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

crovea wrote:

I'm not sure you need to provide screenshots in this case, but for future reference until we get screenshot functionality in, you can either run the game without fullscreen and print screen will work fine or for fullscreen you can try and find a "free" version of fraps, which will be able to take screenshots and capture video.

I got three screenshots. It's really just some text problems. Also, the main GUI when in fullscreen mode (I took pictures out of it) puts the Compounds section a bit lower so that it looked like ATP was going off the screen a bit.

How come I have such a small area to see my environment? I'm aware I can zoom out, but I don't think the gui should be so squished together like this? Is there a way to fix this?

Atrox wrote:

How come I have such a small area to see my environment? I'm aware I can zoom out, but I don't think the gui should be so squished together like this? Is there a way to fix this?

You probably chose a smaller resolution when you first set up the game. I chose 1920 x 1080.

Loony Toony wrote:

Atrox wrote:

How come I have such a small area to see my environment? I'm aware I can zoom out, but I don't think the gui should be so squished together like this? Is there a way to fix this?

You probably chose a smaller resolution when you first set up the game. I chose 1920 x 1080.

I wasn't allowed to choose a resolution?

moopli wrote:

Kirillian wrote:

Switch to UE4

Simple, really -- Ogre3D gives us a lot of control over the graphics pipeline, with direct OpenGL access. We need that to be able to write custom compositors and fragment shaders, and I don't think UE4 would give us that. And Ogre seems to handle massive numbers of instances much better than UE4, which is also very important. UE4 provides more framework for game-data and game-state stuff, sure, seeing as it's a game engine, but here again, we need a lot of flexibility, enough that bashing UE4 into the shape we want could easily be more effort than it's worth. UE4 provides out-of-the-box integrated sound, physics, graphics, etc, sure, but we've already got all the integration work done already -- any new library we incorporate will likely be for a specialized purpose (noise-generation, for example), and thus can simply interface with Lua, so we can avoid a lot of nasty API-bashing. The Unreal Editor is essentially useless to us, seeing as the bulk of our work is in procedural content generation, meaning we'd be writing C++ whether using UE4 or not. Okay, it would help with adding polish to lots of other features -- GUI would be one example, if not for the fact that we've just introduced a polished UI, and we now have methods of working with CEGUI to make it look how we like.

Funnily enough, some reasons other people usually have against UE4 are non-issues to us: 5% of 0 means we pay out nothing (though there's still the access fee for the source), and we care little about blender modelling conversion issues, seeing as we're working so much on procedurally generating and morphing meshes ourselves anyway.

From the experiences of other people who've gone from Ogre3D to UE4, it looks like we would need to rewrite nearly everything. Yeahhh, uh. No.

Understood, thanks for answer.

Atrox wrote:

Loony Toony wrote:

Atrox wrote:

How come I have such a small area to see my environment? I'm aware I can zoom out, but I don't think the gui should be so squished together like this? Is there a way to fix this?

You probably chose a smaller resolution when you first set up the game. I chose 1920 x 1080.

I wasn't allowed to choose a resolution?

Delete all the game files, reinstall them, and when you try to open the game and the Ogre thing comes up, select the Ogre system from the arrow menu first, and when all the other text comes up underneath it scroll down to resolution, click on it, and then use the drop down arrow below all the text to select your favorite resolution. Sorry if this is unclear :-/

[quote="Loony Toony"][quote="Atrox"]

Loony Toony wrote:

Atrox wrote:

How come I have such a small area to see my environment? I'm aware I can zoom out, but I don't think the gui should be so squished together like this? Is there a way to fix this?

You probably chose a smaller resolution when you first set up the game. I chose 1920 x 1080.

No I understand that, I've tried that multiple times, it's just the drop down arrow for the resolution doesn't drop down.

Kirillian wrote:

Understood, thanks for answer.

Thanks for the question! I don't think we'd ever actually considered it as an option (of course, there was no open-source UE4 access back then), so you made me think carefully.

@Atrox: Go into ogre.cfg to tweak it yourself, it seems like the config window is a bit terrible. We could roll our own dialog window to set configs, I guess.

@Loony Toony: You don't have to delete everything, just delete ogre.cfg to get the config window back. Or, just edit the values there directly.

Crovea mentioned before that gameplay mechanics would be added on request, and while I don't necessarily like this idea very much and think it would be better to have a plan, I've got requests. Obviously some of these things are planned, but this is just my 2 cents:

Major:
-More organelles along with some sort of new method of unlock besides "collect more things I guess", like an organelle tree.
-Creation of cells definitely needs work. Even if they don't have good graphics at the time, make the creation of cells not entirely organelles.
-Membrane hex added. It's essentially a space in which you can put organelles.
-Organelles usually occupy multiple membrane hexes, so you need to expand your membrane to make room for new organelles occasionally.
-Maybe some basic microbial events could take place to add to excitement.
-Of course, the compound producers need to be replaced with clouds.

