design standpoint. But do we have any backing theory about this? Multicellular organisms with a nervous system can do that, but can unicellular ones do the same? Unicellular cells with photosynthesis privilege this to glycolysis apparently, and I saw a paper mentioning some N-fixating cells doing it only at day/night. So this could be the case, but I don’t know for sure. I’d think that organelle prioritization is more likely realistic

I’m not an expert, but I remember hearing about how even single cell organisms can control which proteins and how fast they make them based on pretty complicated chemical signals. So I don’t see a big problem with realism if a cell is able to “slow down” a process that is not currently beneficial.

@Maxonovien

I nonetheless agree with hh that such a somewhat complex system could be complex to players, especially for larger cells and when the game will offer more organelles. So we have to be careful with the UI in that they could easily mess up their cell design.

(already posted before remembering this)
Fully agree. I think we really need to work through our backlog of toxin customization, endosymbiosis, organelle upgrades first to see how much stuff there’s in the microbe stage. I think if we plan too many big complex systems, the game will end up being overwhelming by having too many complicated systems.

As an example the game used to have oxygen clouds in the environment, but they were removed to make the game play better by reducing the different clouds the player needed to find to stay alive.