Miscellaneous Bugs And Questions That Don't Deserve Their Own Thread Thread

Yet I've not seen one post on it. Interesting.

There's no need for sarcasm. Even if you didn't know it had been discussed before, its better to start here because if it has, youll find out and get the answer without taking a whole thread. Doing this greatly helps to deal with both the number of threads on the forum and the repetition of discussion.

Now this has got me thinking, everyone knows the angler fish, the big fish from Finding Nemo with the lights and the huge teeth. That is only the female of the species, the male is many times smaller than her and has no digestive system, and when males are born, they are automatically searching for the nearest female. When he finds her, he latches on with his teeth, and eventually dissolves until he is no more than a bump of reproductive material on the female's side, ready to fertilize her eggs.

What I'm wondering is, can a relationship like this exist in Thrive?

dinoman9877 wrote:

Yet I've not seen one post on it. Interesting.

That's because it came up as a subtopic on another, massive thread. I believe the official consensus was that we'd like to have it, but don't have any concrete idea of how to implement it until we fix our concept for resources. You've just gotten yourself assigned to remembering to bring it up again after we've done that.

Please remember that we speak a belgiumming ton of languages, but that we do not have a dedicated sarcasm and irony translation team.

Quote :

Now this has got me thinking, everyone knows the angler fish, the big fish from Finding Nemo with the lights and the huge teeth. That is only the female of the species, the male is many times smaller than her and has no digestive system, and when males are born, they are automatically searching for the nearest female. When he finds her, he latches on with his teeth, and eventually dissolves until he is no more than a bump of reproductive material on the female's side, ready to fertilize her eggs.

What I'm wondering is, can a relationship like this exist in Thrive?

That's also something that has been brought up, is highly desirable, and so far mostly unplanned-for. If you can find a thread germane to the topic, I vote that we resurrect it to give all the ideas people something to chew over while we do organizing stuff.

Dinoman and Immortal_Dragon do raise some interesting subjects, but my question is how could the whole angler fish or parasite be implemented in the game as both either an AI or actual play style? The other options could be fairly easy to use in a game, watch carnivores kill something and then jump in once they leave, but the parasite and mutualism factor stumps me. Either the character will have to be very small, in a big world, or they would have to again, be small and ride a larger animal where ever it goes...

A bit of clarity could help because me and Dragon here are confused.

Btw, awesome suggestion Dinoman, but to me, it seems much larger then we could expect. Programming wise...

I imagine that parasitism would not be as hard to implement as it may seem like, but mutualism would be much harder. To me, having a relationship with a specific species would be very hard. How would you interact, besides having a painfully cutesy dance-off. Would you provide protection? Food? Mate attraction? Territory marking?

PortalFan1000 wrote:

I imagine that parasitism would not be as hard to implement as it may seem like, but mutualism would be much harder. To me, having a relationship with a specific species would be very hard. How would you interact, besides having a painfully cutesy dance-off. Would you provide protection? Food? Mate attraction? Territory marking?

I want to live inside my host though and control like wasp steer into water then burst

And now another thing I want to bring up. Vehicles for the Industrial Stage. Have they even been mentioned yet? I have a small list of questions here that I thought up recently.

1. Can we even create the vehicles our species will ride into war?

2. Are we restricted to only a small way of determining movement for our vehicles? For instance, here on Earth, plains have been made to resemble birds, but use jet propulsion because the material doesn't...bend well...Uh...Yeah. But on another planet, it may be more more efficient to adopt a form of movement for air bound vehicles that would use wings like that of a flying animal, if the species were able to find a way to minimize drag and stress put on the machinery during take-off, flight, or landing, and could then adapt it to make sudden twists, turns, and other crazy movements used in aerial combat, then it would work out well. Would such a vehicle be possible to make in Thrive?

3. Walking vehicles. Spore had the possibility, but it was aesthetic, but in Star Wars, they were a blessing and a curse. They could overlook the whole battlefield and thus shoot down on enemies below...But if something went wrong, they would just topple. Will Thrive have it too?

4. Aerial combat is a fickle thing. In the organism stage, it's basically whoever can make one not fly and avoid being torn into at the same time, but they can go through physical contact. In a vehicle, however, going at high speed, through the air, with combustible parts lining the flyer. In Earth, when one plane rams into another. It doesn't go well for either of them. In Thrive, I would hope this would be no different, which would make aerial combat a haphazard throng of twists, turns, and loops, akin to dogfighting on Earth today. How will this be worked out?

Well, there's a reason parasites are smaller than their hosts in nature. It makes them less noticeable, so they can be more successful in attaching without being knocked off, and so that they can leave the host with more to feed off of later.

