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Post by hhyyrylainen on Jan 23, 2018 20:27:22 GMT
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification. Does this mean that in terms of gameplay though (2d -> 3d -> rts -> rts in space) there are only four planned stages? I wouldn't call those different points of view (camera angles?) different stages as the planned transitions will be smooth. Like from 2d to 3d the camera will basically just tilt to the side and lower so that it is behind your creature, in a smooth motion. That way the player can certainly notice but it won't be like in spore where a cutscene is used to do the transition and it is a large leap. Basically the stages are just so that we can more easily categorize things as belonging to the different parts of the game. I've discussed a possible zeroth stage, abiogenesis, where you basically start as a strand of rna and can start getting adjusted to the different mechanics one by one. The problem is that that will probably be quite boring so we want to keep that optional (if we ever get around to making it) so the cell stage should be the default starting stage. That's a GUI issue, because there currently aren't tool tips or a summary of how your cell will fare against other species. How I picture the organ editing in my head is basically doing sculpting. You select the type of organ you want to place and then use a paint brush to paint it on or to increase the size. This, too, will benefit from real time updating statistics telling you if your design works. We will probably start with quite accurate models and then add even more complexity. With good tutorials and tool tips that should be doable, and from my experience most fans want very accurate science in the game. But if something is just way too boring or tedious it will probably have a button to automate it.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Jan 23, 2018 20:02:56 GMT
Why tho?
Well, right now the game looks and plays in a way that is super complicated. Right off of the bat, players have to learn about the colors of the fog that is food, learn what each fog represents, and learn what combination of this fog that we need in order to generate ATP. By the time that this has happened, they're idly waiting for their cell to die because their ATP just sunk to 0. If they continue, they also have to keep track of how much ATP they'll have post reproduction, and more. This hurts the core game loop. We want an action that leads to a reward that leads back to the same action (only better). Eat food, get larger and more powerful so you can eat larger/more powerful things. It's a loop since eating allows you to eat more in a cycle. In this case the opposite happens. Everything you do sucks away ATP.
I think this can be fixed by having a tutorial that has flashly arrows and makes you press buttons. That way we don't have to skimp on detail and still allow new players to get into the game. I don't think simplifying is the right answer. We are trying to balance realism and fun/gameplay, but I think this goes way too far. And many people are probably going to be unhappy if we did this that we basically became Spore 2.0, just maybe slightly more in depth.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Jan 23, 2018 19:33:26 GMT
At this early stage it is probably too early to say, but I'd say the biggest issue with just allowing players to choose the world size, without adapting the simulation, will cause the required performance to run bigger and bigger worlds to rise quickly. So if the simulation isn't made to work with bigger worlds players with even the most beefy computers probably cannot get that much bigger worlds than designed.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Jan 13, 2018 19:41:42 GMT
The look of the GUI is easy to change. It is just a png file so any graphical designer (or image artist / anyone) can change it. The lack of lighting is slightly more difficult, but still it needs only changing the materials assigned to the different objects to enable lighting on them (and making sure it looks good).
So neither of these require any programming changes. We currently have no one active who is very good with ogre materials. That makes the lighting suggestion slightly harder.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Jan 9, 2018 12:55:06 GMT
I don't think there have been concrete plans as to how the planet generation works. There probably won't be a planet editor until late space stage. So the settings you can tweak will be something like mass, distance to star, moons etc. But I don't see a reason why the planet editor couldn't feature importing terrain from heightmap, even if we don't end up using heightmaps for generating the terrain.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Jan 8, 2018 20:37:03 GMT
It's quite hard to do anything to the graphics (unless some new team member is a designer who can redesign it) without specific improvement suggestions. So if you can come up with any concrete suggestions, please share.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Jan 7, 2018 12:43:14 GMT
As for the graphics overhaul, oh thank god they are planning that! I would hate the cell stage to be released with its current graphics. Which part of the graphics do you find looking not good / old? Is it the GUI buttons and style, or the textures or models of the different objects? If so that would be easy to fix for a 3d game artist. If you are instead referring to us not using the modern look of hdr or physically based rendering techniques that pretty much all AAA games use that's a bit more complicated to do and would require completely redoing all the graphics assets. Also related to that when we where doing the ue4 engine testing, which by default uses physically based rendering, many people didn't like the very bright look.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Jan 1, 2018 22:12:25 GMT
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Dec 30, 2017 10:46:09 GMT
As Oliveriver said if you are logged in you are taken to the last or the first post you haven't read.
