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

Questions or small ideas should be done here. Things that are too long or require a lot of discusion deserve their own thread. If something posted here becomes a good discusion, but too long for here, it can be moved to its own thread by the moderators.

Heres what I propose for the Flagship idea:
We make a thread called:Flagship auditions (when almost done with thrive or already done)
We let ppl audition and the best creature wins

One more thing could I audition two plz when this game is closed beta

How are temperature, scent and pheromones going to fit into the game? Also, is there a thread on symbiosis yet?

NikolaAnicic007 wrote:

One more thing could I audition two plz when this game is closed beta

We have agreed on no flagships and there are no closed betas, Only open

I actually remember agreeing on having some kind of flaghsip creature, althrough i personally don't like the idea.

There won't be any closed stage of development. There is simply no way to kep it closed, even if we wanted to.

About temperature, scent and pheromones:

Temperature - Probably the creature will have a range of temperatures it is comfortable with, and will start to suffer if outside that range (Starting to lose life, higher costs for actions, etc)

scent - When a creature has upgraded smelling capabilities, it will detect creatures from a higher range. Creatures wont probably be able to evolve anything to counteract this, althrough wind will probably help.

Pheromones - Probably creatures from the same species will be able to detect themselves from pheromones if evolved. If you mean a creature creating pheromones to affect other creatures, that will probably be too tricky

Symbiosis - Hopefully species will act symbiotically on their own and we wont have to harcode it (learning Ai is awesome) harcoding symbiosis would look ugly, and i dont think it is even feasible

Ok, thanks. For pheromones I was just thinking about ants, so maybe a colour trail depending on the type of trail the ant laid down. As in, to food, that there's a predator or something like that.

Just some general questions I had.

What is the relationship between the size of organs and the rate at which they can process compounds in an organism? 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?

haven't i alrwdy answered that? i believe it was in the s same post, but i'm too tired to look for it

Haven't i alredy answered that same questions? I believe it was in this same thread, but right now i'm too tired to look for it


Wow. It seems i was too tired.

NickTheNick wrote:

Just some general questions I had.

What is the relationship between the size of organs and the rate at which they can process compounds in an organism? 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?

Size of organs will determine how much of a process can happen, not necessarily the rate or efficiency of the process. The plan is to have each organ, when it is first evolved, perform some novel process. It will convert a compound into another compound or whatnot. It does so with a certain efficiency- for instance, a lung transfers gaseous oxygen into the blood from a gaseous medium. When originally developed, it might convert 10% of the oxygen that passes through it into dissolved oxygen in the bloodstream. As you evolve, you can upgrade this to 11%, 12% and so on, up to a certain limit (in humans, it's about 25%, so let's set the limit arbitrarily around 30%). in each breath, you will extract 10% of the total amount of oxygen that was in that breath. A larger lung would mean more oxygen in total, because the lung has a larger internal surface area to gather it, but not an increased efficiency. A lung is classified as an organ, a respiratory organ, and a lung, so the CPU knows what's what.
About techs: this is the essential problem with the TE, and why I don't want to bother with it. unlike the OE, there are really no limits on what you can make, and that makes simulation essentially impossible on any kind of realistic computational budget. We leave this issue for now, since there really is no clean way to get around the complexity of technologies and their uses.

Daniferrito wrote:

haven't i alrwdy answered that? i believe it was in the s same post, but i'm too tired to look for it

Haven't i alredy answered that same questions? I believe it was in this same thread, but right now i'm too tired to look for it


Wow. It seems i was too tired.

Yes, I asked these exact same questions on the Crash Course Economics thread, plus a few others. However, only the few others, which I didn't include here, were answered. I wasn't going to ask these ones again, since Crash Course Economics is on a new topic now, so I asked here.

Thanks for the explanation scio! For the TE, I have the same policy, I am planning all the concept around it but am reluctant to dive into it itself. For buildings, I have managed to figure out how to make it work. However, whats left is tools and vehicles.

See, the thing is, do we make a TE in which the player can do anything, and then start adding restrictions? Or do we make a TE where the player can do nothing, and then start adding exceptions? The former is impossible code-wise, since a game can only include as much as was coded, and nothing more. However, the former is also what the concept envisions, and what many expected from Spore (Yes, I'm going to play the Spore Card). I am sure everyone would prefer to have the first one if it was possible. Therefore I have been thinking of creating a sort of a compromise, which gives the illusion of being the first, but is really a hybrid of the two ideas.

