Thank you everyone for your continued help testing the combat update! We have one last patch (hopefully!) before we look at launching this onto the main branch.
Changelog:
Add visualizations for the following traits: thick skin/protective fat, carapaces, and spikes.
Health bars, damage/status text, and particle effects now fade correctly with distance.
Show current status effects on the creature selection display.
Fix: the body part menus in the combat stats display reorder as creatures move the body parts they are pointing at, making it difficult to read.
Fix: offscreen status effects (text and particles) can appear in incorrect places and move erratically.
Fix: damage and statuses can sometimes pop up at the same location and overlap.
Fix: when a currently selected creature is stunned in combat, it can prompt the revive button to appear.
Fix: when a creature is stunned in combat, and it was being viewed with the neurology or follow camera, those camera views end.
OPEN BETA: Combat Update
Hello!
We're excited to announce that the next major update to Ecosystem, the "Combat Update", is now in Open Beta for all owners of the game (and if you don't own the game yet you can save 20% during SimFest which is on right now!)
This is one of the largest updates we've released for the game so far, with the new systems interacting with all the other systems that already existed in the game.
Because of this, instead of a small closed beta we wanted to open it up to all owners of the game to gather as much as feedback as possible (which you can feel free to leave in the community tab here on Steam!).
*BACK UP YOUR SAVES* - Before taking part in the beta, if you have some ecosystems you love and want to test out the combat, please back them up. You can find the save files in your "My Documents/Ecosystem" folder.
*ACCESSING THE BETA* - Right-click the game in your library, choose "Properties", choose "Betas", and select CombatOpenBeta from the list.
*WHAT'S CHANGED?* - Please find the patch notes below!
FEATURES
Combat Simulation: Combat is heavily physics-based and includes new traits (and new uses of existing ones) that can be factors in a species' evolutionary future.
Biting does piercing damage, based on bite force quotient, size, and total creature momentum.
Striking with limbs does slashing or blunt damage based on the momentum of the strike.
If an attack throws a target's joint out of position, this can cause the limb to become nonfunctional, dizzy the creature, impair its vision, cause bleeding, and several other types of statuses.
Creatures can also evolve different types of venoms, which impart different negative effects, as well as resistances to these effects.
Creatures can evolve thicker skin in places and thicker skulls, as well as spikes and carapaces, which defend against certain types of attacks.
All new combat stats are subject to mutation and mating, and can be changed in the editor.
Multiple creatures can all participate in the same fight, allowing for predators to engage in group tactics.
Combat can be induced between any two creatures in the game by selecting a creature, clicking the 'Force Combat' button in the Interaction menu, and then clicking a target.
FIXES
Fix: When a creature causes instability in the physics system, it can now be put back into its last valid state instead of simply dying.
Fix: When a creature causes instability in the physics system, no longer show elongated glitched limbs.
Fix: Creatures sometimes still appear in the stored list briefly after you delete them.
Fix: Creature steering ability to steer frequently has trouble with height differences.
Fix: The species preview sometimes doesn't update when loading a saved species.
Fix: An error can occur if the player loads a stored creature and then adjusts the evolutionary parameters to conditions that the loaded creature doesn't satisfy.
Combat Update - First Look! - May 2023 Development Update
Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the May development update. I'm currently midway through work on the next major update, which is the update I've been most excited about out of all of them so far, and also the one which I think will have the most substantial impact on gameplay. Currently, creatures spend a lot of time racing to their food supply or mates, or away from things that want to eat them, so there is heavy evolutionary pressure on speed. That complements the game's focus on locomotion and how the mechanics of swimming drives the form of lifeforms in the ocean, but coming soon is a combat simulation, creating a new dimension on which creatures can evolve, and new potential niches in the environment.
The combat is tightly integrated with the rest of the game's design principles, being heavily physics-based and including many new properties (and new uses of existing ones) that can be factors in a species' evolutionary future. Like real fish, every creature has a bite force potential that correlates with its overall mass, but also a bite force quotient that can allow it to 'punch above its weight' (traits like this that have no downsides are balanced by requiring more energy and thus greater food consumption to maintain). In addition to biting, creatures can do slashing or bludgeoning damage by striking others with their appendages, with damage based on the momentum of the strike. Further, if an attack throws a target's joint out of position, the simulation detects this and treats its specially: such attacks can cause the limb to become nonfunctional, dizzy the creature, impair its vision, cause bleeding, and several other types of statuses.
