Translating Multicellular species to Macroscopic species

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With the end of development switching to Macroscopic rapidly approaching, I want to tackle a specific topic: translating Multicellular species to Macroscopic species. While we have a pretty feature-complete Multicellular Editor and an in-depth concept for the Macroscopic Editor, they have quite some differences between them, and perhaps even points where they are in conflict. So, once we start implementing more features and restrictions in the Macroscopic Editor, no matter what those actually end up being, I think it will be good to have some plans for how to convert things.

General Concept

I think we are in principle able to take every aspect of a Multicellular species and translate it to the initial Macroscopic design. The fact that the Stages have different mechanics does not preclude that, it just means that while x translates to X, y might translate to Z. We also want most things to still be evolvable in the Macroscopic Stage. So when a trait carries over, you can consider it an “early unlock” and a head start on that trait, but it should still be possible to be unlocked afterwards, albeit more expensive.

As an example: In Multicellular, the Axon organelle boosts movement organelles in the whole organism. But things are translated when entering Macroscopic: If none of your cells have axons, you start with no nervous system. If you have one cell of a multifunctional cell type that also has an axon, then you start with a “basic” nervous system of a small size. If you have several cells of a cell type that is specialised in just handling the axon, then you start with a more advanced nervous system that also already has significant investment in its size.

I have discussed each attribute of a Multicellular species separately below. Of course, the specifics depend a lot on how Macroscopic mechanics are implemented exactly, but I have relied on the Macroscopic Editor concept, and hope that most of this will be applicable.

Cells to metaballs

The default structure of a Macroscopic species is expected to be a bilaterally symmetrical one, with a single “chain” of connected metaballs running from front to back. If we have more symmetry types, that will likely just mean more of these axes. Metaballs attached to the sides of this chain are appendages, and later on limbs. This immediately conflicts with how the Multicellular design (and the current translation of it to Macroscopic) works, since it is made up of a 2D sheet of nodes, where nodes to the side of the middle one can be something completely different.
My proposal for this is that each row of the Multicellular hex design is converted into one metaball for the initial Macroscopic design. That metaball is stretched in width depending on how many cells there are in that row. Any properties of that metaball depend on the properties of the cells in total. So, a row with chloroplasts, actomyosin and pili in it would turn into a wide metaball that has muscle characteristics, performs photosynthesis and does damage on contact. But how much the metaball contributes to each of those depends on how effective those cells were, and what their relative abundance in this row was.
This preserves the shape of the original organism and the function of its cells (both in an absolute sense as in relation to parts of the body), while still meeting the design goals of the Multicellular editor.

Membrane types to Tissue properties

Membrane types should have a fundamental effect on how the species works, or at least on its starting metaballs.

  • Rigidity, or the ability for the tissue to flex in any way. (this was not explicitly in the macroscopic editor concept, but I think it is reasonable to have). The membrane rigidity slider can also affect this.
    • Normal and Double: very flexible.
    • Calcium Carbonate and Silicate: Entirely rigid, like a rock. Compare with coral, but without the soft bits that coral has. Considering the physical nature of rock here, the membrane slider should affect the flexibility much, if at all.
    • Cellulose and Chitin: Intermediate between the above two. The slider can affect rigidity a lot here.
  • Damage Resistances: I think this is more straightforward, assuming the Macroscopic Stage has a similar damage resistance system. I do think the cell’s HP should be integrated into the damage resistance numbers, because the actual Macroscopic Species’ HP should be based on other things.
  • Microbe Absorption: Te ability to absorb nutrients from microbe clouds/mats by moving into them. Normal and Double enable this, the Cell Wall types do not.
  • Compound Absorption: The Macroscopic Stage will still have some mechanic for absorbing small compounds from the environment. Membrane stats can directly translate to this.

Organelles to metaball properties and available tissues

Personally, I believe that all the cell parts we have in the Microbe and Multicellular Stages should translate to some function in the Macroscopic Stage. I also believe this is doable. It does not have to be the exact same function (it might even be more interesting if it is somewhat), and multiple cell parts might translate to the same thing. But everything should do something.

  • Processes: should mostly translate into Macroscopic metabolisms. Things like photosynthesis and chemosynthesis are of course fairly easily ported since they add up across the organism. Anything that produces ATP is a bit trickier since that’s local. We might be able to ignore it as long as cells don’t have an ATP shortage, or it could translate to sprinting ability.
  • Environmental tolerance effects: These should be easy to transfer, assuming the Macroscopic tolerance system is still somewhat similar.
  • Storage: Can pretty directly translate to Storage attribute of metaballs.
  • Flagella and Cilia: should convert into a “skin type/feature” that provides some mobility based on the surface area.
    • Flagellum length: If the skind feature can have settings, than this would similarly translate to the initial setting of “cilium length”.
    • Pulling Cilia: Can enhance microbe absorption if it is enabled at all.
  • Pili: Provides some contact Microbe Absorption ability, even if the membrane type does not. (this is based on the Thrive gameplay implementation of pili, which is quite different from what they are IRL)
  • Actomyosin: Should become “muscle tissue.”
  • Axon: Should become “nerve tissue,” possibly as part of a nervous system capacity organ system.
  • Toxisome/Toxin vacuole: Translates to a new toxin system. Most likely should me limited to the “when you get eaten” or “contact” type of toxin deployment. If there are damaging toxin types selected, this should also have some Microbe Absorption ability.
  • Signalling Agent: Improves the internal organisation system (hormone system?), if we have such a thing in Macroscopic. (I believe communication with different individuals of your species should be a more advanced unlock).
  • Chemoreceptor: Better chemoreception. (the most basic sense in Macroscopic)
  • Lysosome: Needs to translate to a new digestion system.
  • Bioluminescent Vacuole: Besides the tolerance effects mentioned before, this would be producing light, which might have more relevance once vision becomes a thing.
  • Slime Jet: Ability to adhere to surfaces. A defensive mucus layer. (skin feature?)
    • Mucocyst: Stronger defensive mucus.

