Release planning for 0.5.7

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Let’s officially plan the next release once again.

0.5.6.1 is going to happen in a little under two weeks. The goal is to fix the major issues like auto-evo taking too long, fixing a few bug fixes that are ready to go, and putting a little more effort into getting Thrive Steam version running on older Windows versions, even though I didn’t promise it would. I’d hold off on major new features for two weeks because of this. Minor features and tweaks, I think, are fine to merge.

For 0.5.7 I think focus should be on explaining the auto-evo to the player and improving the experience regarding that, I just opened a thread about that:

Other than that, I think I can spare the time to work on organelle upgrades and chemoreseptor. Hopefully. There’s still quite a lot of polishing for the mod loader etc. immediate fixing needed to be done by me.

As for general stuff I’d like to see as a major feature would be the spawn system complete rewrite to make it more consistent and less able to randomly give some players a really bad experience, though I guess with chemoreseptors it might be fine with the current system, but then that organelle becomes basically mandatory to add.

As for timing I set tentative date 2 months in the future (the last Saturday of January). I think we might want to move to a 2-month release cycle to have relatively often updates going out on Steam etc.

I finally gave up and didn’t put in a bunch of issues for 0.5.7 that I’ve been keeping in the latest release milestones for more than 6 months, as it doesn’t seem to help in getting them done…

Let me know what you’d like to see / plan on working on.

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I’ll be working on currents in December.

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I believe focusing on improvements to auto-evo and it’s effects and explanation to the player is a good idea.

Right now auto-evo thinks that two proteins are superior to their organelle equivalents which is just wrong.
It also just really doesn’t like size at all which we should think about, as size should be pretty important for predators.

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Yes of course, I’ll link that issue here for future reference (so I hopefully remember to put it in the release milestone):

This is also a big thing now that the player is affected by it. The exponentiation in the energy cost should probably be removed from auto-evo entirely and just relying on the osmoregulation cost numbers instead.

Also I just remembered one thing that we probably want to do: we probably want to boost the nucleus creation change and probably also make sure it isn’t too detrimental in auto-evo, otherwise AI species no longer can evolve the nucleus at all.

I’m also a bit feeling like we need:

in order to be able to speed up auto-evo development and tweaking

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Il be working mainly on colony fixes/balance, and some organelles bugs.
Also, if i have the time maybe some GUI for the planet editor in JAN

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I’ll probably try to dedicate this update to world-shaping, in other words making the environment more interactive with the player.

Main focus will most probably be compound concentration changes, and then:

  • day/night cycles
  • compound clouds improvement
  • spawn system refactory

Of course, my current focus is limiting auto-evo for 0.5.6.1 as well, and so I’ll probably add some non-necessary elements after the release.

On this I’d like to nonetheless point out that IRL, in general the smaller the more populous as well.

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I need to choose between investing the time to finding a new way to set up a development environment that doesn’t break so Belguming much, or walking away from Thrive development. I’ve got some ideas on a big auto-evo rework that could fix the problem of n^2 runtime, but based on the last one it would take most of the two months, most of that being review time from other people. I’d also like to update our Darwinian evolution to not be vestigial anymore, but that’s also going to require an auto-evo refactor. I can see some simple changes here and there that would be easy to go after, but I don’t think the player will notice them in the current game state.

What I’d really like to see is something to help the early game issues we’ve heard about. If we think of something there, I’m happy to jump on it, although it might be so simple I get beat to the punch.

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Let’s see, here’s some of the things that I would like to do off the top of my head:

  • Art gallery viewer.
  • Graphs improvements.
    – make line graphs viewable in full size.
    – use bigger floats for graph datasets to allow bigger numbers.
  • (Maybe) try implementing a basic version of timeline tab. Could show any species that emerges/went extinct and environmental changes (atm only glucose and more once full dynamic compound concentrations is implemented) in the last 1 billion years(?). Extensible for mass extinction events, etc.
  • Other audio and UI tweaks.
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One major thing that I don’t see mentioned here yet, or I didn’t see it when skimming this again, is that auto-evo now that the player is affected by it, needs rebalancing to make it make more sense. The first thing that needs to go is it being really tough on larger cells and the nucleus making no sense to auto-evo (meaning that AI species can no longer spontaneously get the nucleus). These need at least a little bit of attention.

One other thing that I could throw in the milestone if there’s someone with time to work on it (if I get my tasks complete ahead of schedule I might tackle this, as this is pretty important for future auto-evo work), is the auto-evo exploring tool for the game.

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Buckly mentioned this:

I had found that the iron food source seems to not be working, so that strikes me as obvious low fruit (that I can’t fix currently). The other stuff with auto-evo will be trickier, for reasons that are a separate discussion.