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

MitochondriaBox wrote:

T0N12 wrote:

A sandbox mode that has all god tools offer but more and it's available automatically for people who want to just mess around.

Are you describing Thrive's sandbox mode, or are you saying it should be available from the start?

I'm saying it should be unlocked from the start for people who just want to mess around without having to unlock god tools and those who want to work for them can just play through the stages to unlock them. Also it should be made a subforum separate from the god tools subforum as you can do more in sandbox than with God tools. As in sandbox you are a god while with God tools you have the power of a god limited to the capabilities of tools made limited by science. Semi-OT but what should we call the sandbox/God mode? God mode, sandbox mode, or sandbox/God mode?

Should thrive have a ato-update feature?

Is there going to be a debug console for unlimited mutation points, health, ATP, etc.?

MitochondriaBox wrote:

Is there going to be a debug console for unlimited mutation points, health, ATP, etc.?

Like Spore? I think its a nice idea.

Madero wrote:

MitochondriaBox wrote:

Is there going to be a debug console for unlimited mutation points, health, ATP, etc.?

Like Spore? I think its a nice idea.

I was thinking more SCP Containment Breach, but I suppose that works, too.

I don't think deserves its own thread for the time being - it should probably be moved to the Misc thread.

hello guys I just thought i would post a song that i think would go good with one of the more advanced stages of the game.
"note this is not of my creation its from Armored core 2"
hope you enjoy

Tidus Klein wrote:

hello guys I just thought i would post a song that i think would go good with one of the more advanced stages of the game.
"note this is not of my creation its from Armored core 2"
hope you enjoy

I'm pretty sure the soundtrack people's stance is on original music only. It does give some good inspiration on other things, though, but the complications of getting the composers' permission aren't really something people here'd want to get involved with.

No offense, though. It'd fit the Space Stage tech editor pretty well, in my opinion. Again, pretty good inspiration.

MitochondriaBox is right - we're trying to veer away from outside music as much as possible for the time being, although it's possible we'll reconsider once the microbe stage is complete. We had a discussion about it here, but the main certainty either way is that it has to be music we can get permission for. I'm also against using other video game music, as it usually carries a fair amount of symbolism from its original game, whereas our composers will need to create that themselves, with iconic themes for Thrive.

Sandbox/God mode should have it's own subforum in Modes.

well that was the goal was for inspiration more then actually use....probably should have stated that.
my bad.

Sorry if the answers for these are really obvious and I just missed them. Anyway, here we go...

1. Since most information regarding the start of the Microbe Stage that I'm aware of is now outdated, what's the consensus on the start nowadays? What the player cell will be like, what it'll start with, how it'll survive without mitochondria if it doesn't start with them, etc.

2. Mutation points represent time, but I have no idea how they'll be collected. Will mutation points be garnered at a set amount every time the editor is booted, or will they be collected somehow in-game, and how?

MitoBox wrote:

Is there going to be a debug console for unlimited mutation points, health, ATP, etc.?

Already got one, ` to open. It's a lua console though, so you'd need to code in your cheats to be able to call them from in there. It's also not too great right now since I didn't put much effort into getting it anywhere farther than barely-functional. But we're adding a bunch of random useful cheat commands (officially debug commands, but we all know what they'll be most useful for :P).

T0N12 wrote:

Should thrive have a ato-update feature?

I've got soem ideas on how to make one, and we might eventually create a patching system, but that would have to wait a while, since the codebase is still under way too much change. A patch file would (almost necessarily) need to store the entire executable (since it'll tend to change quite a lot between releases), at least. Although, if we set up a version control system for package-release, we could probably prevent the redownloading of all those .dll/.so's, and a lot of repeated script files. But anyway, yeah, we've looked into it.

Quote :

I'm saying it should be unlocked from the start for people who just want to mess around without having to unlock god tools and those who want to work for them can just play through the stages to unlock them.

That'll be easy to do once we actually have the game mostly finished
But until then, it's a moot point since people would have to play the game many times over until sandbox mode is unlocked ie finished being coded.

