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

The Uteen wrote:

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.

that's what i wanted to know, they could be like some sort of "wonder", i mean, a megastructure would take several ingame years to build, in fact arcologies are present in games like Simcity and Anno (2070)

I don't think we should make pre-defined wonders, but as we are alowing the user to design their own buildings, just let them asign a building as a wonder. They will themselves judge whether its new shiny, absurdly huge and overcomplicated structure is a wonder or not, and mark its construction in the civilization's time-line, where all the other meaningfull data is displayed, like eras (user defined), when when they developed tecnologies, birth and death of important members of the civilization (user defined), and all that stuff. Probably with butons to show/hide stuff, as it can easily get cramped.

If that topic is settled, I would like to re-raise my question. The links I gave earlier, which are most like our plan? What are we planning to do for procedural generation for the environment? Because we can't Procedurally Generate (PG, if that acronym isn't already taken) plants, since plants are not preset, and evolve like animals.

I believe the question is whether we want the environement to be editable or not. If we make static worlds, we can go as big as we want, as we dont have to store them anywhere, just store the seed and make the algorithm work (like fractals, a simple formula can make infinitely big and complex shapes). On the other hand, if we want the terrain to be fully editable, we will need to keep small, low detailed planets (as we want to have lots of them, and we have limited storage capacity), in exchange of alowing the player to modify the surface to it's hearth content, and less cpu/gpu ussage, as the algorithm doesen't have to recalculate everything every time you move.

We could still allow for some changes to be aplied with the static worlds, like craters, as long as we keep them low. Big changes, like plate tectonics, are nearly impossible, unless we manage to fit them into the fractal algorithm (I dont think it is even possible to do so).

After all of that, I think i have answered nothing of what you asked. Belgium. Well, correct me if i'm wrong, but the decission was between some kind of height map (probably over a rounded cube), or voxels. Voxels look great, and solve the cave problem, but i've been loking information about them for 2 hours and i'm unable to find much information. If we are able to find a free engine that works with voxels, it would be great. The heightmap is much simpler, and I won't present much problems if we go with it.

Edit (Kinda): Actually looking in the ogre forums about voxels leaded me towards some voxel engines build over ogre, and most of them have a free license.

However, the question is to what extent should the player be able to carve up his environment? In Multicellular and Aware you may dig burrows and make minor changes, but then in Society and Industrial Stage you may mine out whole layers of rock or blow up chunks of earth, and there's even more of an impact a player can make in Space Stage. I think we need to gauge how much we want the player to be able to interact with/destroy the environment, with keeping all of the different stages in mind. How much do you think we should set?

OT: 500th post!

Small changes like burrows we can store them for some time, and if the player leaves the area and the burrow is no longer loaded in memory, just delete it (for example, a hole you diged for hibernation*, and that is easy to replace/ you wont use again). If it is the place the creature lives constantly, we can store it like a building, but into the earth instead of outside the earth. The problem comes when the changes are big and detailed, as we have to store all the details. Mining out huge layers, as long as we keep the mining shape simple (like an inverted piramid or other simple shape) or flatening up places would be possible. Explosions are cpu intensive, and if we have to calculate them every time we reload the area it gets bad.

I vote for huge worlds with limited changes alowed.

Is there a bug or something in the forum or what? cause some of my posts have been deleted. and not just posts, but my own topics as well. i hope no one else is having this problem.

P.S. will there be a way to make an chemical spray as a defense like what the bombedeir beetle does?

About the deletion issues, my topics/posts dont get posted sometimes when i have poor internet connection. However, can we please remain on the topic at hand before raising further questions. This is quite important.

Daniferrito wrote:

I vote for huge worlds with limited changes alowed.

QFT

alduin2013 wrote:

Is there a bug or something in the forum or what? cause some of my posts have been deleted. and not just posts, but my own topics as well. i hope no one else is having this problem.

P.S. will there be a way to make an chemical spray as a defense like what the bombedeir beetle does?

Some of your threads were resolved and I closed them.

So, to what extent will evolution slow on other organisms once your species hits sentience? What about once they go farther and farther into sentience and the timescale reduces?

I believe we could still have some evolution once sentinence is hit, but with the steps much further apart.

However, we may just decide to stop it completely

Since we planned somewhere that your species would be converted into units, with stats replacing the dynamic combat system which uses simple physics of multicellular, it might be easier to not keep evolution going. If they can evolve post-sapience, we would also need a ‘sapience niche’… I'd like it to be included if possible, though, if at a slower rate (under ¼ speed?), so we don't have to worry about it too much.

Actually, that doesent make it harder to keep evolution going. We just have to store the creature somewhere, and we can run the evolution over that. Then, we extract the stats from there.

