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

Oliveriver wrote:

On the contrary - if everything goes to plan

With the caveat, of course, that nothing ever goes according to plan.

Huh, I thought it'd take longer, since I assumed that everyone was super busy all the time.

Would about 1-3 years to star the next stage be a better estimate (assuming we don't plan on doing everything for the previous stage at once), and then folks proceed to take as long as they need for other additions?

I know we're still far from it, but since we are going to have first person view in Aware stage, how are we going to deal with slug-like or chameleon-like eyes, or even more than 2 eyes?
Also, I haven't seen Sciocont for a long time. Where is he? (without being indiscreet)

ElementalRed wrote:

I know we're still far from it, but since we are going to have first person view in Aware stage, how are we going to deal with slug-like or chameleon-like eyes, or even more than 2 eyes?
Also, I haven't seen Sciocont for a long time. Where is he? (without being indiscreet)

There's going to be first person view? Wow. And yes, you should worry about the views. Imagine trying to navigate when you have chameleon eyes pointing different directions or your eyes don't allow for depth perception (or worse, you don't have eyes). There's going to have to be a LOT of work on that if they keep that idea.

Loony Toony wrote:

ElementalRed wrote:

I know we're still far from it, but since we are going to have first person view in Aware stage, how are we going to deal with slug-like or chameleon-like eyes, or even more than 2 eyes?
Also, I haven't seen Sciocont for a long time. Where is he? (without being indiscreet)

There's going to be first person view? Wow. And yes, you should worry about the views. Imagine trying to navigate when you have chameleon eyes pointing different directions or your eyes don't allow for depth perception (or worse, you don't have eyes). There's going to have to be a LOT of work on that if they keep that idea.

I've heard that senses other than sight are also brought into 1st-person view, so, even if you don't have eyes, you'll still "see" things like scent trails, so, if you could smell, the screen would probably show a blurry environment based off different scents.

As for different-pointing eyes, I have no clue how THOSE would work. The player'd probably be limited to stalk eyes pointing the direction he/she is facing. Perhaps the same for chameleon eyes. Otherwise, they'd be going willy-nilly based on stimuli, but at least the view'd be blurred in the middle so it'd still look like a coherent image.

MitochondriaBox wrote:

Loony Toony wrote:

ElementalRed wrote:

I know we're still far from it, but since we are going to have first person view in Aware stage, how are we going to deal with slug-like or chameleon-like eyes, or even more than 2 eyes?
Also, I haven't seen Sciocont for a long time. Where is he? (without being indiscreet)

There's going to be first person view? Wow. And yes, you should worry about the views. Imagine trying to navigate when you have chameleon eyes pointing different directions or your eyes don't allow for depth perception (or worse, you don't have eyes). There's going to have to be a LOT of work on that if they keep that idea.

I've heard that senses other than sight are also brought into 1st-person view, so, even if you don't have eyes, you'll still "see" things like scent trails, so, if you could smell, the screen would probably show a blurry environment based off different scents.

As for different-pointing eyes, I have no clue how THOSE would work. The player'd probably be limited to stalk eyes pointing the direction he/she is facing. Perhaps the same for chameleon eyes. Otherwise, they'd be going willy-nilly based on stimuli, but at least the view'd be blurred in the middle so it'd still look like a coherent image.

Perhaps a separate screen for every eye?

HariboTer wrote:

ElementalRed wrote:

I know we're still far from it, but since we are going to have first person view in Aware stage, how are we going to deal with slug-like or chameleon-like eyes, or even more than 2 eyes?

NickTheNick wrote:

Yes, it would split the screen, but that would be really disorienting so I would recommend to any player not to do that.

(source)

So will split screens be a thing? Rejected or confirmed?

That's one of those things that I feel very uncomfortable about deciding now. And frankly, if anyone were to say, unequivocally, that we will or will not have {some random feature that is neither a very important part of Thrive nor needed for current development},I would straight-up tell them that they're getting ahead of themselves. Speculate away. Come up with good reasons for and against. Hold a debate. But no rejection or confirmation yet.

