Favorites Hotbar

While playing, it is my interpretation that you will have several species/tribes/nations, etc. which you will be watching closely and controlling and other species which will be developing around them or even on the other side of the continent/planet/universe, etc. that you may or may not have even known have existed. It is also my interpretation that you will be able to "possess" an organism/tribe/nation and act on their behalf.

If this interpretation is correct, then we should have a favorites hotbar/menu/button which lists your favorited species/tribes/nations which you have taken notice of. For example:

You are playing on a planet x and controlling species y when you decide to let the species evolve on their own. You "zoom out" and find another species which you find interesting and "zoom in" on an organism of their population, which you then "possess". After playing as an individual of their group for a while, you wonder how far your other species has gotten while you are away. So you zoom out and look for them, but you can't seem to find them! SOLUTION: You click on your handy-dandy hotbar of favorites and select that organism from your list of favorites.

This way you wont loose your favorite organisms/tribes/nations, etc.

Hello, I'd better find your welcome thread!

And I think this is already included as a god tool, although the details are quite fuzzy. I think this would be a good way of using the tool. Although the favourites might get a bit tricky when a species splits into two different ones... Maybe use the most similar one to the original?

In the case of a splitting species, the game will send you a popup stating:

One of your favorite species has split into two!

Which would then be followed by a thumbnail of each new species. You can pick which one you wish to remain on your favorites bar (or both).

Pop-ups... They work, but it would be good to be able to disable them when you get 50+ continually evolving species, in which case my system is needed. Options are the answer to everything. We're going to have a lot of them...

Yeah, popups can be helpful, but at the same time we wouldn't put anything that they actually needed to respond to in them, as plenty of people will be playing headlines-off.

My idea: Down by the save and quit buttons area, we could have a popup progress report. You could set your "favorites" by selecting one of the species that split off, but the other one would still be an option, so you could go in the next day, change the option, and go see what they were doing.

Also, and I don't think that this has been discussed before, we could have a cladogram going in there. That way you could keep track of your species lineage, which would be lots of fun, especially if you made it from some wiggling worm thing in the depths of the ocean all the way up to sentience. The generations count could be applied for the approximate date of the split or the adaption to a new species, if we or the player wished.

And given that we'd probably be needing thumbnails of the creature so that we could tell at a glance what it is or was when hopping between options, we could have pictures up on the cladogram as well.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

Yeah, popups can be helpful, but at the same time we wouldn't put anything that they actually needed to respond to in them, as plenty of people will be playing headlines-off.

My idea: Down by the save and quit buttons area, we could have a popup progress report. You could set your "favorites" by selecting one of the species that split off, but the other one would still be an option, so you could go in the next day, change the option, and go see what they were doing.

Also, and I don't think that this has been discussed before, we could have a cladogram going in there. That way you could keep track of your species lineage, which would be lots of fun, especially if you made it from some wiggling worm thing in the depths of the ocean all the way up to sentience. The generations count could be applied for the approximate date of the split or the adaption to a new species, if we or the player wished.

And given that we'd probably be needing thumbnails of the creature so that we could tell at a glance what it is or was when hopping between options, we could have pictures up on the cladogram as well.

A cladogram, you say?

That sounds genius! It would be a great way to view the thrivepedia(?) You could select a microbe and trace it to sentience. Nice idea.

Thanks. I was hoping to put it next to those "options" type settings when you open up the window that lets you save and quit. (You know, the usual options are things like sound on or off, screencap resolution, other stuff I probably pay no attention to...)

We could have a "select favorites" tab and a "load cladogram" tab. Shouldn't be hard to make, as it is essentially a series of lines. Assuming that a species would be flagged as having evolved from species x, then it shouldn't be too hard to work in.

I like the idea, but my vote is to worry about it later.

~sciocont wrote:

I like the idea, but my vote is to worry about it later.

True enough. We need a list for post-coding stuff.

I remember saying we need an ingame thrivepedia.....

We should include that in cell stage. It would make it friendlier for players that dont know what "insert any cellttype here" are good for and how the ingame functions work.

Thrivepedia is something to worry about much, much later.

Specifically, when we finish cell and finally have something to show for our efforts.

I'm a bit late, but cladograms are cool, and now we have a great way of seeing our species and organising creatures in the 'pedia too.

Could cladograms be used for tech, too, for seeing the evolution of technology? The evolution of the phone:

Cable phone;
Old fashioned walkie talkie, with people going 'over' (one way calling, one can speak while the other listens, then they switch over);
Normal mobile phone;
The ultimate device for spying on people with just a few simple viruses Smartphone;
SiriPhone;
GLaDOS;

Should be quite interesting too.


And please don't say it... Concept cladograms... The new biomes? Every single possibility...

No! I don't have the patience to deal with that stuff...

These should be procedurally generated, as the game will flag species x as a descendant of species y... Okay, so maybe I'm assuming, but there's some binary somewhere that tells you what you came from, or else this system wouldn't be able to keep track of who was due to evolve. So, say procedural and hope that Roadkill doesn't want to strangle me with my own socks for throwing yet another spanner into his work... yeah, sounds like a good plan to me.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

No! I don't have the patience to deal with that stuff...

These should be procedurally generated, as the game will flag species x as a descendant of species y... Okay, so maybe I'm assuming, but there's some binary somewhere that tells you what you came from, or else this system wouldn't be able to keep track of who was due to evolve. So, say procedural and hope that Roadkill doesn't want to strangle me with my own socks for throwing yet another spanner into his work... yeah, sounds like a good plan to me.

Guys, our procedural naming process already stores all information about the evolution of organisms, which can then easily be parsed and structured into a cladogram using a relatively simple algorithm.

~sciocont wrote:

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

No! I don't have the patience to deal with that stuff...

These should be procedurally generated, as the game will flag species x as a descendant of species y... Okay, so maybe I'm assuming, but there's some binary somewhere that tells you what you came from, or else this system wouldn't be able to keep track of who was due to evolve. So, say procedural and hope that Roadkill doesn't want to strangle me with my own socks for throwing yet another spanner into his work... yeah, sounds like a good plan to me.

Guys, our procedural naming process already stores all information about the evolution of organisms, which can then easily be parsed and structured into a cladogram using a relatively simple algorithm.

Tech doesn't use this system... Hm...
...
We could position it in a cladogram by looking at the most advanced tech used in its construction, and see exactly how advanced it is by finding how far along the research tree it is... Yes, and different techs with the same level of advancement (like different brands of a product) could make branches... But then how do we decide which brand/branch a tech branches off? Hm...
...
And alien tech being fused with terrestrial tech is going to break the whole thing...
...
... ...
... ... ...
I give up... There will have to be a hidden procedural name for tech stuff... And I thought I was getting somewhere...

~sciocont wrote:

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

No! I don't have the patience to deal with that stuff...

These should be procedurally generated, as the game will flag species x as a descendant of species y... Okay, so maybe I'm assuming, but there's some binary somewhere that tells you what you came from, or else this system wouldn't be able to keep track of who was due to evolve. So, say procedural and hope that Roadkill doesn't want to strangle me with my own socks for throwing yet another spanner into his work... yeah, sounds like a good plan to me.

Guys, our procedural naming process already stores all information about the evolution of organisms, which can then easily be parsed and structured into a cladogram using a relatively simple algorithm.

*Bows and offers cookie*

I was right!