Remember how a while back, you said that we will only implement a degree of evolution that the average person can be expected to know? Well likewise, we need only provide the player the level of customization the average player would want to be able to have. In terms of the TE, we make the player's creations dependent on Function Parts. Function Parts, as unlocked through the Research Web, is our means of restricting and expanding the field of possibilities for the player. To get to the point, instead of having the player design and mould a spear in the TE, and having to have the computer run super complex calculations to determine things like the weight of the spear, whether it can float, how much penetrating force it can generate, how durable it is, and all those other possibly useful variables, we make it so that the player has to use a certain FP.

To give an example, if I wanted to make a spear, I would have a preset FP called "Spearhead". I would select one of those, select what it is made of, attach a stick to it, and voila, I'm done. The FP "Spearhead" would have a predetermined list of variables, and thus the computer would have much less to calculate. The player could stretch and mould the spearhead to a certain extent, or maybe there could even be several variations of the "Spearhead" FP to provide variety, but by making it something preset we can define its characteristics, such as its pierce damage, instead of having to come up with a physics simulator to calculate any possible tool made by the player.

I will stop there, for concision's sake, and I want to hear what you guys think.

So you're saying that we use a larger library of specialized FPs to reduce ambiguity. I think that's a good idea. The problem is that we have to ship with a huge amount of models and instructive code, but that's not in any way debilitating.

Exactly. It's the best solution I can think of, and it provides us something for us non-programmers/modellers/composers to get to work on here on the forums.

NickTheNick wrote:

Exactly. It's the best solution I can think of, and it provides us something for us non-programmers/modellers/composers to get to work on here on the forums.

Sounds good.

as an option when starting a new save, will the planet customization have an option like custom, pre-set and random?

custom being you get to choose every little detail.

pre-set being already made planet types, eg.
earth-like (place habitable: planet: rock - temperature 50 - biome "arctic, arid, beach, etc." - atmosphere rich "carbon, hydrogen, oxygen" - mineral rich "silicon, iron, manganese, chlorine, sodium, aluminium" - star type " yellow dwarf, G class - orbit "slight ellipse, hot Goldilocks" - moon "27% size, barren")

and random being well, a random planet. this could be on a moon orbiting around a gas giant; or on a planet that has a moon of a similar size as it is, and they orbit around one another.

spacetime_dinosaur wrote:

as an option when starting a new save, will the planet customization have an option like custom, pre-set and random?

custom being you get to choose every little detail.

pre-set being already made planet types, eg.
earth-like (place habitable: planet: rock - temperature 50 - biome "arctic, arid, beach, etc." - atmosphere rich "carbon, hydrogen, oxygen" - mineral rich "silicon, iron, manganese, chlorine, sodium, aluminium" - star type " yellow dwarf, G class - orbit "slight ellipse, hot Goldilocks" - moon "27% size, barren")

and random being well, a random planet. this could be on a moon orbiting around a gas giant; or on a planet that has a moon of a similar size as it is, and they orbit around one another.

I think we will be able to customize or choose random by clicking randomize button.

Is it just me, or are there a Bajillion people on right now?!

It says there are 200+ people online for me, but only 2 registered. I also noted that we just jumped to first place on ModDb, with over 20000 visits today (the second is at 4000).

Anyone has an explanation about this sudden boom in visits?

PD: i just saw that we hit a peak of 443 people online about 9 hours ago. Wow.

Oh my gosh, you are right. 1st place! And so many visits just in one day!

The amount of visits we got today is actually equal to a fifth of all the visits we had ever gotten before then.

This is crazy!

I am also very intrigued to see where all the publicity is coming from.

NickTheNick wrote:

I am also very intrigued to see where all the publicity is coming from.

I registered just to let you know that this project is getting a lot of attention through various posts on Reddit.

Here, for example: /r/todayilearned/comments/1ahkro/til_that_there_is_a_group_of_volunteers/

Since I'm new I can't post external links, but put reddit.com before that /r/

Oh man, thanks a bunch. I had a feeling it was Reddit, they accounted for our last activity surge as well! It's interesting how much effect one post on Reddit can have.

Seems like a pretty cool project. Lots of interested people in those reddit posts. I hope more than a few of them are programmers willing to lend a hand.

Cheers.

Maybe I'm not searching deep enough, but I haven't encountered a thread on this.

How are we going to calculate how much damage one organism does to another? For that matter, how are we going to determine how much damage an organism can take?

I have a few suggestions that might work out, mostly in the former category, but I want to know if there's already been work done on this before I start going on about muscle forces and thrusting vs. swinging motions.

Discusion on damage is on the following thread:

https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t332-complex-damage-system

Thanks. I'll have a look through there.