Revamping Compound Clouds

Gameplay
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That criticism is very valid indeed. Altough it would mostly apply to autotrophs, as the passive absorption rate would be so slow that heterotrophs would still be very strongly encouraged to find food. They need to hunt either way to get glucose to survive, and the ammonuim and phosphate they get as a byproduct from hunting would very strongly outweigh that which they absorbed passively from the environment.

Still, I completely get that you’re very hesitant about this out of principle. It would definitely make autotroph gameplay even more of a waiting simulator.
To still make a counterpoint, speeding up in-game time to absorb nutrients faster will also increase the frequency of AI cells coming to attack you (frequency in a real life time context, if you get what I mean). That way it could feel more like a defense/survival simulator rather than a waiting simulator.
Although this only applies to autotrophs which actually have active defense measures (like slime or toxin ejection where you have to press a button) as opposed to passive ones (like spikes or simply a though shell).
But again, I can see why you still wouldn’t want to go down this road. My points are merely a bit of food for thought.

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13

I’m just going to throw my own input on the pile here;

I don’t think a massive rework is really necessary.

Without compound clouds, many autotrophs motile or not just have absolutely nothing interesting to do but just kinda idle around. So instead of removing every compound, my suggestion is to, if anything, give players an idle phosphate generation.

Why just phosphates? Because out of all the compounds, they are the only necessary one that you need alot of, but cannot create yourself via any remotely plausible means.

Ammonia would be exempt because you can produce it if you really feel the need to.

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14

I’d personally be wary of just implementing phosphate generation because the gameplay loop is already so volatile as is. It would help with patches where you don’t bump into a cloud instantly, but for the issue of going straight to the editor a few seconds after a prior editor session because you bumped into a highly condensed cloud, that problem would be exasperated.

Though I’m not convinced by doing away with clouds entirely, I am heavily in favor of restructuring phosphate and ammonia mostly for the purpose of standardizing the gameplay loop. I don’t think it’s good design to have the two compounds be the sole determinant for a trip to the editor; it can unnaturally lengthen the experience of a tiny simple prokaryote with limited function, and can unnaturally shorten the experience of a large eukaryote with a lot of function. Though I wouldn’t say this is something to change for right now.

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Currents

I thought I had mentioned this in my OP but I’ll elaborate more here. Currents are one alternative that can help address the issues. Though I don’t think currents should not be implemented (they should of course be implemented), I think there are some drawbacks to relying solely on them to solve the above issues.

  • Sessile and less active/mobile organisms would still be inviable in low current or no current biomes (note that this affects you even if you play super mobile since the AI will be less viable as sessile).
  • The amount of Phosphate and Ammonia needed to reproduce can get so high (for example for a eukaryotic plant cell or some other larger/complex cell) that it would take many many waves of ammonia and phosphate getting washed into you to be able to reproduce.
  • If clouds of ammonia and phosphate are few and far between, they will wash over you so infrequently that it would be quite frustrating. On the flip side, if they are large and frequent, the environment will literally be awash in bright purple and orange and really ruin a lot of the good visuals of the game that we have built.

Reclassifying Ammonia and Phosphate as Background Compounds

There are a lot of topics for conversation in the thread, namely: Do we replace all clouds with chunks and background absorption? Do we only replace Ammonia and Phosphate? Do we Replace clouds with chunks but no background absorption?

So in an effort to focus the conversation, it seems the least controversial idea is potentially changing Ammonia and Phosphate into background compounds. It seems to me that out of all the suggested changes, this is the smallest change with the biggest potential impact. Additionally, implementing such a change would allow us to then play with it, reassess, and then decide if we wanted to take the further step and move other clouds into background absorption as well. If they were moved to background compounds, this is what it could look like:

Overview

Phosphate and Ammonia exist as features of the patch like Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide. However, since they are liquids (and not gasses), they can be stored, and so upon first spawning you will start to see a steady trickle of them flow into your storage. They will exist in different concentration per patch, and will fluctuate in response to natural processes that produce them and how many organisms are consuming them.

Realism Justification

We can say that Phosphate and Ammonia exist as such small molecules that are so diluted in the oceans that they do not appear as specific clouds, as opposed to Glucose, Hydrogen Sulfide, and Iron, which are scarce and concentrated enough that we represent them with clouds.

Rate of Absorption

The rate at which you absorb Ammonia and Phosphate from the environment is determined by their concentration in the environment, by your membrane type, and by any specific mutations you may have to increase absorption rate (like microvilli). Moving can also increase your absorption rate while moving, since motion facilitates fluid flow across membranes.

Other Sources of Ammonia and Phosphate

Cells will still yield Ammonia and Phosphate when they die. As such, there is a large incentive to evolve predatory or scavenging behaviour, especially if no other species have yet, since the cells around you represent untapped ammonia and phosphate stockpiles.

Nitrogenase will still yield a rate of Ammonia over time, and so it would speed up the rate at which you accumulate Ammonia. However, Nitrogenase will not be required to be self-sufficient for Ammonia, which is good because most autotrophs never evolved Nitrogenase.

How will Different Niches Play

Heterotrophs will still need to hunt for glucose, hydrogen sulfide, or iron, as without them they will starve and their ammonia and phosphate will be useless. As such the constant pressure of the risk of starvation is still present.

Autotrophs will need to find a way of producing their own glucose, hydrogen sulfide, iron, or some other energy source to be fully self sufficient. For example, a photosynthesizer would use chloroplasts to produce their own glucose. Once an autotroph has that, they are fully self sufficient. They will gradually absorb Ammonia and Phosphate from the environment, and they will have some way of producing an energy yielding compound for themselves without needing to move.

Other Consequences of Such a Change

This would effectively make growth a passive process. The player will need to hunt for food to stay fed, and make sure they stay alive from predators and environmental hazards, so that they can ensure the passive process of growth continues uninterrupted. This is exactly the gameplay loop of 3D Multicellular, Aware, and Early Awakening. Hunt for food and stay fed, and meanwhile your organism will slowly and passively grow. It’s similar even in an indirect sense to the core gameplay loop of Late Awakening and onwards, you supply your people with food and resources and their population will passively grow on its own and their prosperity increases.

However, this doesn’t make the time it takes you to grow completely out of your control. Remember that your absorption rate is affected by several variables, so the following are steps you can take to increase your ammonia and phosphate absorption rate:

  • Migrate to patches with lots of natural production of ammonia and phosphate (vents, tidepools or ocean surface before the Great Oxygenation Event, patches with high rock erosion (which is where phosphate minerals enter the ecosystem)).
  • Migrate to remote or underpopulated patches where there are less other species consuming ammonia and phosphate
  • Evolve your membrane or other adaptations to increase your absorption rate
  • Become a very mobile and active species so that you swim around a lot, increasing your absorption rate
  • Evolve to become a predator or scavenger, so that you can harvest phosphate and ammonia from other cells
  • Evolve a nitrogenase to produce your own Ammonia
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16

The smallest impact idea was to add a background rate of phosphate collection. Though even that requires some explanation to the player because otherwise we’ll get a flood of “bug” reports after the next release.

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In terms of not entirely breaking the game’s design, If I had to pick my poison, I’d select @Deus’s idea of reproduction being mostly a constant rate that can be sped up somewhat by acquiring ammonia and phosphate. That mechanic wouldn’t be too hard to implement, but redoing the tutorials about reproduction would need careful consideration.

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18

Well similar to what Deus said above, I don’t think it makes sense to separate Phosphate and Ammonia by making one absorb passively and not the other, both in terms of logical consistency, and since then it would not fully solve the problem of sessile or low mobility organism viability.

For example, in such a case, all sessile autotrophs would require a nitrogenase since ammonia would not absorb passively, but nitrogenase is actually a rare mutation not often found in autotrophs. If both Phosphate and Ammonia were absorbed passively, Nitrogenase would rather serve to improve, rather than enable, sessile or low mobility gameplay, which is much closer to what’s observed in nature.

