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

Word, Pages, Powerpoint, Keynote… I don't think there are many programs solely for that purpose.
There might have been one in Textease Studio, but the last time I used that would have been in primary school.

I think we planned to finalise the current part of the tech tree before extending it.

I used yEd for flow charts and the like (plenty of examples in the compound system thread). It takes a bit of getting used to, but is fairly powerful in the end.

The Uteen wrote:

So... We don't seem to have a thread for general forum bugs, so I thought I'd create one. In case anyone hasn't realised, this thread is for forum bugs or questions that don't really need a whole thread, but could use fixing.

Now, this will be quite contradictory, but the reason I made this thread was because I noticed a forum bug that didn't need a thread making over it...

The locked topic image appears to be broken.

See? Didn't really deserve its own thread. That's precisely why I had to make this thread.


ADMIN, my humblest apologies for making such a big deal over one minor bug, but I can now guarantee it won't happen again. Also, please fix please.

I had an idea for space. What if, for a closer look or for fun, you could beam down? Maybe you need a suit or something. Then, you can do what on the planet's surface. Sort of like the hologram mode on Spore, but you can jump, swim, or attack. But, you might need to buy a special suit later in the game.

Thanks for the suggestions. Seregon, I will be sure to check out the link you gave, because i always really liked your flow charts on the compound systems thread.

gvd72 wrote:

I had an idea for space. What if, for a closer look or for fun, you could beam down? Maybe you need a suit or something. Then, you can do what on the planet's surface. Sort of like the hologram mode on Spore, but you can jump, swim, or attack. But, you might need to buy a special suit later in the game.

When you get the rts controls, you dont lose the hability to go back into creature mode. At any time you can explore any planet on foot. Or you could never leave creature mode and leave your race to be controled by AI. So this is alredy in, but easyer than you said

is newcomer one of special acess?
if is, i then can't post new threads even with speciall acess!
can you fix that?

dimasciene wrote:

is newcomer one of special acess?
if is, i then can't post new threads even with speciall acess!
can you fix that?

‘Newcomer’ is the title you get when you first join. Once you've made enough posts, you get the title of ‘Regular’.

The reason you are unable to post new threads is just because you haven't made many posts yet. Once you have enough posts, you should be able to post. This is just a normal anti-spam measure.

I think this frequently-asked question really ought to be added to the OP of the FAQ, along with exactly how many posts it takes to be able to make new threads - as far as I know, there is nothing to inform new members that this is normal. Scio, you have recieved a new mission objective!

okay...
it's beacuse i noticed to i did get newcomer rank only when i made 20 posts.

Hi all! I want to ask you about the God mode, I did read something about some artifact that you use to become a god, and you can travel where you want and do what you want... And then I read something that says the god mode is just a bunch of tools and stuff that you can unlock and use... I don't know what is the actual thing that you are going to put in the game so, could you please tell me what it is???

decelis93 wrote:

Hi all! I want to ask you about the God mode, I did read something about some artifact that you use to become a god, and you can travel where you want and do what you want... And then I read something that says the god mode is just a bunch of tools and stuff that you can unlock and use... I don't know what is the actual thing that you are going to put in the game so, could you please tell me what it is???

Our original idea was to have four modes: Organism mode, in which you control your organism; Strategy/RTS mode, in which you control a group of organisms/country; Observer mode, in which you just watch, and have a variety of camera tools/filters; and God mode, unlocked though ascension, in which you watch and have god tools, with which you can create, destroy, and change things as you like.

However, we noticed Observer mode and God mode were both very similar, just having different types of tools - having one Observer mode, in which you could have camera tools and god tools would be a lot simpler. We also thought it would be preferable if, when you unlocked the god tools though ascension, they would be available in every mode, not just an observer mode equivalent. And so, we got rid of God mode entirely, and made the god tools available in every other mode.

Spoiler:

I think i got it...

So, you "end the game" (You really don't end it, you just ascend and stuff, the game never ends), and you unlock the god tools, Am I right?

Well, this is one of the thing that got me very entusiasmated with this game, the RP possibilities are enddless!!

Precisely.

To what extent is the terrain and the map and the world interactive with the player/organism. Is the terrain destructible? Will water simply be textured, animated polygons for visual effect or can it be dynamically interacted with?

Also, regarding the attacking system, will it be a hit and miss attack system like in Jedi Knight and Mount & Blade and Elder Scrolls games, or will it be a selective attack system like in most other games?

NickTheNick wrote:

To what extent is the terrain and the map and the world interactive with the player/organism. Is the terrain destructible? Will water simply be textured, animated polygons for visual effect or can it be dynamically interacted with?

Water from oceans NEEDS to be just a level, and varying depending to waves, tides and anything related.
Water at rivers, lakes, and so on could be potentially simulated, as they did in from dust, but I would put that quite low in the priority list.

About destruction, i believe that the planet surface could be modified, and depending on how well we code the objects over the planet they could be destroyed/damaged along the surface.

Ok, because of course a major concern throughout the game is identifying to the computer what is water and what isn't. For multicellular to awakening stage, the organisms must consume water. Sentience onwards, there might be aquatic TO's, like boats, that have certain parameters for movement within water.

Also, to what extent would terrain be dynamic, regarding the fact that tectonics will be simulated?

Terrain can change more-or-less easily as long as for every possible possition in the planet's surface there is only one level of ground (That means no caves unless they are coded specifically.) It will have a similar look of the terrain in Wow (caves in Wow are actually like buildings sticked to the floor). If you can programm something that resembres tectonic movement, you could just increase the height in some places and decrease the height in others.

For determining where water is located, we would first need to know how water is placed. The easiest part would be the seas, as if we just say that from this heigh (to the center of the planet) everithing is water downwards until you find terrain. For rivers and lakes, you first need to have a way of placing rivers and lakes, and if you add dynamic terrain over that, you would need to simulate the real rivers (wich means fluid simulation) or recalculate the river's path and change all the river instantly.

Then if you want to know whether the water is drinkable or not (like earth's water salinity or contamined rivers or water sources) it gets much more difficult.

Ahh ok. Thanks for the feedback.

Regarding dynamic terrain, this is something we could definately do at a large scale (think meteor craters), but would be really difficult at lower scales due to the lack of resolution. At best, our surface polygons will be around 1m2, though they'll probably need to be larger. That makes any small scale terrain modification rather ugly.

What we probably can do is allow simple modifications like leveling the area underneath a building. As mentioned before, caves are difficult, they may be a nice challenge to implement at some point, but I wouldn't expect much atm. A very good example of what we *might* (see below) be able to achieve, is Wurm Online (example vid).

Given the number of planets we aim to have eventually, and their size, it'll be pretty much impossible for us to store the terrain of any one planet, hence some of the limitations above. The only feasible way of deforming the terrain is this:
- we store the unaltered planet as a random seed, the initial terrain is generated procedurally from this seed, and nothing else. That gives us as much detail as we want for a single number (4 bytes or so). We're still limited to a certain level of detail by cpu power, as generating a planet will be relatively expensive. Additionally, we'll have to store atleast some of the detailed mesh in RAM once generated.
- Any changes to the terrain are added to the seed as changelogs (I forget the proper name), which are applied to the mesh, in order, after generation. So for example, an asteroid crater would be stored as (time = 500'000 years, location = 5deg E, 20deg N, modification = crater-large-1), where crater-large-1 is either a predefined crater mesh, or possible a procedural seed for generating one.

The more changes we make to the mesh in this way, the more information we have to store (insignificant), and the more processing we have to do to generate the mesh from that information (very significant), so we need to keep them to a minimum. A cratered moon like ours (with several hundred craters), would be doable, a player customised city (think minecraft), would be very difficult.

Plate tectonics would also be interesting, as they're basically a lot of very small changes applied one after the other, so unless we can find a more efficient way of storing (and generating from) that data, I'm not sure thats feasible either.

So how will the memory regarding all of the buildings and cities is post-sentience be stored on the CPU? If a player build a certain building, say a barracks, on the planet and then zooms out to visit another planet, and then comes back to the original planet, the barracks should still be where he built it. Or, once individual buildings coalesce into cities, the cities should at least stay in the same location on the planet.

Also, regarding that Wurm video, that looks very nice; and your explanation makes a lot of sense. So basically there needs to be a predefined list of procedural and/or preset changelog meshes in order to apply to the seeds of planet?

Buildings will probably be stored in a similair way, given a location (lattitude, longitude, altitude), rotation, and then the building type/model. It's possible that we'll include flattening the terrain underneath as part of the building placement, rather than something done seperately.

Cities could either be a collection of unassociated buildings, or more likely, a single entity with buildings located in it's local space. In effect, buildings are just like deformations, except that they add something instead of take it away. In this way, very basic tunelling *may* also be feasible, but that's not something I'm going to go in to this far ahead of actually implementing it.

We may need a predefined list of deformations, or we may be able to generate many of these at runtime. Which of these is something we really can't decide until we know more about how we're generating the planets.

just wondering if organism mode will be played in 3rd person.

alduin2013 wrote:

just wondering if organism mode will be played in 3rd person.

We are still on microbe stage, not organism, but here is your answer:
answer

I saw on the wiki that there was section called concept races, only Uteen's work was in there so that made me wonder, can we have a section on the forum on concept races?

As I asked earlier, is the attack system going to be a hit and miss, like Mount & Blade or Men of War or The Elder Scrolls, or is it going to be selective attack, like WoW or Age of Empires or Spore? I personally prefer the former.

Raptorstorm wrote:

I saw on the wiki that there was section called concept races, only Uteen's work was in there so that made me wonder, can we have a section on the forum on concept races?

An off-topic section has already been discussed, and decided against, and a concept races section is quite definitely off-topic. To be honest, I don't know why we even have a concept race section on the wiki.

NickTheNick wrote:

As I asked earlier, is the attack system going to be a hit and miss, like Mount & Blade or Men of War or The Elder Scrolls, or is it going to be selective attack, like WoW or Age of Empires or Spore? I personally prefer the former.

Of the games you mentioned, I have only played Spore, so I'm mostly guessing what the attack systems are, but it will (if possible) be hit and miss, and will use the complex damage system.⁽ᵗʰʳᵉᵃᵈ⁾

Relevant threads:
https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t608-aiming-system
https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t629-aware-stage-combat