MitoBox wrote:

how it'll survive without mitochondria if it doesn't start with them

Anaerobic respiration, courtesy of cytoplasm.

Quote :

Mutation points represent time, but I have no idea how they'll be collected. Will mutation points be garnered at a set amount every time the editor is booted, or will they be collected somehow in-game, and how?

Every time you reproduce you enter the editor with the same number of mutation points. That way, the amount of evolutionary "change" (a nebulous variable if there ever was one) scales with reproduction frequency.

Does that mean that we'll start as a randomly colored cell with a nucleus and the required number of hexagons for it?

Oh dear, it appears the forums died. Is everything still progressing?

Github is quite active, and I'd attribute part of the inactivity on the forums to myself and Oliver who both just returned from trips and will briefly be catching up.

In addition, the forum does fluctuate between highs and lows of activity, and having experienced many of these highs and lows I can assure you it's nothing to worry about. It's likely due to much of the work being focused on code implementation, as well as summer holidays taking peoples' time.

Sorry to post this here, but I've read around and saw that people think that it's alright to use music from outside sources, well, I don't really. For a game this huge, other music not from Thrive should not be in Thrive, at least that's what I feel. except for maybe very specific parts, with well-known music (I hate to use spore for an example, but the scene when your creature goes from creature stage to tribal). It just wouldn't fit very well. You'd be listening to music from Thrive, swimming/running/playing bongo drums/making steel swords/cloning people and making robots/sending ships to destroy everything, when suddenly a track from some other source comes on. That just doesn't make any sense to me. It WOULD work on some occasions, under specific conditions, though. Someone said that we couldn't make as amazing music as some other people, so we should use outside sources, but that's cheating, isn't it?

Sorry if I seemed rude or anything, but I wanted to say this, and I didn't have the permission to on the other threads. Nothing against anyone. Thanks.

Scottnov wrote:

Sorry to post this here, but I've read around and saw that people think that it's alright to use music from outside sources, well, I don't really. For a game this huge, other music not from Thrive should not be in Thrive, at least that's what I feel. except for maybe very specific parts, with well-known music (I hate to use spore for an example, but the scene when your creature goes from creature stage to tribal)

Oh yeah, "2001: A Space Odyssey" soundtrack is amazing. Would fit well in some evolution points.

Scottnov wrote:

Someone said that we couldn't make as amazing music as some other people, so we should use outside sources, but that's cheating, isn't it?

Well, that's false, i trust in our composers skills (including me).
I really don't think that we need to use other people music except in special cases, like the "Space Odyssey" one.

If the player needs to evolve to progress, but the original species pre-edit is kept around, how's the player going to prevent his/her species from going extinct from going extinct after, somehow, both post-mitosis cells/the single mutated offspring gets themselves/itself killed? Especially for the second one, since there's no one to mate with if it's sexual.

If the answer is that a member of the closest species is the new avatar, or (for that second one) that the current avatar can mate with said closest species, then (not taking hybrids and sterility into account) how will the game decide that the other species is "close enough"?

@Scotnov
Fair enough, but I think you're missing the point a little. Take something like this (minus all the coughing), for example, as an ambient aware stage piece (obviously not the whole thing, as that would be far too long). I doubt many will know it, and for the most part it'll blend into the background for that group of people. Therefore, it wouldn't really be

Scotnov wrote:

suddenly

as it's going to fit in with the rest of the soundtrack, so players won't be torn away from the game. There are several advantages to this: it saves our composers a lot of effort, the sound quality is better than what we could conceivably do at the moment, and those who do know it will have a nice surprise to see it included. We would need to get permission for everything, though, which could be a bit of a pain. Also Sprach Zarathustra, the theme from 2001, on the other hand, has connotations with a lot of other things, potentially resulting in what you describe, where the music isn't Thrive. I'd argue these sorts of powerful, poignant themes are the ones we most need to compose ourselves, as they'll be the ones everyone remembers and associates with Thrive.