Personally though, I would lean away from split-screening -- you'd find it hard to do stuff requiring coordination between eyes. I would want a very tricky fisheye transform, which puts points of focus at the places where your eyes are usually pointing. Spur-of-the-moment idea, run with it if you want.

Okay, I have other questions:

1. I've seen that there will be "genetic manipulation" in the Industrial stage, so could we be able to make hybrids?

2. Could creatures wash themselves?

3. How could an aquatic creature evolve into a flying one? ( like the flishes in The Future is Wild.)

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot, I know it has already been discussed but I need to be sure, how much bytes will Thrive be? I want to be sure if I will have enough space for it.

EDIT 2: Aaaand another thing: will there be electromagnetic storms?

ElementalRed wrote:

Okay, I have other questions:

1. I've seen that there will be "genetic manipulation" in the Industrial stage, so could we be able to make hybrids?

2. Could creatures wash themselves?

3. How could an aquatic creature evolve into a flying one? ( like the flishes in The Future is Wild.)

1. I don't know, hopefully someone else will answer.
2. That would be both an interesting and occasionally annoying thing. So a creature would accumulate "filth" by engaging in activities, and I guess the filth could increase the chance of infections? You could probably wash it off by going into the water or cleaning yourself or something.
3. That I do not know, but if that could happen, I very much look forward to it.

Loony Toony wrote:

ElementalRed wrote:

Okay, I have other questions:

1. I've seen that there will be "genetic manipulation" in the Industrial stage, so could we be able to make hybrids?

2. Could creatures wash themselves?

3. How could an aquatic creature evolve into a flying one? ( like the flishes in The Future is Wild.)

1. I don't know, hopefully someone else will answer.
2. That would be both an interesting and occasionally annoying thing. So a creature would accumulate "filth" by engaging in activities, and I guess the filth could increase the chance of infections? You could probably wash it off by going into the water or cleaning yourself or something.
3. That I do not know, but if that could happen, I very much look forward to it.

1. Me neither. However, it's not entirely unfeasible; so long as the game is capable of taking two creatures' designs and making a hybrid. It'd probably only work for close-related species at first, resulting in things like ligers, and could even happen naturally, just not producing an actual species. However, higher "selective hybridization" technologies would probably lead to all sorts of crazy (and fun) nonsense. Pretty sure implementation wouldn't be a primary concern, however.

2. I suppose different activities would have different "sanitation" values; swimming in water would probably mostly have a positive sanitation value, except when the water is stagnant, while walking through a sandstorm would have a negative sanitation value. Grooming would probably work as a positive-value action, as would shaking filth off. The need to attend to sanitation would bring into question the scenario of being ambushed by aquatic predators while bathing.

3. Can't be too hard to go from sea to air, without going to land first. Having massive wing-fins would be the obvious answer, with powerful flight muscles, and maybe a water jet to provide additional momentum if you feel like it. Floating would work, too, if the planet has low enough gravity; you could activate hydrogen sacs to escape from aquatic predators (although they'd eventually evolve a means of following you to the sky). What would the word for this kind of life form be, though (counterpart to amphibious)?

ElementalRed wrote:

Okay, I have other questions:

1. I've seen that there will be "genetic manipulation" in the Industrial stage, so could we be able to make hybrids?

2. Could creatures wash themselves?

3. How could an aquatic creature evolve into a flying one? ( like the flishes in The Future is Wild.)

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot, I know it has already been discussed but I need to be sure, how much bytes will Thrive be? I want to be sure if I will have enough space for it.

EDIT 2: Aaaand another thing: will there be electromagnetic storms?