But things like mutualism would be harder to implement, because these require interactions that benefit both species. Look at the birds that ride on giraffes and other animals in Africa, the birds clean the parasites from the larger animals, they get to stay healthy, and the birds get a free meal and roost. This seems to me that mutualism works best when there is a big difference in sizes between the species.

But of course this being Thrive the player could be on either side of the relationship, they wouldn't be relegated to being the small one.

Immortal_Dragon wrote:

Well, there's a reason parasites are smaller than their hosts in nature. It makes them less noticeable, so they can be more successful in attaching without being knocked off, and so that they can leave the host with more to feed off of later.

But things like mutualism would be harder to implement, because these require interactions that benefit both species. Look at the birds that ride on giraffes and other animals in Africa, the birds clean the parasites from the larger animals, they get to stay healthy, and the birds get a free meal and roost. This seems to me that mutualism works best when there is a big difference in sizes between the species.

But of course this being Thrive the player could be on either side of the relationship, they wouldn't be relegated to being the small one.

Niches seem like the best way to do this, to my mind. A sufficiently diverse ecosystem which has creatures vulnerable to, say, parasites, could open up a niche for a "cleaner" or "doctor" species, which consume those parasites, getting food and providing a tangible health benefit to the other organism. Auto-evo should nudge the two species into letting each other hang around.

Another good example would be for one creature to produce a resource (whether it be dung, aphid sap, anemone poison,) that another creature would be able to utilize. If the resource is crucial enough, the idea would be that there is a survival benefit to the harvesting organism in areas where the population of the creating organism were high enough, and this should, if we program right, prompt the harvester to defend their flocks, as it were. That's my understanding of where we left the plan, anyway.

I remember I read a thread on this a while back, but now I cannot seem to find it. How will the scale of time work in Thrive? For example, a day in Minecraft is 12 minutes. How many minutes, or hours, would a day in Thrive be? How many game time hours are expected to be in each stage? How many days will be in a year? Was it 12?

These things are important, especially since right now I'm working on modelling the Research Web to last for the duration of each stage appropriately.

Well that is a nice question, if the solar system is different for each game then these parameters should also differ. That was on my mind lately when reading through the opening scene thread everyone is saying something about big bang then forming here and there and then zooming on the planet but since it is a different place every time the intro clip should be zooming to a different planet and this means that the game engine should be far enough to handle space objects.
OffTopic: So i've got too much free time lately and i'm spending it all doing nothing so i was thinking of doing some kind of a trailer for the microbe stage, any ideas on a scenario or something?

Has anything like adrenaline been discussed yet? Like something that would increase your organism's physical abilities in certain scenarios (being chased, chasing, fighting, etc.)?

TheChubbyChihuahua wrote:

Has anything like adrenaline been discussed yet? Like something that would increase your organism's physical abilities in certain scenarios (being chased, chasing, fighting, etc.)?

Agents, I think

What about the different grips for melee weapons, some are held in the reverse, while some like nightsticks are held parallel to the wielder's arm, would that just be a FP or something that can be tagged in the TE?

And other types of exotic weapons, such as staves with blades on both ends, or even like the weapons wielded by Klingons in Star Trek, how would those be handled?

You don't need different Handles for that. Part of the description of a handle is that you define how it is held. To have a stave with a blade on both ends, you just place two blades on the handle. They don't need a separate system to handle (no pun intended) them.

I have yet another point to bring up. Hunting. In nature, most predators go without a kill more often that they make a kill. In Thrive, this should be no different. A hunt can fail for multiple reasons, and I think these should be taken into account.

The most common source of failure is just bad planning or starting the hunt at the wrong moment. A chasing lion will drive prey into a hiding lion, but if the prey go somewhere the lions don't want them to, or the prey catch wind of the other lion, it's very possible they can get away without much trouble. Just as well, if a cheetah charges at an antelope herd while an antelope is looking directly at it, the alarm goes up sooner than it would if all the antelope were grazing, and the cheetah is less likely to catch food. It should be the same in Thrive.

Another possibility of failure is the weather. Just the wind alone can determine how close a predator can get. A predator always wants to be upwind so that the prey can't smell them. A wind direction factor would be interesting in Thrive. Another problem with hunts is when the rain comes around. Antelopes turn their backs to the rain when it comes down, making it easy for a predator to sneak up from behind. However, both predator and prey have horrible traction on muddy ground, making high speed chases dangerous, and a struggle even more so. More than likely, it would be easier to wait for a drier day.