Oliveriver wrote:

@Scotnov
Fair enough, but I think you're missing the point a little. Take something like this (minus all the coughing), for example, as an ambient aware stage piece (obviously not the whole thing, as that would be far too long). I doubt many will know it, and for the most part it'll blend into the background for that group of people. Therefore, it wouldn't really be

Scotnov wrote:

suddenly

as it's going to fit in with the rest of the soundtrack, so players won't be torn away from the game. There are several advantages to this: it saves our composers a lot of effort, the sound quality is better than what we could conceivably do at the moment, and those who do know it will have a nice surprise to see it included. We would need to get permission for everything, though, which could be a bit of a pain. Also Sprach Zarathustra, the theme from 2001, on the other hand, has connotations with a lot of other things, potentially resulting in what you describe, where the music isn't Thrive. I'd argue these sorts of powerful, poignant themes are the ones we most need to compose ourselves, as they'll be the ones everyone remembers and associates with Thrive.

I do agree that some ambiance themes are fine to have a track from outside of Thrive as a placeholder, but not as something that should stay, at least not most of them. My problem with using outside sources of music is that Thrive is such an enormous concept, much larger than Spore, which had it's own original soundtrack (aside from the 2001: A Space Odyssey song and maybe a few others I forgot to mention).

I understand that it saves a lot of effort, it's a lot of work to compose an entire soundtrack. Once again, however, they should only be placeholders. Also, I know they're a lot better than what we can do at the moment, but that doesn't mean we should just, in a sense, give up and use someone else's better theme.

Summary: Ambiance themes not from Thrive should mostly be placeholders, except for a few, which might stay. Any larger themes, like you said should be composed by ourselves. This is my opinion on it, at least, and I'm sorry if I seemed rude.

Sorry for the double post, but I have 2 questions: Would it be possible for your race to coexist with another race who both developed on the same planet? Maybe even becoming united into one sort of empire? Secondly, how exactly would you design certain parts, such as mouths or ears (or whatever the equivalent is for your creature)? Would they be premade, or design-able?

Also, I hate to be that guy saying "iz it dun yet?????????????? eta pls???????????????????" but weren't we going to have another release a few weeks after 2.3 was released? Oh well, things take time. Still, I'd like to know that Thrive isn't starting to die off.

I read the discussion about the color of chlorophil, and I saw the table about plant colors per stars. But why is there only 3 colors per stars? Unless it is due to technical limitations, i think plants can have every color of the visible Spectrum but one color will be predominant, like on Earth.

ElementalRed wrote:

the discussion about the color of chlorophil

Short answer: That discussion is old and not really important right now.

Long answer: The most realistic way to do this would be to, for every chunk of leaf on every plant, calculate the light spectrum reaching the plant, multiply it by the absorption spectrum of the piece of leaf in question, and thus figure out how much energy is absorbed by the plant (in terms of wavelength. Then, we can figure out how much heat the plant absorbs, and how much energy the plant can collect over time. We can also differentiate and see which way the evolutionary pressure pushes, and how strongly.

Needless to say, this is very expensive, even in optimized forms that avoid raytracing and complicated continuous spectra. So we must approximate and precalculate -- and that is exactly what they did in that thread, do some thinking, and figure out what colours of pigment would work more or less well for certain colours of star. Sure, we might be able to use some tricks to make the sim more complicated; but it'll already cover almost all cases using that cheap lookup table.

Oh and @Scottnov: The GUI release that was supposed to be soon is mostly on Oliveriver's (and RabiesPig I think?) shoulders; and Oliveriver doesn't have a computer to use atm. More or less, the standard excuse of "stuff happens".

Scottnov wrote:

Still, I'd like to know that Thrive isn't starting to die off.

On this point, I'd hardly think that a planned release for several weeks after 0.2.3 not coming out exactly when intended, or even shortly thereafter, is a sign of Thrive starting to die off. If anything, it's business as usual. Since we are as of yet but a small team, the development of the game relies more heavily on the schedules of individuals.