1. Depends on which kind of hybrids, i would see it possible that genetic manipulation is constrained by the types of DNA and compatibility of the two species and how diverse the Genome spectrum is. So perhaps if the basic transcription nuclease and enzymes fit with eachother, (in addition to base pairing) i would see no problem. So you could make cat girls or woof man. Those are all possible and doable but it will require quite a bit of time so i think that would add about 50GB to the file size

2. Depends if the creatures require hygiene. Also for people who do not have acequdate GPUs it would be useless since they would have no AA on as well as no V-sync for the large explosions of mud to cover the body to be washed off. Also this would depend on what one considers clean. Perhaps your species thrives in dirt and anything else is considered unclean. It could also be that the UV rays are so powerful you must cover yourself in some sort of mud or dirt to stay alive, then cleaning yourself you actually result in the immediate death of the species. But perhaps you have a point because the Ebola would spread to far without quarantining. So I would suggest quarantines instead of cleaning. Much more stable and efficient. about 20GB of data added to the game there

3. Flying fishes evolve based on the entropy of the system. If the Gibbs free energy of the Fishes system is below zero it will evolve into a flying fish. This still depends on the enthalpy of the fishes wing reactions and the temperature under which the wings take place, if the critical temperature of the environment is reached then the fish could possibly grow entropy increasing wings. This also depends if the Fish is smart enough to maneuver in the air, you cant just have fish flying for no reason, they need a purpose of flying to eat things. Only 1MB for this though

Edit 1 Answer: So with the features you described youre looking at 50GB+20GB+1MB. So if you include the GUI made by oliver (which should take up 60GB) and the epic soundtrack (which will probably require installing a separate partition HDD of about 1TB to handle the amount of songs by the team as well as the code (youre looking around 20-50kb) it should be 130GB and 1MB with the 1TB additional partition

Edit 2 Answer: No.

Namor-Yrotciv's reply above is completely ridiculous, you've basically cited a few complicated sounding concepts and come up with a random conclusion, helping no-one and attempting to make yourself look smart. Non-constructive posts and discussions distract people from what this forum is here for - the more productive discussions on implementing the game. Continuing this way is a good way to get yourself a temporary ban.

In response to the original questions, for the most part we don't know. Your asking about features of the later stages of the game, which aren't being worked on now (and won't be for probably several years), and can't reasonably be decided until then. That's why your getting confusing answers (or none at all) from relatively new members of the team - we don't have an answer, and we don't particularly like speculating. That said, and because it'd be rude to reply without at least attempting to answer these questions:

1 - A hybridisation system might be possible, though only for closely related species. A genetic modification system would be far easier to implement, giving traits of one species to another, without having to worry about mixing the rest of the genome. Something like this isn't going to get any serious consideration until *much* later in development.

2 - This depends on if we model disease, and to what level of detail, it seems fairly unlikely, but not impossible.

3 - A few people made decent suggestions (enlarged fins, gas bladders). This should be possible for the player, though it's probably unlikely that the AI would make this extreme a transition.

edit 1 - We don't know how big the game will be, and won't know until it's done. At a guess (and it really is a guess), we should be able to get each stage somewhere between 1-5GB.

edit 2 - Maybe, on some types of planet, if we think it'll have a significant (and interesting) affect on game play.

I think Namor-Yrotciv was just trolling the newbie question of how many bytes it would be. I laughed cuz it was funny, but downvoted for trolling. I do sympathize a bit though, since the answer of "no, we have no idea yet, go ahead and speculate" rapidly gets boring, and people always want unequivocal answers from the Great Thrive Gods. So Namor was demonstrating how silly these unequivocal answers would be. And here I am analysing a troll instead of working.

Anyway Seregon, about the hybridization question, I'll just point out that they'd be phenetic modifications, since the internal data we store for a species will likely lean much more towards the phenotype side, being, basically, patterns of gene expression. Apart from that quibble, I agree.

moopli wrote:

I think Namor-Yrotciv was just trolling the newbie question of how many bytes it would be. I laughed cuz it was funny, but downvoted for trolling. I do sympathize a bit though, since the answer of "no, we have no idea yet, go ahead and speculate" rapidly gets boring, and people always want unequivocal answers from the Great Thrive Gods. So Namor was demonstrating how silly these unequivocal answers would be. And here I am analysing a troll instead of working.