A note on different possible Macroscopic Editor designs

There is still some debate on whether we want to keep cell designs around during the Macroscopic/Aware Stages, or keep track of what tissues your species has available in some other way. I believe everything I wrote here can work for either system. Either drawing metaball stats from celltypes is an ongoing system, or it is run only once during the transition from Multicellular to Macroscopic.

Growth Order

This one is I think the exception to my rule of “everything translates to something.” While there’s a lot of potential for life stages, larvae, etc. I am going to assume that at least initially, juveniles will be implemented as mini-versions of the adults. In that case, there is no “order” different things grow in in the Macroscopic Stage.

Reproduction

Side-note

Writing this part has made me realise that the “minimum size in Macroscopic is 1 mm” fact has an additional dimension to it. If that’s the minimum size we can simulate and we want adults to be larger than juveniles, that automatically means the initial adults have to be significantly larger than 1mm.

I believe right now there is a consensus that at least sexual or sporulation will be required to advance to Macroscopic? If so, then both of those options would transfer over quite easily, with them both being implemented as “tiny ball, transforms into mini version of adult”. The difference would again just be if you need to track down a mate first.

Optionally, if we were to include “mass budding” as an option, it would directly spawn you as a mini-adult adjacent to an adult, instead of an “egg” by itself.

Behaviour

As far as I can tell, all the behaviour sliders seem like they would still be relevant in the Macroscopic Stage, so I propose we just continue to carry them over directly as we do now.

There’s one important point of discussion though. In the Microbe and Multicellular Stages so far, pretty much all species are actively responding to their environment, chasing, running away, etc. I believe only “max Peaceful Sessile + Brave” might just not respond to anything at all? I think this works fine for those Stages. But once we are in Macroscopic, the world should gradually become full of life that does not move or respond at all. There are plants/macro-algae of course, and sessile animals. And most of our current behaviour system directly relates to movement.

An important factor here is the nervous system. You have neuron-less animals like sponges which some people have pointed out do move, but I have to add that this is in mm per day. While among animals with neurons even the tiniest worms or animals notorious for being slow, like snail, they move closer to mm per second.

So, do we just want to disable the behaviour sliders and most AI for anything that does not have any nervous system? I think at the same disabling intentional movement for the player would make sense. This at least would mark a very definitive marker to decide what species we treat as active versus not active. The one reason I think this can work without too much player frustration is because even if you enter the Macroscopic Stage without any Axon cells, you should be able to create a basic one before you leave the editor.

Environmental Tolerances

One reason I proposed to change how some tolerances work (and made a prototype for that) is that once implemented, I think we can also directly port this over. As far as I can tell, excluding later developments like air pockets and massive sizes, when you look at “what average exterior pressure and temperature can this species perform reasonable well in (not just survive until you bring them back to their preferred environmen)” single-celled and multicellular species aren’t acutally that different.

The main concern would be to make sure that environmental effects from organelles are carried over to metaball/species properties in a way that ensures roughly the same outcome.

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I don’t know how this would be concretely programmed. The player doesn’t have to follow any symmetry in multicellular stage if they don’t want to. So I’m not sure how this would otherwise work than by just taking only “inspiration” from the player’s current shape but otherwise basically just discarding what the player designed already…

Right now, metaballs are always perfect spheres, and I think that is a requirement of the entire convolution surface approach, so metaballs have to be spheres, they can’t be stretched horizontally.

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That could be a fun distinction, but considering how often people want to play as “plants,” I don’t know if forcefully losing all control over your organism outside of the editor would be satisfying for them. I think ideally, “plants” will just naturally want to move less and less as they evolve because movement will waste more and more energy as they grow bigger, they won’t gain anything from movement because they don’t have to find food, and they won’t be fast enough to outrun predators.

