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

I was actually just thinking of that earlier today, but the problem is that there are little to no presets in Thrive, all things evolve from the moment the game begins. Therefore, you cannot just drop in during the middle of any stage for a scenario since all life would have first had to evolve to be there. Remember, everything starts orginally as some blob or cell in the primordial soup, then works its way up. It would be nice if someone could figure a way around this, but for the moment it is too challenging to consider.

Actually, i dont think it would be too hard. We would just need to make it be like a saved game. Then we load that. The only hard part would be to prepare it beforehand.

It was just a thought, maybe it will get added after the game has launched. My idea would be just to design the models in the organism editor and then add them into the scenario, but I think it would only be done after the main game is up and running.

Daniferrito wrote:

Actually, i dont think it would be too hard. We would just need to make it be like a saved game. Then we load that. The only hard part would be to prepare it beforehand.

I have the solution!

Sandbox Mode.

The Uteen wrote:

Daniferrito wrote:

Actually, i dont think it would be too hard. We would just need to make it be like a saved game. Then we load that. The only hard part would be to prepare it beforehand.

I have the solution!

Sandbox Mode.

And then save the game and load it as a creature. There you have your scenario

Also, just another thought, is there going to be continental drift? It could be like a setting you could turn on and off when you start the game.

Planet Editor Concept thread (2010), we planned to include continental drift:

~sciocont wrote:

Rocky bodies are going to start out looking like hell, literally. They're going to be masses of black volcanic rock with cracks corresponding to the gaps between tectonic plates. Tectonics will be a part of your planet, and you'll have continental drift and all sorts of other things that come with the rifts like ocean trenches, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.

This thread (a month later) has some discussion against using it, then Bashi had an idea:

Bashinerox wrote:

I could treat plates as hugely viscous fluid bodies, and use density values on a scalar field to convert to a heightmap representing the surface. maybe modify a fluid solver to take into account flocking of "fused plates" in order to produce a mercury-like fluid solved in extreme-slow-motion?

I'll have to think hard on this one..

Then at the start of 2011 ~Scio came up with the Manifesto Of Simplicity:

~sciocont wrote:

This basically means that we can use people's general lack of encyclopedic knowledge to our advantage. If the average person playing Thrive doesn't understand, say, how continental drift works, they cannot get angry at us for not simulating it accurately. If the player doesn't know exactly how something would evolve in the real world, they can't tell us we did game evolution wrong.

And that's basically the history of continental drift in Thrive. It turns out that the idea of continental drift is far too complicated for the average person to understand, so we don't need to bother.

However, we cannot take that manifesto too far, because there are a lot of interesting things we plan to implement that the average person may not be familiar with or understand.

See, there's a difference between something being to hard to do, and us being too lazy to do it. Now, i'm no programmer, and i'm sure that continental drift is incredibly hard to simulate and that's fine, but I don't just want to bank on what people know, I want to make this realistic. If I was doing that I would have settled with Spore.

In my opinion, the best way to create continental drift is to create continents as the game progresses, and by the middle creature stage the planet no longer has continental drift

zippybomb wrote:

See, there's a difference between something being to hard to do, and us being too lazy to do it. Now, i'm no programmer, and i'm sure that continental drift is incredibly hard to simulate and that's fine, but I don't just want to bank on what people know, I want to make this realistic. If I was doing that I would have settled with Spore.

QFT

I personally vote on that we can skip continental drift, at least for now. It can change evolution on the large scale, but we shouldn't make too much effort on something the player cannot see (from the perspective of a creature, foy can't see the planet from enough distance to see its geography)

Daniferrito wrote:

zippybomb wrote:

See, there's a difference between something being to hard to do, and us being too lazy to do it. Now, i'm no programmer, and i'm sure that continental drift is incredibly hard to simulate and that's fine, but I don't just want to bank on what people know, I want to make this realistic. If I was doing that I would have settled with Spore.

QFT

I personally vote on that we can skip continental drift, at least for now. It can change evolution on the large scale, but we shouldn't make too much effort on something the player cannot see (from the perspective of a creature, foy can't see the planet from enough distance to see its geography)

QFT

Continental drift shouldn't have a high priority until later in development. Although I'm not sure if we can simply add it in later without a huge rewrite, we will need more programmers and a bigger team (or some very, very talented programmers) to be able to deal with the task of properly simulating it without breaking everything else in the process.

If we go the rounded cube way of storing the planet data, lots of code will need to be added to simulate tectonics, but i dont think it would be better if we started simulating from the start.

@Zippybomb: I am assuming you assumed I was in favour of implementing continental drift currently. I'm not. What I was saying was that we don't take the manifesto too far and cut out concept more significant than continental drift.

i know this is could be the most noobiest question here but. have we discussed something about Arcologies yet?

I dont think it has been discussed before, but i might be wrong.

It won't be too store dead bodies instead of removing them, and sinking them into the floor a bit every generation, but it might get memory intensive.

Anyway, it is something worth adding to the game? I'm not in favor about adding something like that, but i won't complain if we do.

I don't think that's what Arcology means. Look here.

Also, I didn't want to start a new thread on this, but I found a lot of videos relating to procedural generation, something big for Thrive. The links are:

Starfall: Planet Rendering
XNA Planet Renderer
Voxelform 3 Beta - Organic Infinite Terrain
OpenGL Real-Time Procedural Planet Rendering
Proland - Real-time planet rendering III
Proland - Real-time planet rendering V: terrain editing

I guess what I am asking here is, which one of these are we most closely related to for our engine? I also posted this to provide ideas or inspiration from features they had. I think these videos really exemplify where procedural generation can take us. I think we could learn a lot from these programs. One link I didn't include here was Space Engine, since I know that it has already been raised. I read, a post from about a year ago, that there was communication between our project and the owner of Space Engine. What happened with that? Was anything concluded, or ideas/algorithms shared?