You know me well my comrade.  The all knowing Thrive Gods must always answer the questions of our disciples. For the Lord hath said "Ye are verily my treasured ones, and to those I shall respond."

seregon wrote:

Non-constructive posts and discussions distract people from what this forum is here for - the more productive discussions on implementing the game. Continuing this way is a good way to get yourself a temporary ban.

I agree with this completely, but if you were to actually enforce these rules, not only would you have to temporarily ban myself, but the plethora of insanely irrelevant questions asked by random users in this thread. I think Moopli brought up a good point when he said

moopli wrote:

And here I am analyzing a troll instead of working.

because he realized how stupid 85% of the posts on this thread are. Unless you appoint a senior trollmaster moderator, who operates in this thread only to satisfy the needs of the trolling traffic that passes by, this is basically a waste of your time when you could be doing productive things (perhaps making the GUI).

If you want, start by banning me, but be sure to delete and ban any other insanely irrelevant questions/trolls that come by this thread too. Hell, why does this thread even exist. If you guys were really serious about this, only have this forum exclusively available to people who are actually doing productive things. Otherwise you're letting yourself get distracted by a million other things. If you cant contribute, dont post, if youre going to contribute post. That way you get things done.
Oh im sorry that was too relevant for this irrelevant post.

Yrotciv the higher up people, do not have experience in making a game or managing game development, and that is very easy to see. That being said they are serious about making the game, they are just not sure how to do so.

Solution for forum question posts:
They should have a thread for just for answering question such as this one, BUT, the very first post should be an admin or shared account between the higher up people so they can update it continuously. And in that post they paraphrase the questions, credit the person who asked them give an answer and then delete the post that asked the question so that new posts with new questions end up on the first page. Being on the first page the first post will have an answer sheet for all the questions so that they are unlikely to make reposts. If someone still asks the same question when it has been answered private message them with the answer. For extended answers that already have a thread they can be redirected.

Ex:

ElementalRed Asks:
Q: How much memory will the game take up?
A: It is uncertain how much memory the game will take up it is estimated at 1-15 GB.

I believe the Q&A section did something similar.

Earthium Prime wrote:

Yrotciv the higher up people, do not have experience in making a game or managing game development, and that is very easy to see.

... Man, is that really necessary?

Earthium Prime wrote:

That being said they are serious about making the game, they are just not sure how to do so.

Now, I wouldn't say they don't know "how," since they've got progamming languages in mind, years worth of discussion on how basic implementation of things will go, etc. To be fair, we're all a cobble of people around the world who think Spore 2.0's a good idea, and most of us (including me) don't have much to do or say. However, you must notice that the progress we've all got at the moment can at least attract attention.

Earthium Prime wrote:

Solution for forum question posts:
They should have a thread for just for answering question such as this one, BUT, the very first post should be an admin or shared account between the higher up people so they can update it continuously. And in that post they paraphrase the questions, credit the person who asked them give an answer and then delete the post that asked the question so that new posts with new questions end up on the first page. Being on the first page the first post will have an answer sheet for all the questions so that they are unlikely to make reposts. If someone still asks the same question when it has been answered private message them with the answer. For extended answers that already have a thread they can be redirected.

I think this current style of question answering will suffice. The higher-ups don't always have the time to answer, leaving us less influental users the role of answering these questions, and that saves a lot of time.

The problem with private-messaging everyone is that the message isn't available for everyone to see. Now, if there really was a list of answers, then it'd be a very, very long list, and some people'd rather not read the whole thing. Case in point, the diabolical mess that was the Underwater Civilizations thread, where the brilliant idea of using hydrothermal vents to smelt metal was shot down no less than ten times. Unfortunately, the current way doesn't address, this, either. However, the benefit of giving all users a chance to answer questions is preferrable, in my opinion. It gives everyone a chance to do something.