The two easy options I can think of are

  1. Making the macroscopic species look identical to the multicellular species, with each cell being replaced by one metaball. So, most players’ species will probably start as sort of circular blobs. This does mean they’d start with a quite a few metaballs, though.
  2. Ignore the multicellular species shape and just make one metaball for each type of cell. The more copies of a cell type that were in the multicellular species, the bigger the metaball would be. This would be “discarding what the player designed,” like you said.
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This is a freight train of excessive thought, but I think it’s good to express. My ultimate concern with this topic is placing limitations on an editor which:

  1. Will serve as a bedrock for atleast 5 hours, very easily even more hours of gameplay.
  2. Is the most ambitious in scope, and will have to support the greatest diversity of phenomena in the game.
  3. Will likely be Thrive’s big selling point: there are several “cell games” and many society/space civilization games, but very few “animal evolution” games.

I’m not saying this because I’m convinced anything suggested here is inherently flawed or unable to be “patched in” to a cohesive Macroscopic Editor. That’s just to say that in my head, the most important objective of a macroscopic editor concept is to make sure that, above all else, it is a great macroscopic editor. Obviously that’s the goal with any sort of mechanic in a game - it’s not like we created a microbe editor with the goal of it being anything else than the best possible microbe editor we can create - but the macroscopic editor is just so big in scope, that any limitation can be really jagged. And we have mechanics leading into the macroscopic.

So I get really nervous about hyper-focusing on making sure everything in the microscopic stages hooks up directly to the macroscopic editor across this time jump because the two editors have completely different rules, scopes, and goals. Or more specifically - focusing on the macroscopic editor with this at the front of our minds.

In my ideal world, we create macroscopic editor mechanics we know will work well, and then with those implemented, figure out how to hook the multicellular/microbe features in - not start with multicellular/microbe features as the base layer then find a way to jam macroscopic features on top. Though obviously this sounds a lot prettier than it would likely end up working.

That’s also why I took the approach I did in the macroscopic editor concept of just figuring out the best mechanics to represent as much as possible, instead of stressing over how to hook everything up. Building up this monumental and extremely important tool on mechanics not meant for this stage can lead to some very difficult constraints placed on possibilities.

For example, with membranes and the integumentary system as a whole: there are just so many questions related to mobility, muscle rigidity, flexibility of internal components, etc. which root from how membranes work in the microbe/multicellular stages. So I decided to distance from that a bit, and my first concern with the integumentary system was creating something that would work with representing as much of the diversity we see in metazoans.

That spawned the Skin Type & Skin Attribute system in the concept document. Then from there, I worked backwards to make some assumptions, and concluded that two options would work pretty well:

  • There is one Skin Type that all motile macroscopic organisms start with, and your choice of membrane in the microscopic unlocks a unique Attribute, or -
  • We create multiple Skin Types based on your membrane choice, that all have their own attributes.

The merit of either can be debated, but the larger point is that I started from a point of understanding what was best for the stage at hand, and then worked backwards to the Microbe/Multicellular - not started from the Microscopic Phases and worked forwards.

But I will concede that I am being very extreme and binary in this discussion when in reality, most aren’t mutually exclusive. I also want to clarify that I’m not trying to say that anyone is “hyper-focusing on hooking things up” in a rudimental way (everything brought up here is very important to consider, and would have to be considered no matter what approach we take), and I hope I don’t make that impression.

I honestly think that a part of this reaction is due to the fact that I wrote a bajillion words of macroscopic editor mechanics over a long period of time, and through that process, I bumped into hundreds of of dead ends and difficulties before landing on something that sounded kind of right for every concept. So I remember all of the ways I’ve gotten stuck for certain topics, and am really fixated and worried about us bumping into that down the road because of a decision we make earlier.

TL:DR - I really do hope we consider things from a “best for macroscopic, work backwards to the microscopic” approach instead of a “work with what we have and grow into the macroscopic” approach. Rathalos already does this in the original post well for many segments.

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Ah, my favorite topic of the starting size of the macroscopic stage! As some may know, I‘m partial to starting at 1mm, but I believe the vague consensus is currently that it‘s easier to start at 1cm. But you raise a great point, if the adult size of the starting organism is 1cm, then you‘d likely start at 1mm anyways as you‘ll presumably be playing as a juvenile at the beginning. Feel free to further discuss this in Handling Scale.

Then maybe we need a general seperate discussion about how to handle flatness in macroscopic. It‘s an extremely common adaption for a myriad of different reasons (absorbition/gas exchange in e.g. flatworms, camouflage against the ground in e.g. flounders, navigation and locomotion benefits in inummerable fish species e.g. yellow tang (verical flatness) or stingrays (horizontal flatness)…)

Also, if I‘m not mistaken, I‘ve seen design documents in other threads which presumed that eventually metaballs could be made stretchable/flatenable. I can‘t find these mentions, but does anyone else remember reading or writing about this?

Right now, such shapes can only be achieved rather cumbersomely by placing many tiny metaballs next to each other to eventually form a flat disc. Could there be any other solution? I have a very limited understanding of the technical side of this. I‘m guessing to animate the organisms, we‘ll eventually have to look into things like blend shapes anyways. (Like e.g. the game Abzu animates its underwater animals). Maybe there could be another, more permanent „layer of blend shapes“ implemented „below“ these temporary movement blend shapes so to speak, in order to account for the shapes/sculpting of the organisms which can‘t be accounted for by metaballs alone? I know these are incredibly complicated things to implement, but as Deus says:

So all of this graphics programming part of the macroscopic editor is out of the scope of this thread, I‘m just highlighting this as important discussions to be had elsewhere.

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You handle that by making a specific configuration of metaballs that results in a mostly flat surface.

More likely to use a joint system because blend shapes are a lot more limited than skeletal animation in 3D.

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I think you can see that my primary intention with this thread was indeed to look at what exists in both systems and use that as the foundation to look at what can be done to translate between them. So, especially for anything that you think would not work for the Macroscopic concept I would love to hear it!

But I do have to add that while I think the focus should be on Macroscopic editor designs that work for the Macroscopic Stage, we do need to intentionally balance that with portability from the previous Stages. Following life through the ages and doing a better job at connecting those stages than some other games is one of the stated objectives of Thrive.

For a strictly optimal “creature creator and life sim,” a game that is just that would do a better job. Carrying things over between the Stages is a selling point of Thrive in compensation. We should not be losing sight of that.

Ah, I knew that mathematically, meatballs don’t have to be spheres, but it’s good to know what the limitations are we are working within.

Though in theory, the nodes you manipulate in the editor don’t have to be singular metaballs themselves either? For example, one manipulatable node could have two additional metaballs attached to the side, with the “width” setting of the node controling the size/distance of those two side metaballs. But those three would all carry over the settings and properties set in the “node.”

The reason to do this would be that creating any shape more complex than a worm out of exclusively spherical metaballs that potentially each have their own settings is potentially unusably complex. But this is really more of a discussion on the Macroscopic Editor itself.

The Macroscopic Editor needs a forced symmetry mode that it either starts in, or is a very early development within it. Otherwise having any kind of realistic animal creation and evolution will be unworkable. So, we need some way of converting asymmetric shapes into synthetic ones, unless we expect players to manually trim their designs to be symmetrical before they can enable it. (Again, this is more of a discussion for the Macroscopic Editor thread) The simplest method would be to enforce it right at the start of the Stage. It’s possible to have it happen in Macroscopic itself, but that just makes things more complex.

I will also say here that if you are still imagining each metaball (or “node?”) being made up of one celltype, and us therefore being able to convert one cell to one metaball without issues, it might be worth reconsidering those assumptions. If, for example, we eventually want to construct limbs out of a reasonable number of controllable objects, one such object contains skin, muscle and bone at the same time at minimum. Many things such as flagella cells also just don’t make sense to have solid balls of. They would be assumed to be just the “skin”, with most of the volume being made up of something else. Once again, Macroscopic Editor discussion. Here, I’m just trying to reconcile the different designs.

Finally, I think you might be exaggerating with “just discarding” the shape of player’s designs. Multicellular designs in Thrive already fundamentally have a “front” and “rear”. Whatever features you have in the front, middle and rear would be fully preserved in relative position. What I am talking about would be “there is a row with a signalling cell on the left, a digestive cell in the middle and a pilus cell on the left” would be converted into “one flattened node with those three functionalities, or three metaballs which each have all three properties.” You did make me realise that potentially this would close any “gaps” left in the hex grid, so that does deserve extra consideration.

I do realise the risk, but the problem is that in the Macroscopic Stage the movement isn’t just based on “inherent behaviour” anymore. A tree or large algae can’t just move the behaviour slider a bit to become mobile. It fundamentally does not have the anatomy to be able to react to anything. If you’re larger than one or a few cells, you need a nervous system to realistically be able to have your whole body respond to anything in a reasonable timeframe. What do the Activity or Fear sliders actually mean for a tree?

Keep in mind also that for terrain generation we have a design need for designating some lifeforms as completely inactive. We’ve previously had discussion about whether to use things like behaviour or substrate anchoring to decide this, but when writing this post I just realised that this is a good candidate.

Yes, that’s pretty much what we have right now. (though of course, there is no functionality yet to which metaballs have which functions yet). And I do in fact think it’s too many metaballs for the player to be individually manipulating free-hand.

It also doesn’t resolve the symmetry problem, it just kicks the can down the road.

I will point out again that maintaining “one metaball = one celltype” is not sustainable for Macroscopic in the long run. The amount of work/time it would require for the player to add things in the editor would be absurd.

I would really recommend everyone to try to get a grasp on Deus’ Macroscopic Editor concept. It’s the only design we have for the Macroscopic Editor that would at least work and be usable. There are no (actually worked out) competing designs at this time.

But in any case, I don’t see the merit in this second option, because just making sure each cell type has its own metaball is not valuable.

So I would sooner advocate for:

  1. We use the shape of where cells are placed to inspire where metaballs are placed and the overall shape of the organism, and the celltypes to determine what functionality metaballs in a general area have. But that does not mean that one cell = one metaball with only that cell’s functionality in the same place.

Oh right, I actually got the unit wrong!

I feel like I’ve mentioned something like “if it’s possible to flatten/stretch metaballs, that would be much better than only being able to do that by placing many metaballs next to each other” and that this would make it much easier to make a creature that is made up of one line of nodes from front to back, with other things hanging of the sides. Like Spore, but being able to change the shape of the main body. Probably I said this in response to somebody else> But I can’t find it either!