And lastly, if we did decide to move these to passive absoprtion, they would of course have to be very clearly communicated in the patch notes and have a mention in the tutorial so that the players would understand what the changes were and how they play.

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Good news is that I don’t think that changing reproduction is urgently needed right now so we have a lot of time to consider tutorials and fully go over the shift. We can focus on filling the game with more content and then decide when best to standardize the gameplay loop; unless there is enough push to change everything now.

I think going with passive growth will help fix a lot of issues, but if we decide to go with that change and if there still is a problem, then we might consider doing away with phosphate and ammonia.

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You raise a good point, I don’t intend that all these changes be implemented in 0.5.9 of course, I just wanted to see if there was agreement that this would be an ultimate best case to develop towards. If we did agree that some degree of these changes would be beneficial for the game, then we could decide at what rates to implement them.

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With the recent discussion that I started about making a roadmap to microbe stage “completion”, I’d really like to keep it ballooning out of control, again as is usual for Thrive. I want to focus on the main line through the game so any design that fixes sessile gameplay, should be left out of the initial goals. I’m participating in this discussion only because I don’t want a bunch of rework programming tasks to be dumped on the programming team without any input from any of the programmers.

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22

Considering how much attention and positive reactions (I’ll link this especially: I made an account just to beg for a phosphate and ammonia revamp - Microbe Stage - Thrive Community Forum) this has gotten. I think I might need to react.
I’m currently focusing on just fixing some bugs and small things before getting back to further prototype development. So I think I might want to pick doing something about this. As I mentioned before a simple change to do that get started towards this would be the following:

  • Cells generate ammonia and phosphate automatically towards reproduction
  • Reproduction compound use has a maximum rate of use
  • New game options to turn off or on the above two features
  • Base cost for cell reproduction that needs to be filled in addition to the organelle split costs for microbes to divide. I’ll make this and the reproduction resource use rate into easily tweakable constants for balancing.

If people don’t like the end result more than the current way, those 2 new game options can be set to off by default.

2 Likes
23

Sounds good! Really excited to see what it feels like in-game.

I think those are all really good easy to implement quick fixes to get a proof of concept going. In the future, I’d be glad to help in making the Ammonia and Phosphate absorption variable (depending on several factors like membrane size, membrane type, environmental concentration, etc), and removing the base reproduction cost and making it entirely comprised of organelle costs (and rebalancing where necessary).

What do you mean by this? The rate at which ammonia and phosphate transfer from storage towards reproduction progress?

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Yes, because otherwise the players can just go to a really dense clouds / engulf a lot of stuff to just get to the editor in 10 seconds.

This seems 100% impossible to me. We can’t have the generation time going from like 5 seconds to a few minutes, so we need to have a much larger initial cost than the organelle costs.
If playing the first 5-10 generations are 90% just being in the editor, that would really change how the game feels. It would be more like the swimming around game part just being something the player has to get out of the way in order to get back to the “real” game which would be the editor.

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Ah okay perfect, yeah that makes sense.

Yeah I would definitely not want the first 5-10 generations to be 90% being in the editor. I’m sure we could make such a thing work if we implement variable absorption rates based on your membrane size and some other tweaks. I’ll experiment with that in the future. For now though go ahead and put the base cost I’m just thinking for the future.

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I’m going to keep this conversation going by asking an as of yet unadressed question:
Is the suggestion to do away with naturally occuring ammonium/phosphate clouds? Or is the idea to remove them as clouds all together?

Currently ammonium and phosphate, together with glucose, act as the “blood” of microbes. When microbes die, they drop their organelles along with a cloud of nutrients. The organelles then release their nutrients into the environment until they are depleted and dissolve completely.
Would the idea be to still have microbes release ammonium/phosphate upon death? Because removing these compounds as clouds all together would mean doing away with this dissolving mechanism. And imo this dissolving feels pretty natural and removing it would be a step back.
On the other hand, keeping ammonium/phosphate clouds in this form and simultaneously implementing them as invisible environmental compounds akin to nitrogen or oxygen would set a new precedent: They would be the first compounds which could be present both in a concentrated and in an environmental form.