How about a thread that provides links to all of the Misc Bugs & Questions threads, with the current one being highlighted? Who knows, maybe a compromise could be settled; the asking and answering would go on the current question thread, while the list of these threads would also include a list of answers, if anyone wants to read it before asking.

Well my point was once you private message them you would add their question to the big list of question and answers and you notify them that the question was answered. I don't think having a list to the links to miscellaneous questions would work either because then people scroll through multiple pages to answer a question, and normally they ask a few. So I think it would be easier just to restate the answer rather then having links at that point. We could honestly do that now if we wanted. My solution isn't much better to answer everything it would be like 72 pages worth of information. You could use CTRL-F to search for your question, that's still not an elegant solution. I guess our current method will have to do it's not that elegant of a solution either.

Things are picking up around here I hope the momentum continues but considering things like the GUI weren't finalized. To make a video game you really really need to have finite details, menu gfxs, where they will be places, spacing. One of my fears is that we get momentum we will have people coming into the forums asking a already answered question or unimportant questions then leaving just causing spam.

MitoBox wrote:

I wouldn't say they don't know "how," since they've got progamming languages in mind, years worth of discussion on how basic implementation of things will go, etc

There is much more to developing a game than having some people who program, and some people who do art, and some people who do sound, and some people who spitball ideas, and so on. Earthium's assessment is exactly correct. Let's just ignore all the people not on the core team (rabid fans), and we get a few people who make parts of the game, a few people who talk about things, and a few people who do a bit of this management thing. But we still don't run ourselves much like a professional game dev team. Luckily though, we do try, and whenever someone points out that we aren't exactly a team of expert game developers, well, I don't mind hearing it. It is true, and it's something we need to fix, and saying "C'mon man be nice to them, they're really nice people" is nice for support but not constructive. 

MitoBox wrote:

The higher-ups don't always have the time to answer, leaving us less influental users the role of answering these questions

The problem here is that almost none of the questions have really good answers yet, and are really just fodder for speculation. That speculation fodder makes good discussion, but we've already decided we want that sort of thing to go to the subreddit. In the end, all that leaves are bug reports and simple questions that probably don't need to be in a FAQ, like "what file contains the hex coordinate math" (hint: it's scripts/microbe_stage/hex.lua). Those kinds of things are already being handled better by the subreddit. I know I'm already an evangelist for cleaning the forum and moving stuff to the subreddit, so I figure it won't hurt my reputation any to say that the miscellanibugs thread has probably outlived it's usefulness.

quote="Earthium Prime"] I guess our current method will have to do it's not that elegant of a solution either[/quote]

I wouldn't rule out your idea immediately; things are going to change a lot as time goes by, and different methods may work better later than now.

Earthium Prime wrote:

One of my fears is that we get momentum we will have people coming into the forums asking a already answered question or unimportant questions then leaving just causing spam.

Well, I think we can all say that managing the questions is as important as answering them. Time will tell how, I guess.

moopli wrote:

There is much more to developing a game than...

I was thinking more immediate "how's" like how the stages would go, what editors there'd be, etc. and not ones like how do we fix this, how are we going to find someone that can do that, etc. I was referring to immediate "how's" because I interpreted his statement as saying you guys don't have a goal in mind.

moopli wrote:

It is true, and it's something we need to fix, and saying "C'mon man be nice to them, they're really nice people" is nice for support but not constructive.

In my defense, I felt as if he was saying that nobody here knows what they're doing, not something constructive like "you guys should try organizing yourselves more." The tone of words is up to the reader, and we saw it a different way.

moopli wrote:

I know I'm already an evangelist for cleaning the forum and moving stuff to the subreddit, so I figure it won't hurt my reputation any to say that the miscellanibugs thread has probably outlived it's usefulness.