NickTheNick wrote:

I don't think that's what Arcology means. Look here.

Also, I didn't want to start a new thread on this, but I found a lot of videos relating to procedural generation, something big for Thrive. The links are:

Starfall: Planet Rendering
XNA Planet Renderer
Voxelform 3 Beta - Organic Infinite Terrain
OpenGL Real-Time Procedural Planet Rendering
Proland - Real-time planet rendering III
Proland - Real-time planet rendering V: terrain editing

I guess what I am asking here is, which one of these are we most closely related to for our engine? I also posted this to provide ideas or inspiration from features they had. I think these videos really exemplify where procedural generation can take us. I think we could learn a lot from these programs. One link I didn't include here was Space Engine, since I know that it has already been raised. I read, a post from about a year ago, that there was communication between our project and the owner of Space Engine. What happened with that? Was anything concluded, or ideas/algorithms shared?

Here'e the thing- we've been basing this off of a spherical quadtreed cube, and with a 4096*4096 resolution and 9m^2 per terrain tile, we'd get a planet about the size of Brooklyn, which is approximately 316 times larger than a planet in spore by surface area. The big decision is this: do we really want space or civ stages? We're probably never going to get to them, so we could make much more engaging and higher eesolution environments using a voxel system instead of a regular spherical plane. The best voxel system I've ever seen is the procedural world by Miguel Cepero, which is voxel based, procedural, destructible, and looks brilliant. The spaceengine thing never took off- he said he'd be happy to discuss things with us but wanted to keep his engine as his property in case he ever wants to make it into a game or sim to sell.

Quote :

...do we really want space or civ stages?

Part of me enjoys the prospect of the benefits of cutting those stages, but then that was overwhelmed by the other part of me that would never want to give them up. I would have to cast my vote to preserve civ and space, without them the game is incomplete.

NickTheNick wrote:

I don't think that's what Arcology means. Look here.

Also, I didn't want to start a new thread on this, but I found a lot of videos relating to procedural generation, something big for Thrive. The links are:

Starfall: Planet Rendering
XNA Planet Renderer
Voxelform 3 Beta - Organic Infinite Terrain
OpenGL Real-Time Procedural Planet Rendering
Proland - Real-time planet rendering III
Proland - Real-time planet rendering V: terrain editing

I guess what I am asking here is, which one of these are we most closely related to for our engine? I also posted this to provide ideas or inspiration from features they had. I think these videos really exemplify where procedural generation can take us. I think we could learn a lot from these programs. One link I didn't include here was Space Engine, since I know that it has already been raised. I read, a post from about a year ago, that there was communication between our project and the owner of Space Engine. What happened with that? Was anything concluded, or ideas/algorithms shared?

The graphics will be more or less like this?
its great !!!

NickTheNick wrote:

I don't think that's what Arcology means. Look here

Ok, sorry, i understood a completely different thing, i though he just had agramatical error, i was speaking about Archaeology.

NickTheNick wrote:

Quote :

...do we really want space or civ stages?

Part of me enjoys the prospect of the benefits of cutting those stages, but then that was overwhelmed by the other part of me that would never want to give them up. I would have to cast my vote to preserve civ and space, without them the game is incomplete.

I'm not able to look at the procedurals/engines Scio & Nick posted right now, but I think I've seen similair things elsewhere, I'll try and look at them tonight. Regarding cutting civ/space stage, there are arguments both ways, though the strongest one for me is that whereas most of what we want to do has never been done before, the civ/space stages have whole genres dedicated to them, and we're going to struggle to do them justice. However, I still think they're worth including, as we already have a lot of interesting (and some original) concepts, which could make them significantly different to most civ games.

Also, while voxels are very nice (this blog has some of my favourite voxel terrain in it), they are also a serious technical challenge, and making them work (let alone doing so without massively reducing the games performace) might be one challenge too many for our coders. On the plus side, I do believe its possible to make fully spherical worlds using voxels, so theres no reason we couldn't keep the civ/space stages if we did decide to use them. Given that actual development on the civ stage is atleast 2 years away (and that's being very optimistic), I don't think we should let that be the deciding factor for whether we use voxels.

EDIT - and I just realised I linked to the exact same blog Scio did!

The voxel terain looks great, but I'm scared at how memory intensive it is, at least if we allow parts of the terrain to change and store that changes. If we just have a procedural generated planet, we dont have to worry about size (a seed is the only thing the generating algorithm needs to generate the same planet again), in exchange of static worlds.

well then, how you guys think an Arcology could work in Thrive, well i dont know how much we have advanced in the concept of civ and space stage and the whole bulding editor and that stuff.

penumbra espinosa wrote:

well then, how you guys think an Arcology could work in Thrive, well i dont know how much we have advanced in the concept of civ and space stage and the whole bulding editor and that stuff.

At space stage it has been suggested to be able to build a self-sustaining ecosystem in any space-station/ship, allowing a civilisation to exist independantly, needing only light (or another renewable energy source) to function. therefore, any pre-space civilisation which gets the required technology should also be able to make a ground-based version, though it would probably require a lot of space.
In fact, if we could do something like the Morlocks' Sphere from The Time Ships, that would be even better. (For those not familiar, they can just extrude everything they need from the floor of their species' living space in the shell of their dyson sphere, thanks to the immense power of the Sun and the Sphere's massive data-banks. Having one of those would be pretty awesome. Making one… Spectacular)

Our concepts are still fairly basic for Space technology, but it think it will just be a case of adding the most important technology first, then adding everything else we can think of and can do.


As for the planet generation debate, I side with procedural generation. It would be perfect for multicellular. Structures are something to worry about when we get to them; Minecraft can do it.