Another problem is the death struggle. Many prey animals don't fancy being torn open and eaten, and would rather go out kicking than let the predators have their way with its bowels. Predators take a risk of injury when the feet and horns start flying, and a good kick in the head or leg will more than likely risk the predator's life as a whole, being unable to hunt or pay attention from a possible brain injury. I'd actually like to see a risk of injury in trying to bring down prey, since everything is based on the functionality of the body and organs, rather than a health point system.

One final problem is the problem of going after a baby. Lions actively hunt buffalo and take great risk in targeting an adult, but they are asking for it when they go for a baby. Many species of animal are fiercely protective of their young, and buffalo are a prime example. They are unlikely to abandon a calf and are more likely to charge and scare off the lions. (Look at the Battle at Kruger on Youtube. Buffalos went up against lions AND crocodiles to save a calf) In Thrive, with certain species built like a buffalo: large, strong, and aggressive, it would be nice to see them rush to the aid of a young one in trouble, perhaps something that could be edited in the behavior editor if that is what you want your species to do.

dinoman9877 wrote:

The most common source of failure is just bad planning or starting the hunt at the wrong moment. A chasing lion will drive prey into a hiding lion, but if the prey go somewhere the lions don't want them to, or the prey catch wind of the other lion, it's very possible they can get away without much trouble. Just as well, if a cheetah charges at an antelope herd while an antelope is looking directly at it, the alarm goes up sooner than it would if all the antelope were grazing, and the cheetah is less likely to catch food. It should be the same in Thrive.

This will be part of an organism's AI.

dinoman9877 wrote:

Another possibility of failure is the weather. Just the wind alone can determine how close a predator can get. A predator always wants to be upwind so that the prey can't smell them. A wind direction factor would be interesting in Thrive. Another problem with hunts is when the rain comes around. Antelopes turn their backs to the rain when it comes down, making it easy for a predator to sneak up from behind. However, both predator and prey have horrible traction on muddy ground, making high speed chases dangerous, and a struggle even more so. More than likely, it would be easier to wait for a drier day.

I don't think we will have a dynamic system keeping track of air flow and scent wafting.

dinoman9877 wrote:

Another problem is the death struggle. Many prey animals don't fancy being torn open and eaten, and would rather go out kicking than let the predators have their way with its bowels. Predators take a risk of injury when the feet and horns start flying, and a good kick in the head or leg will more than likely risk the predator's life as a whole, being unable to hunt or pay attention from a possible brain injury. I'd actually like to see a risk of injury in trying to bring down prey, since everything is based on the functionality of the body and organs, rather than a health point system.

There is a health point system, but it is separated for each body part or organ system, whereas in the Strategy Mode all units will have their health apply uniformly across their body.

dinoman9877 wrote:

One final problem is the problem of going after a baby. Lions actively hunt buffalo and take great risk in targeting an adult, but they are asking for it when they go for a baby. Many species of animal are fiercely protective of their young, and buffalo are a prime example. They are unlikely to abandon a calf and are more likely to charge and scare off the lions. (Look at the Battle at Kruger on Youtube. Buffalos went up against lions AND crocodiles to save a calf) In Thrive, with certain species built like a buffalo: large, strong, and aggressive, it would be nice to see them rush to the aid of a young one in trouble, perhaps something that could be edited in the behavior editor if that is what you want your species to do.

That will be a part of the Behaviour Editor, I'm mostly sure.

Guy, sorry if this is off-topic, but I have some good ideas for Pos-Ascension powers (sandbox is one of my favorite things in gaming and I have a lot of imagination... ) and I don't know where to post them... :| 
Also, sorry if I'm not working, it's because of the Summer Holidays (the time of the year that a kid has to be a kid!)...

I think here's the best place. https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/f13-god-tools

I have a idea concerning ascension. How about when your race has ascended-remember in minecraft, when you kill the enderdragon and leave the end, the text scroll? I think that, when your species ascends, that happens. You tell them that you created them, that they are just in a game, etc. I just thought that would be neat.

Alternatively that might be a place to put the credits, like just the credits of main developers, not the entire forum member list of contributors and then let the player continue in god mode which is sort of a more open ended epilogue where the player can do anything.

This sort of thing would help the ascension feel like more of an end game, which I think is a nice idea and something alot of players will enjoy. If not some credits then some form of scroll or message to the player should be in order I reckon.

That sounds good to me Inca, I think it would be a fitting place for the credits. The intro would only have the Thrive logo, and Revolutionary Games on it, so the developer names would go at the end.

I was casually reading the Guinness World Records Gamers' Edition last night (as you do) and came across information about a website for indie games. Here's a link: http://indiegames.com/index.html

While it may not be a good idea to post anything about Thrive at the moment considering how much we actually have to show, it may be one of the best platforms for growing our audience in the future.