Well, it's started to. Doing away with it any time soon might be a little hasty, but maybe when enough question activity relocates there, and when it's established to everyone as having that role? Just saying now might not be the best time, since it's still being used a lot.

I will answer what questions I can.

ElementalBlue wrote:

1. I've seen that there will be "genetic manipulation" in the Industrial stage, so could we be able to make hybrids?

2. Could creatures wash themselves?

...

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot, I know it has already been discussed but I need to be sure, how much bytes will Thrive be? I want to be sure if I will have enough space for it.

1. The idea is that researching a tech named "Genetic Manipulation" or something of the sort, you can re-unlock the Organism Editor and gradually mutate your species through genetic engineering.

2. This requires a system of "dirtiness" which doesn't really make sense to implement for reasons already stated. Also this is a terribly specific and distantly related question to ask, I don't really understand how our answer can satisfy that because things are bound to change by the time we get to implementing this.

@EDIT
There are several problems I see with this question:
1. I don't know how you can expect us to count the bytes of a game we haven't made yet. It's like asking an architect how much wallpaper he will need for a house he hasn't even drawn blueprints for yet.
2. This assumes that the question will reach a final state after which it won't change, at which it will have it's final size in bytes. This is not the case, because the game is continuously being updated, which usually means more space taken up. It might taper off at some point as the game gets really big but that's nigh impossible to predict at this point.
3. Even if the above two were not the case and we somehow knew that the game would be somewhere around say ~10GB, I don't see why you would be saving hard drive space for a game that will be years in the making and will take quite a while to even reach that state of taking up 10GB.

@Roman
I'll be honest I laughed at you're responses because I recognized what you were trying to say, but I think you could have been much more constructive and intelligent with conveying what you thought of this thread and the questions people ask then how you did it, which only really serves to antagonize people and is quite out of place on a development forum.

Nevertheless, I think you are right in saying that the Misc thread is not really related to development at all and is more just a lot of people (usually new and just fans) wanting to know what ideas we have for the game and taking it as factual assertions of what we promise will be implemented.

@Derivative of Earthium
I like your idea of a Q&A thread, but the OP would get very long very fast (although using Ctrl+F function would expedite the process). Your idea for PMing people who ask repeat questions sounds nice in theory, but if say I put that into practice I'd basically be spending all of my time just PMing people about questions they've asked that have already been answered, because people do that A LOT.

@MitochondriaBox

Quote :

the brilliant idea of using hydrothermal vents to smelt metal was shot down no less than ten times

You better not be implying that that was a possible solution to underwater solutions, because it was disproven, as you said, at least 10 times.

NickTheNick wrote:

@MitochondriaBox

Quote :

the brilliant idea of using hydrothermal vents to smelt metal was shot down no less than ten times

You better not be implying that that was a possible solution to underwater solutions, because it was disproven, as you said, at least 10 times.

I think he was being sarcastic

Atrox wrote:

NickTheNick wrote:

@MitochondriaBox

Quote :

the brilliant idea of using hydrothermal vents to smelt metal was shot down no less than ten times

You better not be implying that that was a possible solution to underwater solutions, because it was disproven, as you said, at least 10 times.

I think he was being sarcastic

Yep, hence me referring to the whole thread as a "diabolical mess." Of course, due to the non-vocal nature of words, any sarcastic tone was entirely implied, so there's no problem with interpreting my post that way, it's just not what I said.

My comrades, perhaps the forum can be very dev specific and fellow gentlemen like myself can go and frolic in the plentiful land of reddit, and perhaps within all the rabble there, something good will come out. We can leave the dev's alone and only serious inquiries can make it through. Since the game seems to have a lot of thought into it for the current stages, all it needs now is action. Action is what drives revolutions, what drives the processes of life.

Show them what Thrive truly is through the game.
Show them what you can and cannot do through the gameplay.
Show them that there is and will be everlasting progress.
Make them excited, because of endless possibilities.
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