So, exactly like MirrorMonkey already said:

Am I correct?

Right now we the constraints we have that lead to this are:

  1. The convolution surface approach requires spherical metaballs.
  2. Each metaball needs to be individually placed and controlled in the editor.

Point 2 is currently the case, but does not have to be. A metaball can have a “width” slider that spawns additional metaballs to the sides that are not individually controlled but just take the properties from the parent metaball.

Sorry to derail my own thread, this belongs more in a Macroscopic Editor thread like MirrorMonkey said.

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Yes, we could have tools that manipulate or even create multiple metaballs at once.

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I 100% agree with this, so thank you for making this thread. The Macroscopic and Aware stages will be the ones everyone’s most excited about and they’ll be where all the YouTube thumbnails come from, but the real selling point of Thrive is following your species on a journey from the very beginning to the very end, so feeling like your choices in each stage matter in the next stage is super important.

I think it would be amazing for a player to look back after 100 hours of gameplay and think things like “if my world didn’t have that iron-rich estuary next to my spawn, things might have turned out completely differently” or “imagine how things would have gone if that other species didn’t force me to become extremely motile in the microbe stage.”

This isn’t a hill I’ll die on or anything. I think what you’re saying is perfectly reasonable and if that’s the direction we want to take, I won’t complain. I do think it would be a lot more fun for the player to experience their species gradually becoming slower and more sessile as it evolves until it eventually becomes a completely immobile “plant,” though, if we can justify that scientifically.

For performance reasons discussed in the thread you linked, we can treat anything that’s slower a certain speed as a static object that can be represented with a billboard, which should include any “plant” if auto-evo is doing its job right.

I agree that 20 metaballs is too many for the very start of the stage.

This does seem like the best option if the nodes the player works with are groups of metaballs instead of individual metaballs so stretching them is possible. I guess that’s a conversation for another thread, though, so we can talk about what’s best for the macroscopic stage as a whole and whether it’s viable from a programming standpoint.

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Fair point. I do want to emphasize the concern of focusing too much on this aspect as opposed to making sure concepts are globally cohesive for the macroscopic/aware stages, but that doesn’t invalidate this topic at all.

I will take this perspective and point out some things to this topic. Just so it’s clear - me picking at things isn’t me saying “this won’t work with the macroscopic” - me harping on so long about the macroscopic editor concept makes it sound like every inch of the game is conceptualized when it absolutely isn’t. I will just draw some attention to specific areas.

Membrane Influencing Integumentary System (VIII in the Larger Concept)

The other details sound good, but I do wonder if a simple rigidity slider is able to represent these adaptations well. Though the idea of having such a wide scale of rigidity does sound cool.

My interpretation goes something one of two options:

  • Each Membrane is a Skin-Type - There is a distinct Skin Type for each different membrane. For example: Single can be “Gelatinous”, Double can be “Thickened Gelatinous”, Chitin is “Chitin”, etc.

  • One Common Skin-Type (Depending on Motile v. Sessile), Unique Starting Attribute Based on Membrane Type - There is one universal skin type depending on whether or not you are Motile or Sessile - and your choice of Membrane unlocks a special starting Attribute. So the Skin Type would be “Gelatinous”, and the bonus for Chitin would be “Chitin Capsules” which provides specific boosts - better starting defense, starting with the ability to burrow, etc. Other Membranes have other unique stat impacts and attributes as well.

So I would think rigidity is more of a local slider for each of these skin types (If I misunderstood your suggestion initially, apologies!). And the implications would be that even the least rigid “Chitin” Skin-Type would be more rigid than the most rigid “Gelatinous” Skin-Type, for example.

I think a larger part of this relates to how we decided to deal with sessility: is it a distinct gamemode like previously conceptualized, or is it just regular Thrive gameplay where you can’t move at all? The first option is more unique, but provides more bloat, probably more work, and probably a lot more “dead-ends” depending on what a player’s objectives are.

In my head with the editor, I believed the second choice is more convenient for several reasons:

  • Potentially More Convenient - Having your membrane be entirely made out of Chitin when you initially spawn, as would be implied by having a distinct “Chitin” Skin Type before you have advanced skeletal capacity, is different from obtaining a chitinous exoskeleton. Which likely evolved from a previously more gelatinous ancestor.

  • Easy Analogue for “Chitinous Cuticle” - Nice representation for some more basal Ecdyozoa and several annelid analogues, such as velvet worms, nematodes, bobbit-worms, etc. A Chitinous exoskeleton isn’t accurate for these organisms as a distinct “Chitin” Skin-Type or more advanced “Chitin Exoskeleton” Skin-Type implies, so A “Chitinous Capsule” attribute along that line fits in well.

Alternatively - possessing a Chitin membrane as you become macroscopic could just grant you a “Chitinous Cuticle” Skin Type, which serves as a root of the “Arthropod Pathway”. Though there’s a question of if we want the player to make that choice of their future skeletal structure in the Macroscopic, or have that choice made for them when they transition to Multicellular. If that choice is made in the Multicellular - that would increase replayability and the impact of earlier game choices.