The latter option could potentially be confusing for the player, but imo it’s better than to remove ammonium/phosphates crucial role as microbes spilling body fluids.
Furthermore, enabling ammonium/phosphate to be present both in a concentrated and in an environemtal form opens up a possibility which I alluded to earlier in this thread:

The way I see it this could be a viable compromise which leaves the early game as it is, yet tackles two central problems with the current system, which are

  1. The frustration of finding enough nutrients to reproduce as a large cell and especially as a mutlicellular organism
  2. The impossibility of sessile gameplay

Both of these problems only arise multiple generations into the game, which is when they should be tackled. There is no need to make the early-game less fun in order to make the late-game more fun.

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Popping back into this thread with a sudden thought I’ve not seen anyone mention:

The phosphate generation mod proves that having infinite ammonia and phosphate available causes one big problem: cells multiply without limit, filling the screen and tanking performance. There is now a slight mitigation thanks to Made microbe reproduction respect entity limits by hhyyrylainen · Pull Request #3536 · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive · GitHub, but that has knock on effects on gameplay as hhyyrylainen noted in the related issue. What will removing compound clouds or having a passive reproduction rate do to stop the same thing happening?

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@Oliveriver Well I think we have to make a distinction between generation and passive absorption. The microbes shouldn’t “generate” compounds out of nowhere, their rate of reproduction would be tied to the concentration of environmental compounds.
But yeah, I can see how this could represent a problem, especially with propositions of incredibly fast passive absorption floating around, like reaching reproduction in under 30 seconds (which I really don’t think would be a good idea for various reasons).

Now that you brought this up, I remember another problem this could generate:
When a cell splits, its glucose will be split between its two descendants. Unless they found some glucose before splitting again (which seems unlikely at such fast intervals of reproduction) the consecutive generations of on-screen microbes would have ever less glucose and would quickly perish.
The player organism would kind of circumvent this, as the player always starts with a base amount of glucose. This results in the “flipside problem” of the former problem, which is that the player never has to face the consequences of an unsustainable lifestyle.

All in all, I think passive absorption can only ever be a viable model if we ensure that the passive absorption rate isn’t ever too fast. And I suspect that bar of “too fast” can be reached all too quickly.

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I started on this:

The basic functionality should work, I’ll probably have enough time tomorrow to make sure the tutorial still makes sense and do something for multicellular.

Edit: for the sake of documenting this which might be interesting, I’ll say that yesterday I worked about 2 hours on this to get the basic functionality done (single microbes only, no multicellular, didn’t fix tutorial). And today I worked 6 hours basically just doing the multicellular part, fixing and tweaking the tutorial and various bugs and things that likely would have confused the players. I think that shows pretty well the ratio of getting something started and getting it across the finish line.

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30

The way I envisioned it, no, they would still release these compounds. We could have them release each compound as separately coloured clouds as they do currently, or we could have them release a single gooey substance that represents their cytoplasm (which would be more realistic), that when absorbed yields glucose, ammonia, and phosphate.

Their rate of absorption will be directly proportional to their environmental concentration, and as such we’d have to implement a basic nutrient cycle for ammonia and one for phosphate. Both Ammonia and Phosphate can be generated from several natural processes, and then can get consumed by cells, and so should eventually peter out at an equilibrium where consumption matches production. The rate of natural production of these two therefore serves as an upper limit to how much life a planet or biome can sustain (as well as other factors like sunlight and oxygen availability).

Awesome work HH thanks so much! I can do some testing once I return. Also, I can help with tutorial work both in doing the writing and in coding, so happy to help flesh out the tutorial.

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I did rework the tutorials to work with the new system, so that should be taken care of already, at least on a basic level. This is a pretty huge game mechanic change so maybe rethinking the tutorialization around it might make sense still.

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