I fixed the top links being too wide on mobile so now it's no longer possible to scroll sideways. I do too get a little bit of lag while scrolling fast on mobile but when actually reading the posts there's no distracting amount of lag.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Dec 29, 2017 23:40:06 GMT
Looks like there are a lot of no votes. I'd like to know why people voted no and if it was any other reason than "I don't feel like it / like change".
I very much would prefer changing as I find discourse technically so much better than this forum. The automatically seeing new posts without refreshing and getting desktop notifications when any of your watched threads are updated are so much better than what this forum has that I'd probably be way more involved in discussions there.
Discourse also has very good spam combatting features that don't need as active moderation becase community members that have been around for a long time can flag spam posts and have them disappear with just a few reports.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Dec 26, 2017 22:45:15 GMT
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Dec 19, 2017 14:56:04 GMT
The new potential replacement forum is now up: community.revolutionarygamesstudio.comThere is still quite a bit work to do like setting up categories and customizing the theme, but the basic setup is done. If you try signing up make sure to check your junk email folder if you don't get the account activation message. I opened a topic there for testing / commenting about it: community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-this-new-forum/20Right now there are a few not really visible improvements like https support and http2. But it should be possible to have more cool stuff like: embedding the new forum on devblogs to keep their comments better in one place, and replying to topics through email, and better spam fighting plugins (if needed)
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Dec 16, 2017 23:13:17 GMT
Even if the situation isn't completely terrible it could be better.
I would also prefer some other forum software than this one as the post editor is pretty bad and other forum software, like discourse, have cool modern features like automatically showing new posts when you are looking at a thread. Also it might work better on phones and be just all around more pleasant to use.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Sept 27, 2017 13:20:31 GMT
In which game, thrive or another game? If it is some other game that is windows-only it most likely uses XAUDIO (from DirectX) which may work on your computer. We use OpenAL based sound, which works on all platforms, but doesn't work for some reason on your computer. In thrive of course. I have installed openAL and game still have this error. Strange... If sound is working for you, then you are probably hitting a long standing bug in thrive caused by misusing the audio library under some conditions leading to it being unable to play more sounds.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Sept 27, 2017 12:34:36 GMT
Looks like the audio device in your computer doesn't work with OpenAL. Or the [DEFAULT] option is incorrect. There is currently no way to change the default and OpenAL is used by all cross-platform sound libraries (being cross-platform is a must for thrive). So I don't see a fix other than creating an options menu. You should try playing Thrive on another computer or trying to change the default audio device in windows. I have a sound in-game even with error, it is normal? In which game, thrive or another game? If it is some other game that is windows-only it most likely uses XAUDIO (from DirectX) which may work on your computer. We use OpenAL based sound, which works on all platforms, but doesn't work for some reason on your computer.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Sept 26, 2017 17:44:11 GMT
I have a problem, game crashing and it's because of missing sound, BUT this file contains in my folder and with right name. How to fix it? (sorry for my grammar) Available Playback Devices: 0): Generic Hardware on [DEFAULT] 1): Generic Software on 2): Generic Hardware on S/PDIF Pass-through Device (ASUS Xonar DG Audio Device) 3): Generic Software on S/PDIF Pass-through Device (ASUS Xonar DG Audio Device) Attempting default device: Generic Hardware on [Error] Failed to Create OpenAL Device.