One concern I have with extremely direct cell-type-to-metaball conversions is how universal this would be to the Macroscopic/Aware Stages. After a certain point, these microscopic structures become less influential, and macroscopic structures become influential. To simplify it - when a player reaches a point when they’re evolving “dinosaur analogues” (just to name a more advanced class of organisms), I don’t think they should be thinking about this level of adaptations at all, and should instead more generally focus on organ systems and macroscopic structures.

Though I will say that the issue is more focused on how editor tools work more than the mere fact of there being a direct analogue for functions. We could have this mechanic be more influential early on in the Macroscopic, then fade away throughout the Macroscopic and Aware - perhaps once you progress your integumentary adaptations, you lose this ability?

Also one little idea - perhaps what would be considered are A.) the most directly specialized organelle, and B.) whether or not a multicellular part is present in that row? If a row of cells includes just one thylakoid, I would think that could lead to a lot of “let me stuff as many parts as possible before I become macroscopic just to get X ability” and other related balance issues.

Another small thing I want to point out: would it be fair to assume that these adaptations remain so local after multiple eons of evolution and scaling up? I would think having these adaptations be more global to the organism’s body - for example, instead of damage upon contact in one area from pili, damage is universal and is scaled based on degree of specialization and frequency of cell type in the multicellular organism as a whole.

I also think it would be more cohesive to the stage as a whole. A more “row-by-row” basis would imply an extremely universal need for some sort of “brushing on your organism to unlock an ability” throughout a lot of the stage.

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I feel like I’ve discussed this (with you?) somewhere before, but I can’t find it on the Macroscopic thread. I should probably write a comment on there to describe this in a way that could fit within the concept.

But basically, I don’t think we should consider cell membranes and skin types to be all that connected. Cell membranes are much more about the internal structure of tissues/the whole organism. It’s what makes a plant (even when it loses the ability to photosynthesise) different from an animal on a fundamental level. It’s also why “Chitin cell walls” (fungi) is completely unrelated to “Normal membrane cells, has a Chitin skin” (arthropods).

This is why we have uniform membrane types in the Multicellular now and the muscle organelle is locked to Normal/Double. (Come to think of it, that’s where I must have had this discussion before) It’s to create more permanent splits in the tree of life, as otherwise something like the difference between plants and animals you see in nature is impossible to represent in Thrive. So whatever it translates to should especially should not be only a starting attribute that can easily be changed.

Well, I think in general we want some degree of being able to tell how rigid individual parts of the Macroscopic body are. An arm with an endoskeleton, an octopus arm, and arm with an exoskeleton, a thick herbaceous stem, a wooden trunk and an arm of a stony coral are all very different. And since we are planning to have a type of procedural animation, I think it’s a good mechanic to focus on.

This translating of the membrane types to rigidity would be just one aspect of that. (Though there are IRL ways of making cellulose cell walls more or less rigid, that’s not so much the case for stone)

The point of that part of the concept is actually that things are translated much less directly from cells to metaballs than is currently the case. The row-condensation means that potentially 5 different cells gets compressed into one metaball (or, considering the earlier conversations, one metaball and a four copies with the same properties) that inherits its abilities from what those cells had. So, “this front part can eat microbes, has poison glands and chemo-sensing.” The Macroscopic Editor concept still has different parts of the body with different properties, right? The mouth is the entrance to the digestion system, that tail has a bone club, this leaf can do photosynthesis? Otherwise, what are we doing?

I am not entirely sure what you mean by “this ability” here, but the general concept here is to give you some starting abilities that fit entirely within the Macroscopic design, but having you start with them if you had them in multicellular. Having toxin cells means you start with toxin glands somewhere, otherwise you have to place them separately later on if you want them. If you have actomyosin and axon cells in Multicellular, you start Macroscopic with basic muscles and a basic nervous system, otherwise you have to evolve them while in the Macroscopic already. So in that way, it fades away over time, because (for most) of these things, they are eventually replaced, upgraded, etc. I’m not sure if you saw, but this whole post was intentionally written to be agnostic of whether we have cell design in Macroscopic at all.

I did address this briefly in one sentence, somewhere… But basically, I would rule this as “this part of the organism has some photosynthesis, but barely any.” I figured that different amounts of photosynthesis in different part of plants was important enough that it would be an expected part of the Macroscopic Editor. Alternatively, there can be a simple threshold where if the row was above X glucose production per total hexes, you get photosynthesis, and otherwise tough luck. I thought about just grabbing the most specialised functions, but that seems difficult to do with how different Microbe/Multicellular functions have different hex footprint requirements.

For hoarding lots of different functions then, the idea would be that it would make everything else you initially get weaker. As for purely the benefit of unlocking things, partially that’s just an unavoidable part of how MP costs in the first two stages work. But also, placing more of those things means you are spending more time in the Multicellular Stage that you could have been in Macroscopic already.

It’s certainly possible. The “row condensation” is a compromise between mixing cells around like that and still keeping some sense of what you put where in your Multicellular design. Otherwise really the only things left are “cell types + ratios” and “overall shape.” Notably, IRL things like “digestive cells” or “sensory cells” certainly are focused in specific parts of the body for animals both micro and macro. Take a look at cells with cilia localised on the corona in rotifers and in comb rows in comb jellies. So if anything, eons of evolution and scaling up can make things more localized.

Meanwhile, other things like the nervous system certainly are much more distributed. And I think this can be fully mixed in implementation: any feature that in the Macroscopic Editor is implemented as localized, looks at specific rows. Any global feature just looks at the cell types and numbers as a whole.

I have to say I didn’t get such a “where exactly things are placed does not matter” impression from your Macroscopic editor concept?

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I remember this being a big problem in Spore, but I think the problem there was that some things could only be unlocked if you got them in the cell stage and there was no penalty to having every single part on your organism.

I think it’s an easier problem to avoid in Thrive because players are inherently penalized for stacking on every single part with increased osmoregulation costs and decreased specialization. If someone wants to make a goofy organism that can do everything, it probably won’t survive on higher difficulties.

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That is true. But if the presence or absence of specific parts and functions in the microscopic stages sets dramatically constraints in the Macroscopic/Aware Stages, I’m sure the player would take temporary decreases in efficiency for the option of having these processes. Even if placing a thylakoid reduces efficiency of my lysosomes, atleast I have photosynthesis to work with. And I just had to spend 20 MP and survive a generation in the Multicellular for that option to be available - otherwise, I would have no access at all to it.

I think I was extending points you were making to conclusions you weren’t meaning. For example, you just mentioned rigidity as one aspect, whereas my mind immediately jumped to some sort of “rigidity” slider that the player would be able to mess with at any point in the macroscopic stages. So all of a sudden, if they make a dinosaur-analogue and mess with this slider, they can make themselves turn into a slug of some sort(extreme example, but you get the point). Apologies.

A question for this: if membranes have a dramatic influence on mobility, then wouldn’t than essentially mean that 4 out of the 6 membrane options result in basically no movement capabilities? Cellulose would indicate algae and “flora”, chitin would indicate fungi analogues, calcium carbonate would indicate something like a stony coral, silica would result in something like glass sponges, etc.

If we have a separate sessile mode, that isn’t an issue at all. But if gameplay is unified across sessile and motile organisms - which it very likely will be for a long while - that could be a limitation.

We have muscles and nerves locked behind the two membranes, so I wouldn’t call it a “surprise” that would be thrown at players though. And maybe some extensions of, say, cilia and flagellum can be abstracted to crawling motile elements. Or if we want to go more non-LAWK - some sort of appendages can allow movement for even “rock organisms”? Pioneer Rock from SpongeBob anyone?

I would also assume that almost 75% of mechanics would end up being for either single or double-membraned organisms, and taht a similar number of players would funnel to those membranes long-term.

Understood. I definitely don’t disagree with you on a fundamental level here then, my ultimate concern would just be about which system these adaptations manifest themselves in.

Examples of that sort of question we should consider -

  • Are poison glands represented as an extremity unlock which allows you to create barbs out of appendages, akin to a jellyfish, or as an integumentary attribute that deals poison contact upon damage?
  • Does possessing photosynthesis as you transition mean a unique integumentary attribute, a unique sort of appendage that performs photosynthesis, or a metabolic process available instantly limited by your SA:V?
  • Does possessing a digestive complex result in a more advanced organ system state right from the beginning (we should get back to the internal organs discussion soon at this rate), or is that too far of a leap?

That’s a much more productive conversation than the discussions I was trying to have.

P.S - I’m referencing systems defined by the macroscopic editor concept not because I’m demanding that those systems are the only thing I’d accept. I just think we should approach things systemically as much as possible so that we don’t create a mosh of features, and I think trying to see if existing concepts can handle them avoid bloat, and allows us to identify a need for additional mechanics.

My point here is definitely much less of a concern now that I’m more on your page.

With something like photosynthesis for example, I know that it just isn’t worth meaningfully evolving around it as a motile organism. It takes a lot of specialized sessile-conducive adaptations to become an efficient photosynthesizer that just isn’t worth it for a motile organism to maintain (high SA:V structures being extremely flimsy for example). So a lot of highly motile photosynthetic organisms either have it as extremely negligible, or just evolved out of it since it wasn’t very useful.

I wonder if there’s a way to make it so that the player has the option to drop their non-dominant metabolic processes? So if you meet a certain threshold, you’re almost “stuck” as being a predominantly photosynthetic macroscopic organism - if you don’t meet that threshold, it’s a secondary and highly diluted process, and there would be some option to get rid of that.

Of course, plants are aerobic as well, so it isn’t so cut and dry. Still, thresholds can be useful.

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Well, I think the consensus among others is thus far that you should still be able to evolve all metabolisms in the Macroscopic Stage? I don’t necessarily agree, but if that is the case, there is no “need” to get it before you go to Macroscopic.

In any case I would really like to see being able to get access to other metabolisms via endosymbiosis in the Macroscopic Stage. Like is the case with corals, lichen, tube worms at hydrothermal vents, etc.

It’s something I actually discussed in the Multicellular parts thread. As you’re probably aware, some plants can move parts of their bodies. The force for that comes having certain cells expand (rather than contract) due to osmotic effects. So that could be used in place of muscles, it just has weird and interesting differences like the “muscles” being on the opposite side from where you would expect them, probably being inside the joints themselves, being slower but not requiring additional energy to keep constant pressure. So that basically has them moving like animated plants in “insert fantasy franchise here.”
For the Multicellular Stage, I can pretty much implement them whenever we have a model for it, for the Macroscopic I can imagine it would be more complicated. But that means it’s 4 out of 6 membrane types for full movement instead of 2!

For before we have this kind of movement solution implemented for cellulose/chitin (and still for carbonate/silicate), as you already pointed out we have the option of flagella/cilia. This is also why I made sure to include it as providing a movement bonus in the initial post. The largest animal to use Cilia as primary locomotion I believe is the Venus Girdle at 1.5m (though it can also uses muscles in short bursts). Which I think means that this is enough of a solution throughout the development of the Macroscopic Stage at least.

A few more things:

  • Axons as currently in development actually aren’t locked to Normal/Double currently. The exact same method for their formation as in IRL animal cells probably could not work. But plenty of cells with cell walls do have long extensions for other reasons, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable.
  • I do also have some underdeveloped ideas about motion in the “stony” species, but that would definitely be non-LAWK.
  • As for “sessile mode:”
    • With what I mentioned before, at least during the Macroscopic Stage, every membrane type should still be able to have a motile lifestyle.
    • I do have some ideas I want to put in a “Macroscopic gameplay” (to parallel the editor concept) thread. But, given the above, before we implement anything specific for it, I think a valid stance is “Yo player, you chose to make an immobile creature.” That’s pretty much the status quo for the Microbe/Multicellular Stages, and some people do like watching immobile macro-algae grow apparently.

Well, the intention with this post was to go with what the Macroscopic design already was, but I guess it did show that some things are not entirely clear yet.

Considering that we have things like trees which obviously have photosynthesis ability in the leaves but not in the trunk or roots, I think this demonstrates that we need at least one of:

  • Integumentary attributes not being global across the whole organism.
  • There being some other category for tissue properties that is per-metaball/node/whatever, whether those be the main body or appendages.

Given the simplicity of this stage of development (in the biological sense), I would interpret it as contact poison. Keeping in mind my observations on the previous point, the question would be whether it is limited to one part of the body, or present on all of it.

A skin attribute makes sense, though I will note here that the current concept has skin attributes limited to one, which is quite limited for this kind of implementation.

I do also think it makes sense for having one “toxic attribute” to make it easier to unlock other toxic “abilities” but I would have to dive into the evolutionary history to be sure. And this would again be a general macroscopic editor principle that “being given something toxic at the start” just happens to plug into.

I would say so yes; it makes sense for that to progress it to a more advanced state. I listed it in the individual categories in the initial post, but I would envision a kind of sliding scale:

  • Cell wall, and no relevant organelles (so in the Multicellular Stage, they could not hunt other cells in any way): you cannot eat from planktonic clouds or microbial mats in any way.
  • Being able to engulf or having any damaging organelles means you can eat from microbial clouds or mats.
  • It would make sense for multiple of the above, as well as lysosomes, to improve your digestion efficiency, but that’s a question of how many “levels” we want to this in the Macroscopic Stage. I am aware that we don’t want the same granularity you get out of individual organelles in a cell, but considering the progression pace of the Macroscopic we might want there to be a few steps to this.
  • Having a digestive complex (extracellular digestion?) would be another massive step up in digestion efficiency/speed. Considering we are scaling up in the transition, this could even start you off with a small jawless mouth (/blind gut which automatically means the hole is a mouth? Maybe that’s a better way of looking at it?).

By the way, I would expect the above “skin microbe absorption” to be something that is disabled once you get a different skin type that has other benefits. So that’s a logical step for some species once they have a mouth/gut.

I guess it calls for a general review of how to handle metabolisms in the Macroscopic Stage/Editor? Quite a lot of plant species have entirely dropped photosynthesis by the way. And like I mentioned before, a lot of parts of plants don’t do photosynthesis to begin with, and that leaves them more efficient at other things. (As in our cell specialization system)

I don’t think we want to go as far as a slider for each metabolism for each metaball. But perhaps it’s possible to have:

  • A global checkbox for “does this species have access to this metabolism.”
  • A checkbox per major body part for “is this metabolism active here.”

The idea would be that there’s an automatic equal ratio between the metabolisms, and all the other functions of the body part (movement, digestion, etc.) scale with how much ATP is “produced.” (I don’t think we need to actually track that during gameplay).

And then indeed, any process below a threshold in the Multicellular Stage is left out of the Macroscopic body parts.

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I think a “Macroscopic Gameplay” thread might be needed before we can come to any solid conclusions on this thread. It seems like we all have different goals in mind, so we’re talking in different directions.

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