Release planning for 0.5.9 (and 0.5.8.1)

[hhyyrylainen]

@Oliveriver

Finish my alternative movement control scheme mod. The actual code changes are done, I just didn’t get time to package it into a proper mod (probably using Thrive Harmony).

Related to the mod improvements I mentioned I kind of wanted to work on, includes bundling Harmony directly with Thrive, and making an example mod using Harmony.

@Oliveriver

Add fossilisation. This was a feature planned eons ago, where players could select species from their environment when the game is paused and save them for later viewing in either the freebuild editor or a content library (similar to Spore’s). Given that we have both pausing and a method to generate PNGs from species in the game now, this may not be massively difficult. Or it might be. I don’t know yet.

I wouldn’t expect it to be. I kind of want to myself reimplement the way Spore stored creature data in the PNG. This would be a pretty interesting thing to work on, at least for me. My initial guess is that they either embedded JSON or binary data in the file metadata or just appended at the end of the file. These both likely break if the image is uploaded to some site that does resizing or metadata stripping.

@Buckly

As Thrive steadily gets more and more attention, it’s becoming steadily clear that there are some sore spots in it’s current state. I believe that at this point, an improved spawn system is imperative for Thrive if we want to help keep more players engaged, as it’s current implementation can throw off the interest of many less patient players. Thus I am classifying it as highest priority.

I’ll put the sector spawn system PR in the 0.5.9 milestone. Maybe that’ll help.

@Oliveriver

I’ve mentioned this before, but whatever the evolution algorithm ends up being, it will be called Auto-Evo. It’s too ingrained in the game’s identity to replace that name.

Unless the “natural selection” mode is extremely slow, which I assume it will end up being. Enough so that the game is not really playable in its current state. If any kind of simulation can be made fast enough, it should replace the current auto-evo algorithm as a better version. But yeah, that would still be called auto-evo.