Additionally, creatures can evolve thicker skin in places and thicker skulls, even spikes and carapaces, which defend against certain types of attacks. In fact, targeting weak points is a central part of the combat simulation. This also helps keep the fights interesting to watch, so that instead of ramming into each other head-on repeatedly, creatures circle around each other like planes in a dogfight, aiming for exposed necks and underbellies. There's a lot more to talk about with combat but I don't want to get too far ahead of what I've actually implemented. Hopefully this will nonetheless give a helpful idea of what's coming next. Thanks for reading!
Tom Johnson
Hotfix - 26/04/2023
Fixed a bug affecting some peoples Aquariums.
Earth Appreciation Festival Stream
Hey folks!
At 7pm BST, Tom, the developer of Ecosystem will be jumping on a stream to play through some of the game, feel free to submit any questions for him here or during the livestream and they may be answered!
And don't forget to check out the other awesome games taking part in the Earth Appreciation Festival:
This hotfix is to address a memory leak issue introduced with the new fish heads and textures we added.
Thanks to Stobz on the games Discord for helping test out this patch!
Hotfix for Creature Update Fixing Memory Leak
This addresses a memory leak relating to the creature skins that could affect long uninterrupted playthroughs, fixes a problem with the brightness slider on the creature editor for the new creature skin, and adds a separate saturation slider on the creature editor for the new creature skin.
Creature Head Update Now Live!
How time flies! Yesterday marked the second year of Ecosystem's Early Access release and to celebrate we're not only on sale for 10% off, but we've also got a new update which doubles the amount of heads and skins in the game, meaning that there's going to be more variety than ever in your ecosystems!
The full patch notes are at the bottom of this post, but first I wanted to update last years Early Access journey graphic I made to bring it up to date for our second anniversary and give you a little insight into what is to come!
Two Years of Early Access As A Solo Dev
What Next?
Whilst waiting on getting the new heads and textures from the artist, Tom has been working on the next major update that will be coming to the game, which will be a complete overhaul of creature combat. We don't have anything to share just yet on this, but we will do soon!
After the Combat Update there will be an Interaction Update, which should increase the ways in which your creatures will interact with each other in the world, whether this is a positive interaction or a negative interaction.
And then looking ahead to 1.0 we are finally able to announce that the Crustacean Update is going to be coming. We've been hesitant to commit to this fully up until now as they're quite technically complex when interacting with the current game systems, but Tom has done some early prototyping and is confident that he can get crustaceans into players hands!
This is likely going to be the 1.0 release of the game, but as always, game development is fluid and things change and get re-prioritised, but this is the current plan!
Tell Me About These Heads!
As mentioned, today's update doubles the number of heads and textures in the game, adding 8 new heads and their matching procedural textures. This will allow for a lot more variety in the game now and give you more choice when creating your creatures using the editor.
I won't spoil all 8 of the new heads for you in this post, but here is the concept art for the Scorpion Fish, and the blockout of how the head appears in game.
The full patch notes are below - whether you've been on the full journey since 2021 or have just joined, thank you for your support!
PATCH NOTES
Doubled the number of available heads for creatures.
Added new skin type for creatures with the new heads.
Add hotkeys to the version of the Interact Menu that appears when you select a creature.
Fix: creatures sometimes have knowledge of eggs that have been laid without actually having to sense them.
Fix: the 'burst' effect when the player spawns new species sometimes disappears.
Fix: notifications from previous games can persist for a few seconds after loading a new game.
Fix: temporary scratch data used by the creature's brains for calculations is now saved alongside those brains to ensure there is no variation in behavior when a game is saved and loaded.
Hotfix 22/02/23
Fixes:
Fix issue where charts may not initialize properly and some text may not appear if the Windows system language is not yet supported by the game.
Small Hotfix - 19th January 2023
PATCH NOTES
Fix: The species preview window flickers occasionally when there are lots of creatures.
Fix: If the first spawned member of the species is instantly removed due to physics instability or throws an exception, the diet of the species may be set to 'Any' and it will not feed properly.
Fix: If the player deselects a creature while renaming its species, the rename species menu is remains visible but does not respond correctly.
Fix: In some circumstances, hard caps are not displayed in the species info menu, even though they are enabled and can be seen in the evolutionary toolbox.
Do not refund life points for a nonviable species if hard population caps are on, since they will bring the species back to life.
