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.
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Following the slime point, we really need to implement a proper agent system. Even if that system is backend code instead of all the jazz we talked about in that thread.
The most important thing to add to Thrive would be a new programmer. I would suggest you use whatever you think would be easy to finish as an onramp and work forward from there.
I was planning on working on multicellular AI for this release, but I also want to see the spawn system fixed, so I’m going to take a crack at it over the next couple days. I have a new job starting after that, so I may have to drop the work and pass it on to someone else, but I’ll be able to communicate that clearly if it happens.
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These are all really cool projects! I’m particularly excited to see how you tackle planet generation, because of the different climates, terrain, etc that can come from them.
Fossilization and Slime also sound really cool! I can’t wait to see how your projects work out! ^^
I really want to bring Natural Selection into the game fully. Maybe as a togglable option between it and Auto Evo, but in a game like this, it has to be an option.
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Just to clarify, I said implementing the new settings screen excluding planet generation. Or maybe just adding placeholder visuals for it.
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.
Very much agree with this. If it hasn’t been fixed by the time I feel I’m ready to work on it, I’ll probably volunteer to help.
Ohhhh gotcha! Sorry sometimes my brain mixes up words. Still exciting work though!
While this is probably a discussion for another thread, I think AutoEvo in its current form should also stay in the game. I believe having two entirely different algorithms with the same name would get very confusing.
I’ll try finishing the engulfment revamp as it unfortunately didn’t make it into the newest release. And with the new dev cycle time available maybe I’ll also work on new lysosomes organelle to complement the rework.
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I dont want to make any empty promises as much as i can so patch map and some colony/multi bugs where possible.
I can make a lysosome organelle model for you if it helps.
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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.
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.
I’ll put the sector spawn system PR in the 0.5.9 milestone. Maybe that’ll help.
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.
That will certainly helps, though I probably won’t start working on it until sometime but if you want you could model the lysosome (and maybe icon?) soonish so I could have it ready made once I finally need it.
Yeah I can do that for you! Gimme a few days and I’ll sort something out.
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This is something that has been imagined for awhile. Anyone working on a random patch graph generator? Given patches get randomized names now it is high time this gets added, with some options (eg, “i want a frozen planet” → hit start game → new menu for making some pre game choices → choose ice planet → get a patch map with several ice shelfs generated → start game )
It would certainly require design work, and an algorithm for generating sensible patch graphs.
Kemikal is working on Patch Generation however, I think our lack of clarity on what a patch even is holds him back. It’s not a word with any basis in the real world, and every time it gets brought up, that one thread about Patches gets slightly longer (in the past) or mass discord discussion occurs.
Rephrasing what I said on discord:
A patch is an area of uniform conditions and existing species. So to create patches you first start off with the biomes on a planet and you start creating a patch for each biome area. And you just merge area into the single patch until you hit another biome or a major obstacle. That way the patch is an abstraction of a possible habitat for a species (the same biome with mostly the same conditions and no major obstacles so that the species can spread to the entire patch at once).
Regarding building a hex based sphere patches can be generated in the following way:
Basically I think you can start by assigning biomes to each hex on your sphere and then merging next to each other hexes with the same biome to be a single patch. If you hit some kind of major obstacle then you need to split the area spanning the biome into multiple patches
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0.5.8.1 is out now:
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