Minor:
-A working options menu should be in place for changing things like resolution.
-On startup, the Thrive intro should play, but if possible, make the last frame stay on screen for longer, and then make it fade out slower.
-The music on the title screen should start up slower.
-More ways to kill microbes besides toxins.

In response to your concerns, don't worry, we are operating by what we've laid out in the GDD  (we're definintely not just twidling our thumbs waiting for ideas here), crovea was simply stating that the programmers are open to requests for gameplay features as well. 

Organelles won't unlock in a tree fashion, implying that some will lead to others. Rather, they will all begin unlocked, and the ones that don't begin unlocked can be acquired/unlocked from ingesting bacteria in your environment. 

Cytoplasm as its own hex will definitely be added, but scripted events for the Microbe Stage is a big no no (or any stage for that matter).

Most of the rest of what you said we are already aware of, have planned, and will add in the future.

NickTheNick wrote:

Cytoplasm as its own hex will definitely be added, but scripted events for the Microbe Stage is a big no no (or any stage for that matter).

I think by "events" Scottnov meant some kind of natural event that can effect the microbes, that happens randomly. For example, the opening of a volcanic vent releasing more compounds.

I presume ElementalRed means the microbe upgrade system. where we can upgrade our cells organelles, (its in the gdd), right now however we do have the microbe editor and as far as I know, its still planned.[/quote]

No no no, I meant for the game itself.

StealthStyle L wrote:

NickTheNick wrote:

Cytoplasm as its own hex will definitely be added, but scripted events for the Microbe Stage is a big no no (or any stage for that matter).

I think by "events" Scottnov meant some kind of natural event that can effect the microbes, that happens randomly. For example, the opening of a volcanic vent releasing more compounds.

Yep, this is correct.

On this scale natural events won't be noticeable. Plus, temperatures, light levels, flow rates, and compound concentrations will already be fluctuating a lot anyways. Natural events will become prominent following the transition to 3D.

Is it normal that most of the microbes (except the predatory ones) are going in a straight line?

I was just wondering will there be things like parasites? like they could be beneficial or they could be bad so you have to adapt living with the parasite? just a lil question i wanna ask even though i dont know if this has been discussed if it has well that was the worst timing i have every had well i just wanted to say that not anything like fire breathing or aquatic civilizations just parasites which from my sight are scientific and so on so forth i hope it wont be such a big deal -turtle lol

TurtleDuDe48 wrote:

I was just wondering will there be things like parasites? like they could be beneficial or they could be  bad so you have to adapt living with the parasite? just a lil question i wanna ask even though i dont know if this has been discussed if it has well that was the worst timing i have every had well i just wanted to say that not anything like fire breathing or aquatic civilizations just parasites which from my sight are scientific and so on so forth i hope it wont be such a big deal -turtle lol

Probably. You could probably be a parasite if you wanted to, even.

ElementalRed wrote:

Is it normal that most of the microbes (except the predatory ones) are going in a straight line?

Errm, I reckon that it's normal at the moment; they're planning on implementing microbe AI so they approach good stuff and swim away from bad stuff; if the AI were at that point, they'd be swimming toward the compounds they need, and trying to get away from cells with toxin vacuoles, with the ones WITH them also going after non-toxic cells. Right now, however, it's probably normal. I've seen them do that, too, especially the Nopers (those really fast ones with like 5 flagella).

Never had the time to play the prototype,but will the background change as you evolve and become bigger like in spore or will it take a different course?

Fangchamp wrote:

Never had the time to play the prototype,but will the background change as you evolve and become bigger like in spore or will it take a different course?

From what I know, getting bigger won't be as dramatic as in Spore; it'll be limited to additional membrane hexes, not "levels." Thus, there won't be massive size jumps, and thus no "levels" in the Microbe Stage for different backgrounds to emerge as needed.

I did have an idea of having a background change in the 2D segment of the Multicellular Stage in the form of the background fading away more and more as more cells are added to the colony, giving way to the 3D segment's ground texture, although I'm not sure if that'd work very well.

Something else I want to point out is that this game we are making has nothing to do with Spore.

It may have been partly inspired by Spore but only as much as it will be inspired by Rome total war, Civilisation and SimAnt later on (love SimAnt).

So basically the answer to all questions of the form "will this feature be like in Spore" is no.

I have a 0.2.4 video done (it's another tutorial, which may or may not be needed since this was a graphical update mostly :-/ ), anyone want to translate it? I already have Zymoox as the probably Spanish translator, anyone have any other languages to translate to?

My video is now posted and since I can't link anything just search for Thrive 0.2.4 tutorial on YouTube (it's around 7 minutes).

Loony Toony wrote:

My video is now posted and since I can't link anything just search for Thrive 0.2.4 tutorial on YouTube (it's around 7 minutes).

I just checked it out!

Awesome Job. Very well explained, and I love the slowmo cell splitting bit. For anyone else who is interested.
I went ahead and linked it.
I also subbed.

Can someone direct me to somewhere I can find which symbols are what agents in the prototype? I feel like I'm stumbling around in the dark and can't find agent stores isolated enough to just use the process of elimination? If someone could, that would be very helpful.