Looks like the audio device in your computer doesn't work with OpenAL. Or the [DEFAULT] option is incorrect. There is currently no way to change the default and OpenAL is used by all cross-platform sound libraries (being cross-platform is a must for thrive). So I don't see a fix other than creating an options menu. You should try playing Thrive on another computer or trying to change the default audio device in windows.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Sept 19, 2017 20:29:49 GMT
Looks like the Audio manager crash is still happening ( github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/issues/504). I'm still guessing that it has to do with us hitting an audio source limit. Perhaps we'll need to re-use same audio sources for different cells or something. cAudio has its own log, which would be very helpful if you could post it. Actually it looks like we have disabled that entirely at some point, I remember someone on the team complaining about useless output. So now there is no log for cAudio, which would probably say why the audio source creation failed.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Aug 11, 2017 20:34:35 GMT
The sentiment is good but I'd be extremely hesitant about this. The game as it is will not impress many who review games for a living. Who were you planning on contacting? Agreed. We should wait until we have some fun basic gameplay. Basically what the creator had suggested with pilus etc.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Aug 9, 2017 14:01:47 GMT
Organelle unlocking will be fixed in the next release. Fixed by this prOr should I say improved as it's currently random and somewhat confusing
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Aug 7, 2017 17:52:10 GMT
I felt this was misguided. The question the developers should be asking themselves is: Why are we intentionally trying to remove variety from our game?-- I understand the need for realism. You're trying to simulate life, and that is one hell of a task. The real world is the best guideline you're gonna get, so by all means, use that as a starting point. But you're dealing with aliens, and in case you haven't noticed, we haven't actually observed any. This is a good thing. You're making the game, you make the rules! Maybe other people would be interested in an earth-like evolution simulator 2046, but I want to choose my own path! Isn't that what video games are for?-- Yeah. I guess entirely underwater advanced civilization progression as detailed in the thread is realistically impossible. It drove that point home pretty thoroughly. But that's according to the real world! You don't have to do that in a game that you're creating! You don't have to follow the rules! You can make exceptions! One of the goals of Thrive is to be a simulation of how life evolved on Earth, the other being a game and maybe then the third being a more general evolution simulation. So I feel like the team is focusing on working on things that we have observed to have occured on Earth. And that of course counts out aquatic civilizations. Though, there are plans to include more crazy things that are unrealistic / something that hasn't happened. These would be enabled with an option when starting the game: LAWK - Life as We Know (It). Refers to the forms of life we're familiar with, such as carbon-based ones. Non-LAWK life may be possible, but we don't have evidence for it. The LAWK option in-game will toggle whether semi-fantasy elements (thermoplasts, fire-breathing, etc.) are available to the player. the loophole to this was uplifting, which I found annoying for two main reasons. 1: uplifting sounds very unreliable. 2: you're skipping chunks of the game. The way I've understood uplifting is that it will be the player's species uplifting (making smarter, or giving tech) to other primitive species. For it to work any other way would make the gameplay incredibly boring waiting ofr a random chance to be uplifted. The main line of reasoning was, as I understood it: "Metallurgy underwater is impossible. Therefore, aquatic species must make use of land to create advanced tools and progress further. If the species can achieve this, they are at least amphibious. And if they're amphibious, why even stay in the water? It's more advantageous to go on land." -- The thread concluded, after a couple three-day-bans, that underwater civilization was possible but could only remain primitive. Advancement was possible, but only if amphibious, which (correct me if I'm wrong) would require a species to operate close to land, or inland, in lakes or something, or uplifted, which isn't up to the player. No deep-trench cities. No nomadic current-gliding trading towns. Nada. Needs the land. Or at the very least, air. So thrive being based on real science the biggest issue with aquatic civs is the lack of metal working. And as you said that would require at least being amphibian, which others have concluded to meaning completely transitioning to land. I haven't taken part in this discussion before so I'll share my super sciencey way to have aquatic civs: So the species needs to be amphibious to smelt metals on land. Perhaps they have became amphibian by having babies on land like some sea animals do. Then they can like create birthing places on land and build furnaces next to them. So far so good but now we need to prevent them from becoming fully land-living. We'll add another pretty advanced civilization that lives on land and hunts these amphibians, thus causing them to not want to be on land any more than necessary so they invent a way to build underwater smelteries and places to raise their young. And boom fully aquatic civs that even benefit from going deeper into the ocean to stay away from the land dwellers, though they'd have to passify the land dwellers before attempting to go to space. Realism, at some point, becomes a burden. Sure, according to what mankind knows, an underwater civilization is realistically impossible. You know what else is realistically impossible? Faster Than Light travel. But a space civilization without FTL is gonna be really boring, isn't it? I imagine the response to this would be something along the lines of "A space empire doesn't need FTL to exist," or "FTL could be possible using uninvented technology! You can't predict exactly what kind of tech will be created in the future!" It's true, I can't. Nobody can. I prefer the approach to having scifi tech with currently plausible physics (it's called hard scifi, I think). So for example FTL could first be wormholes and then the civilization could learn to create their own and equip ships with that technology resulting in the classical scifi warp drive. Only the very early space stage would be without any type of FTL. god forbid, underwater vents. In the end, though, I can't know for sure why the devs ruled out 100% water civs. Maybe the workload was too much. Maybe it's unrealistic to expect from the game's mechanics. Maybe it's just a dumb idea and I'm the only idiot who likes it. I don't know. I'm just saying that you should consider taking a few creative liberties and avoid cutting yourselves off from new, unique, exciting gameplay because it isn't realistic enough. As I said earlier with the LAWK switch, I don't think anyone is fully against with including crazy things in thrive. The biggest issue with thrive is that there aren't a lot of people making new features. So it would take a really long time to get around to making aquatic civilizations feasible, unless we get a new developer on the team who is really enthusiastic about them...
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