3 Major Problems with Development

Should we add this to the final draft?

The Uteen wrote:

Commander Keen wrote:

Quote :

Although, maybe colours will be used to show the different threat levels, we haven't got to that part of the conversation yet... Coloured indicators would be helpful, though.

We can simply change background color and/or put different colored particles depending on the variables. Acidic environments could be green, neutral (around 0.5 In PH it's 7...) could be blue and basic alkali? could be red. Cold could be darker and warm lighter, indicating sunlight. What about thermal vents? These are just examples, but you can show almost everything in this way.

I was thinking about showing it in the background, but there weren't enough colours, having something for yellow and red, when both were present would make orange, so orange can't be used. In other words, secondary colours wouldn't work. The background has a limit of three colours, if the colours mix. Maybe white too. So particles will be needed.

Or we could have little circles that light up in different colours. That might be simpler, at least to start with, graphics-wise.

Yes!
This is an absolutely great way to handle both chemical senses and the environment in cell stage. Also, it allows us to explore heat-loving, base-loving and acid-loving organisms. Here's what we can do:

Create a litmus paper (or red/green/blue) noise layer, then another heat noise layer on top of it, with a gradient of alpha to 80% black/alpha on top of it, perhaps with a burn effect. Each pixel's hue tells its pH and its darkness tells its heat. Brilliant. however, the noise will have to make some sense. It can't be purely random, or else it will be impossible to go anywhere if you have low tolerance. I vote that, at least in the beginning, the playable area (which can easily be quite large) is a mostly neutral pH zone bounded by acidic or basic areas, where your cell cannot survive. This determines the size of your worlds and helps you not die or be trapped in tiny bubbles of livable space.

There's no problem in shifting the area near the start point towards 0.5 (pH 7).

Good job. If someone wants to write an equation for the gradients (both in heat and PH) I'll attempt to get some of my chem notes together so we can figure out some math.

Basically, heat should be incremental. You can't jump from 10 K to 273 k in two zones that are right next to each other. If you have one zone at about 280 k, then the next one over could be either 281 or 279, but not significantly more. PH is similar, in that you could move from a 7 zone to a 7.5, but you aren't often going to go from seven to 14.

This is integral because it will give your organism an opportunity to adapt to new environments, such as higher acidity/basicity, or higher or lower temperatures. This, in addition to the flagellum and all the other functional bits, is basically evolution 101 for your players.

Also, we adding availability of sunlight into the equation? I just realized that some zones will be unequal, and our light-eater cells will have to stick in areas where there is light to eat.

Coherent noise is integral by definition. Using fractals too much might change that, but I think we will keep it simple both for the sake of your argument and speed.

Light could be displayed by drawing yellowish rays across the screen. Shouldn't light affect the temperature, though? We could have the line shine into the warmer areas of the map.

As to the background color, acid should be red, base blue, but what is in between? Going through the whole spectrum is only going to serve confusion me thinks.

Right. With the same concept of random noise, we can also randomly deviate a gradient (I wrote a custom libnoise class for this)

Basically, at the top of a "World" we could have very hot values. At the bottom, we would have very cold values with a perfect gradient. To make it not so perfect, we turbulate them, and move things around randomly so that it isn't so perfect.

Commander Keen wrote:

Coherent noise is integral by definition. Using fractals too much might change that, but I think we will keep it simple both for the sake of your argument and speed.

Light could be displayed by drawing yellowish rays across the screen. Shouldn't light affect the temperature, though? We could have the line shine into the warmer areas of the map.

As to the background color, acid should be red, base blue, but what is in between? Going through the whole spectrum is only going to serve confusion me thinks.

I think water=blue is generally the best idea. have base be purple or something. We will need light maps for photosynthesis to work.

roadkillguy wrote:

Basically, at the top of a "World" we could have very hot values. At the bottom, we would have very cold values with a perfect gradient. To make it not so perfect, we turbulate them, and move things around randomly so that it isn't so perfect.

So the game will have a side view instead of topdown?

~sciocont wrote:

I think water=blue is generally the best idea. have base be purple or something. We will need light maps for photosynthesis to work.

Makes sense. So, as we are not strictly following the litmus paper, the colors are:

Base = Purple
Acid = Red

However, we still haven't solved how the neutral zones will look. I vote for making them gray, but that wouldn't be very cell soup-like, would it?

As for light, we could give it it's own noise. However, my questions still stand:

How will light be drawn on the screen?
Shouldn't temperature be affected by sunlight?

For the first question, I still think it should be done by drawing 'rays' across the screen, really just yellowish lines from an uniform direction.

As for the second, we could use the light noise and add it with the temperature map.

Commander Keen wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

I think water=blue is generally the best idea. have base be purple or something. We will need light maps for photosynthesis to work.

Makes sense. So, as we are not strictly following the litmus paper, the colors are:

Base = Purple
Acid = Red

*facepalm*


How can it go purple to blue to red? When going from red to blue, it will go through purple! If not, we'll just get rainbows when entering acid... Purple -> Blue -> Red just isn't going to work...

Base/Alkali = Purple
Water = Blue
Acid = Green? That would be the logical next colour. Acid tends to be thought of as 'toxic green' anyway.


As for light, any areas it reaches it should warm up a bit, depending on how much light is present. Usually in the sea the light is from up above, and before there were seagulls the light would be fairly evenly distributed, with a gradual gradient to darkness going deeper. I don't think this will really affect gameplay that much.

And light rays would be fine to signify light. Lens flares would be cool, too. It's a tropical petri-dish, after all...

...

Commander Keen wrote:

Roadkillguy wrote:

Basically, at the top of a "World" we could have very hot values. At the bottom, we would have very cold values with a perfect gradient. To make it not so perfect, we turbulate them, and move things around randomly so that it isn't so perfect.

So the game will have a side view instead of topdown?

I thought it was top down with layers... ⍨ <- (Don't worry, despite the setback of the lack of a confused smiley here on the forums, I found a text-based confused smiley in my vast character database! ♫ )

Purple is next to red and blue on the RGB spectrum, Uteen. There shouldn't be a problem, unless it would break some major scientific laws, of course.

I don't really support green for being the acid though, as it is also associated with life. It would have to be the bright 'toxic green', but that would not work since we are using brightness to show temperature.

And now I am really confused as to how will the cell stage look at all.

no... I meant like the north/south of a world. Top as in top of the screen. My point is, you can bias these things so that acidity could exist more towards one end, and basity could exist towards the other. It would be more applicable to temperature I suppose.

I'm with Uteen. Make acid green. We want to have nice, smooth visual transitions.

Now, I vote we relocate to the microbe stage subforum and talk about the effect on gameplay as well.

Acid being green is good.

*Grumbles* You guys do remember that our acids and bases must be dissolved in water if they are to make any difference to our organism, right? So this purple/blue/green scheme means that your Acidic water is green, neutral water is blue, and basic water is purple.

Effectively, areas without water will have no color.

Don't mind me, but given the primordial soup idea I had assumed we'd be evolving in water.... so why exactly do we need a set "water color" if the whole screen is liquid? Green/Blue/Purple works for Acid/Neutral/Base okay, though.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

*Grumbles* You guys do remember that our acids and bases must be dissolved in water if they are to make any difference to our organism, right? So this purple/blue/green scheme means that your Acidic water is green, neutral water is blue, and basic water is purple.

Effectively, areas without water will have no color.

Don't mind me, but given the primordial soup idea I had assumed we'd be evolving in water.... so why exactly do we need a set "water color" if the whole screen is liquid? Green/Blue/Purple works for Acid/Neutral/Base okay, though.

I think this post resolved itself.

~sciocont wrote:

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

*Grumbles* You guys do remember that our acids and bases must be dissolved in water if they are to make any difference to our organism, right? So this purple/blue/green scheme means that your Acidic water is green, neutral water is blue, and basic water is purple.

Effectively, areas without water will have no color.

Don't mind me, but given the primordial soup idea I had assumed we'd be evolving in water.... so why exactly do we need a set "water color" if the whole screen is liquid? Green/Blue/Purple works for Acid/Neutral/Base okay, though.

I think this post resolved itself.

I should probably not be grumbling to the team right after chem class, or the next thing we know I'll have them building buckyballs with microscopic tweezers. All the better to nitpick with.