The problem i though of is that with big populations, evolution slows down incredibly. Any mutation that might be produced gets overriden by the majority, which have unmuted genes. There are some discusions talking about that.

At what point does the CPU draw the line between a lung and a lump of flesh that isn't a lung? Or are there multiple lines? How will the CPU tell whether the pickaxe I designed in the Tech Editor is sharp/dense/strong enough to mine X ore or Y rock? How does the CPU determine the damage done by the weapon I designed in the Tech Editor on organism A? How about organism B? How about when organism B is wearing some X type of armour?

These are always hard questions.

in order to differenciate organs from flesh, i believe we would have organs of different sizes (bigger organs perform their utility faster). Then we place the organs inside the creature (probably wherever they fit). Whathever is not an organ, is plain flesh

As we can't possibly do anything about analizing shape of pickaxes, i would base that on the material the pickaxe is made of. With tecnology in there, as higher tecnology level allow us to make things better. The same about weapons.

About damage on certain organisms, if we simplify the combat system (when simulating lots of things at the same time), we just assign hitpoints to the creatures, and the weapons just deal a fixed amount of hitpoints, no matter anythig else.

I need to know if I can use hymns or songs of a particular historical period. I used these two song (one is the anthem of germany del'est, the other is a marching song of the Soviet Union) to identify two political movements of the left.

I think a communist theme should be something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv0dso2bPoA

PTFace wrote:

I think a communist theme should be something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv0dso2bPoA

Maybe so, but in that case you fall in the copyright of another game. In the case of national anthems or old songs more than half a century, I do not know ... That is why I asked

Normal copyright lasts from 50 to 100 years after the autor death. You can see a table here. However, i believe national anthems are free to use. We need to look at each song individually.

However, i dont think we should use national anthems. Maybe something inspired in them, but not exactly them, as controversy about our use could arise.

Daniferrito wrote:

Normal copyright lasts from 50 to 100 years after the autor death. You can see a table here. However, i believe national anthems are free to use. We need to look at each song individually.

However, i dont think we should use national anthems. Maybe something inspired in them, but not exactly them, as controversy about our use could arise.

Maybe you're right, so now the main point of using march. In any case, the stage production of civilization is far away and will take between 4-5 years so there will be time to change the things it do not like.

talking about music i got this keyboard recently and i'm told im a natural at playing by ear. if i were to help with soundtrack would I have to foolow sheet music or would i just be able to play by ear

How to edit you own signature and profile picture?

Up top there is a profile link. From there, if you look carefully (because with the background image it is hard to see), you can see links for avatar and signature, where you can change it.

Okay, so I'm back and I took the opportunity to first read through the entire wiki to get a good grasp of the current concept. First off I must say reading through what has been achieved so far, especially the models for the OE and auto-evo, really invigorate me. I have some questions though. There are many features that we wanted to include but are now cut from the concept. Are we going to model the game's engine in such a way that we can come back later and add these in once we have more time to focus on them? For example, are we going to model the engine in such a way that we wont have caves or continental shift now, but we can come back and add it in later? Or is this too much work to be practical?

Also, an example of auto-evo used in the wiki is that of a snake and its prey. If the prey evolves a poison, the snake evolves either to become resistant to that poison or some random mutation. How poison defined? Are all toxins grouped together as simply "poison", and becoming resistant to one means becoming resistant to all? Or is poison a compound? Will there be different types of poison so that becoming resistant to one does not mean becoming resistant to all?

In a past post, scio said that biomes will no longer be a massive list with each one being determined by tons of variables, but instead biomes are determined by simply four. Location, water, terrain, and succession. How would predefined food webs and niches fit into a system in which biomes are dynamic? Will still be defined biomes? I know that for the compound system, it would be a whole lot easier to have a defined list of biomes. All we would have to do is assign percentages of compounds that are found in each biome. If biomes are entirely dynamic the we cant simply assign the compound percentages. Could someone please explain to me how biomes, food webs, niches, and compounds will tie in together? This question is mainly for scio, but anyone who can please answer.

On the topic of compounds, Roadkill once mentioned that an organism should be able to eat anything it likes, its just that the type of stomach the organism has determines which compounds within that object can be digested. The rest of the compounds come out as waste/excrement. I mostly agree with this idea. However, I think that the type of mouth should determine what can be eaten. Certain mouths can eat plant matter, others can eat plant matter and meat. Lastly, I also think based off of what organs you have, there are certain compounds that are toxic to you, aka "poisons" as I mentioned above. So the question is, how does an organism's mouth, stomach, and other organs determine what it can eat, what it can't eat, what it can and can't digest, and what is toxic to it.

That's all for now. It's great to be back and I can't wait to get back to working on the project!

EDIT: Please read the below!!!

Spoiler: