Thrive
Thrive 0.7.1 Release Candidate Available
This beta version is available as the beta branch on Steam (right click Thrive in the Steam client to be able to select that version to play).
Please provide any feedback you have about this new upcoming release, we are especially interested in any major game breaking bugs that we have not found yet.
You can provide feedback in the comments below or in the thread on our forums: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-7-1-release-candidate-testing/7810
Devblog #43: Meshes and Miches
This release marks the completion of the 0.6.x roadmap. For this release the major features are a new auto-evo algorithm based on miches that should generate much better AI species, and a convolution surface algorithm which gives macroscopic creatures a “skin” in the prototypes. There’s also a lot of smaller new features and tweaks to the microbe stage as usual. The last roadmap items to be completed where engulfing balancing and fixing as well as allowing continuing as a related species in easy mode.
Thrive 0.7.0
See the full patch notes at the end. or read on for some of the highlights.
Convolution Surfaces Realized
A long-awaited feature sure to excite the community, our macroscopic organism editor has been improved to include meshing, metaball scaling, symmetry, and finer control over sculpting your organism. You read that right: your 3D organisms are now more than just a collection of spheres!
There is still an immense amount of work to be made in the editor – creating dedicated parts related to eyes, mandibles, and more – and macroscopic gameplay remains bare. Regardless, convolution surfaces are a foundational mechanic for creating organisms beyond the microscopic stages of Thrive. We hope you enjoy this promising new feature and appreciate you for being there every step of the way Thrive takes forward. If you make any interesting looking creatures with the new editor, be sure to send them our way as we’d love to see what the community comes up with.
Auto-Evo Reimagined
Thrive’s auto-evo system, responsible for simulating the evolution of life around the player, has received a major overhaul – introducing, the Miche System.
By defining various problems and pressures that organisms might face, and defining how species might respond to that pressure, miches provide a dynamic and complex simulation of an ecosystem. Species will generally be much more efficient in adapting to their environment and responding to pressures. Players will find their worlds busier and more alive, with more competitive organisms popping up around them.
This is an exciting and dramatic change to auto-evo – the fundamental evolution mechanic underlying Thrive – built up from years of lessons learned. For a more detailed write-up on how exactly miches work, consider reading this older document by Thim, who is one of our programmers who contributed heavily to the development of miches. Note that some changes might have occurred between this rendition of miches and that which is currently implemented.
You can also see an explanation of miches in a video format where Thim yells at a lawn. Again, the current implementation of miches has likely been changed to better fit Thrive’s purposes since the making of this video, but this is the easiest existing introduction to the core concepts of miches.
Expanded Cellular Gameplay
The microbe stage has received a host of new exciting features that greatly expand on it’s gameplay and feel.
A new part – the mucocyst – has been introduced as a customization option and alternate form for slime jets. When activated, the player will be encased in a tough exterior coat of mucus, allowing major resistance to toxins, engulfment, and other threats. Players will be immobilized however, and growth will be halted while in this state.
A sprinting mechanic has been introduced, granting the player additional speed. Rather than just pointing your mouse in a direction and holding W, races to compound clouds and chasing/being chased is now more engaging. Be careful though – sprinting too long generates strain, resulting in an increased energy demand that could exhaust your organism!
The process panel now has a functional use beyond making sure things are functioning right within your cell. Players can now selectively pause certain metabolic processes via the panel, allowing for an entirely new layer of energy management for players who love to optimize.
Finally, various smaller but substantial improvements to game mechanics will make combat both more rewarding and challenging. A short healing cooldown has been introduced, making toxins more viable as a weapon and combat more high stakes for the player. And greater customization over toxins allows players to choose an expensive, high-damage impact, or less expensive and faster but less-damaging hits.
Compound Clouds Revisited
Thrive’s visual richness has been improved. Compound cloud visuals have been improved, with the clouds having much more texture and contrast than before. With adjustments having been made to improve visibility in the brighter patches.
Phosphate chunks have been introduced as well, with both smaller digestible minerals and large cloud-emitting crystals spawning into the world. These chunks will be more frequent in deeper patches and will create a more interesting visual landscape and environment for the player to interact with. More chunks might be added in future updates, so stay tuned!
Other Notable Changes
- In the experimental features mode, placing rusticyanin allows the player to shoot projectiles at iron to break off chunks, which will eventually result in the larger iron chunk being depleted fully. Enabling experimental features will allow players to test this out; feedback would be much appreciated.
- Migration has been revamped, allowing the player to direct their species towards a new patch without necessarily playing in that patch themselves.
- On easy mode, players can now switch to another species upon extinction.
- Corpse chunks now have more resources, making heterotrophy more viable. Chunks spawning and despawning has also been refactored to result in more consistent performance.
- You can now engulf when starving, though you take health damage.
Looking Ahead
The development team will now shift focus to improvements to the presentation of information across the various editor screens of Thrive, such as the editor itself, population and patch data, the timeline, and representations of the food web in a patch. This will make the game easier to understand and manage, setting up the Microbe Stage for future dependent features, such as dynamic environments.
Though focus has shifted towards the x.7.0 release cycle, this doesn’t mean that combat will not see any new development in the future; any volunteer can pick up on concepts and implement more abilities. However, our main programmer will now be focusing on moving Thrive forward and establishing the foundation of the important features we have yet to implement.
As always, remember to join us for our developer Thrivestream later today, where we’ll cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development.
You can either comment below or visit our feedback thread to give your thoughts on this update.
Full Patch Notes
- Added a completely new auto-evo algorithm based on a miche algorithm. This should massively improve the species auto-evo generates.
- Added convolution surfaces to add "skin" to macroscopic creatures to no longer display them just as a collection of metaballs
- Added sprinting ability to get a quick burst of speed
- Updated the compound cloud visuals with a new shader for more textured look
- Added new environmental chunks that emit phosphate
- Added feature to command the player species to migrate to new patches without the player having to move themselves
- Added mucocyst upgrade for slime jet which turns it into a defensive shield
- Added option to switch to a different species on extinction in easy mode instead of getting a game over
- Added a red screen flash as indicator for the player taking damage
- Added customization of toxin toxicity, which allows selecting between more damage per single shot or faster fire-rate
- Increased toxin initial velocity a bit
- Made cell turning speed ramp up much much faster when not pointing at the cursor. This makes the strategy of needing to overshoot the cursor past the direction you want to point at for maximum turning speed unnecessary.
- Microbe AI can now move sideways when trying to reach chunks or other cells
- Fixed eukaryotic engulfing size multiplier to be 2 instead of 1.5
- Prokaryotes now drop smaller cell chunks that are easier to eat
- Buffed dropped cell chunks to have 3x more compounds in them
- Added a cap to how many chunks a dying cell can drop to prevent absolutely massive cells causing issues
- Entering engulf mode without ATP is now possible at the cost of a little bit of health
- Added pilus damage cooldown on ejecting something to prevent ejected cells from immediately dealing massive amounts of pilus damage
- Increased maximum chunk count a bit to hopefully help with visual despawning
- Added buttons to the process panel to toggle individual processes on or off
- Cell colony members now forward messages to the HUD, which for example, allows indigestibility messages to be forwarded to provide info to the player as to why they can't eat something while in a colony
- There's now a few second cooldown before health regenerates after taking damage
- Added experimental siderophore feature that reworks iron gameplay to make it require shooting projectiles at big iron chunks to break off small chunks to then eat them
- Added a basic process panel view to the editor
- Added slider to resize metaball to be placed in the macroscopic editor
- Added simple X-axis symmetry mode to the macroscopic editor
- The prototype rocket launch animation now approximates an orbit entering manoeuvre instead of going straight up
- Tweaked when the low performance warning is triggered
- Fixed a bug where engulfed objects can get stuck in an incorrect state (entities in incorrect state are now force ejected)
- Fixed bug with the events timeline clearing wrong parts of the timeline after 20 generations
- Fixed organelle icons being cutoff in the Thriveopedia
- Fixed species preview tooltips not working in auto-evo explorer
- Fixed species preview tooltips not working in the timeline tab
- Fixed input keybindings menu not showing modifier keys along with graphical key representations
- Fixed slight visual artifacts with mixing clouds near the screen edges
- Fixed mouse hover panel checked world position under the cursor not taking our distortion shader into account (chromatic aberration option)
- Fixed various aspects of main menu 3D backgrounds 2 and 3
- Fixed multiple places in the editor where too long translations caused issues
- Fixed one 3D background having a particle emitter set to update at a limited framerate
- Fixed not being able to rebind inputs to CTRL, Shift, and ALT
- Fixed bug with rebound keys not displaying in key prompts correctly
- Fixed species colour not applying to all strands of cilia
- Fixed editor timeline global and local buttons being pressable at once
- Fixed word wrap not being enabled for auto-evo prediction panel, which caused issues with too wide GUI controls in some languages
- Fixed radial selection menu text being offcenter
- Fixed bug with editor button staying active while going to a later stage
- Thrive now prints the time when the game is started to log files
- Reduced memory allocations in microbe mutation generation
- Added a shader for iron chunk depletion and slightly updated the iron visuals in general (this is unused currently but is planned to be used in the future)
- Removed old auto-evo configuration options that are no longer used
- Made key prompts queue a refresh on data change instead of loading an updated icon immediately
- Wrote code documentation for BiomeCompoundProperties
- Added backend support for LAWK-locked organelles to be handled by the endosymbiosis system
- Updated some of the code README file badges
- Updated YamlDotNet from 15.3.0 to 16.0.0
- Updated code checking tools version
- Fixed our shader code check not working properly after the Godot 4 upgrade
- Removed old mutation code that the new auto-evo no longer uses
- Improved our threaded run generation script error messages
- Added TODO comments to a few places we could use graphics pooling as new graphics instance creation is one of the heaviest parts of the game in terms of performance currently
- Added more instructions regarding gettext to our setup instructions
- Updated translations
Thrive 0.7.0 Release Candidate Available
This beta version is available as the beta branch on Steam (right click Thrive in the Steam client to be able to select that version to play).
Please provide any feedback you have about this new upcoming release, we are especially interested in any major game breaking bugs that have snuck in.
You can provide feedback in the comments below or in the thread on our forums: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-7-0-release-candidate-testing/7673
Thrive Patch 0.6.7.1
You can find the major updates in 0.6.7 in the previous news post.
Patch Notes
- Changed compilation options for the fallback native library that should now work on older CPUs that only have SSE 4.2 and no newer instructions
- Fixed the game getting stuck when selecting 32 native executor threads
- Re-enabled Harmony mod loading as this no longer seems to cause the game to get stuck on start up with Godot 4
- Reduced unnecessary StringName allocations related to key prompt icons and checking pressed inputs
- Updated YamlDotNet from 15.1.6 to 15.3.0
- Updated Jolt Physics Engine version
- Updated translations
Devblog #42: Endosymbiosis Time
Thrive 0.6.7
See the full patch notes at the end or read on for some of the highlights.
Day & Night Fully Implemented
The day/night cycle was originally implemented way back in 0.6.0 as an experimental feature. Today we are proud to announce that it has finally made it’s way into the game proper as a mainline feature and will always be active by default! Photosynthesizers beware the long night, as the sun is no longer a constant source of energy. Photosynthesizing players will have access to dedicated editor widgets that will help them calculate how much energy they produce, and how much they need to survive the night.
AI has been updated to account for the time cycle, and cells dependent on solar energy will become less active when the sun sets. Cells that spawn during the night will have their storage adjusted so they can survive despite.
Afraid of the dark? The day/night cycle can still be toggled off in the game settings on new-game start.
Endosymbiosis
The long awaited symbionts are finally here! Predatory players now have a unique method of kickstarting the evolution of compartmentalized processes by recruiting engulfed prey to serve their needs!
When the player engulfs a bacterial species they may be able to find that same species in the new endosymbiosis menu in their next editor session, where they will have the option to use the species to unlock an associated eukaryotic organelle.
Ferroplast Organelle
Iron appreciators rejoice, for there is finally a eukaryotic organelle for the chemolithoautotrophy process! This brand new hypothetical part, called the ferroplast, permits a more efficient way to harness those Fe- ions out there.
Expanded Toxin Varieties
With this update comes some brand new toxin varieties for players to weaponize themselves with. Each of the four toxin types have unique effects that can hinder your target in a variety of ways. Each toxin will also have it’s own unique colour when fired, so let those vivid colours fly loose!
Other Notable Changes
- Buffed cell corpse chunks
- Added alternative unlock condition for oxytoxisome that unlocks it after dying multiple times, this models how prey species can become toxic instead of only predator species having access to toxin
- Added custom inventory item drag icons and updated land tree placeholder model
- Added a display in the editor showing how long each compound takes to fill up, this will hopefully help in planning for how to survive the night with enough resource generation during the day
- Made auto-evo consider surviving the night more to penalize species with not enough storage or resource stocking up during the day
- Created a new custom model for ice chunks to be separate from the particle effects also present in the patch
- Added custom model and icon for injectisome upgrade
Looking Ahead
With this update, a bulk of the tasks planned for the 0.6.x release cycle have been completed. Players may be able to look forward to the implementation of a stamina and sprinting system, new cell parts and customization, and expanded features for toxins.
As always, remember to join us for our developer Thrivestream later today, where we’ll cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development.
You can also visit our feedback thread to give your thoughts on this update.
Full Patch Notes
- Implemented endosymbiosis. It is now possible to engulf other species to turn them into free organelles and also to unlock those organelles in an alternative way compared to the normal unlock conditions.
- Added customization for toxin organelles to select various toxin types that have different effects than oxytoxy
- Added different colours for different toxin types
- Day/night cycle is now enabled by default but can still be turned off
- Added ferroplast organelle, which is the eukaryotic variant of rusticyanin
- Cells spawning close to night time (or during night) get extra resources to help them survive the night
- Buffed cell corpse chunks
- Added alternative unlock condition for oxytoxisome that unlocks it after dying multiple times, this models how prey species can become toxic instead of only predator species having access to toxin
- Added custom inventory item drag icons and updated land tree placeholder model
- Fixed auto-evo mutations code using exceptions for normal flow control, this fixes at least one identified case where the game would freeze completely
- Fixed compound bars when max storage amount is less than 1
- Fixed fluid currents system force not applying, this bug was likely present ever since the ECS refactor
- Fixed iron chunk collision model scaling and fixed their rotation differences compared to the visual models
- Fixed HUD messages font shadow not working
- Fixed a brief flash of the game when exiting the freebuild editor for the first time
- Fixed multiline text edit style not working correctly
- Fixed cheats being able to enable the editor button when already going to the editor which allowed causing a crash in the game by clicking the button again
- Fixed some problems related to multicellular species trying to enter binding mode
- Made AI cells that depend on resources that aren't present during the night be more sessile during it
- Added new GUI and warnings to the editor to show if storage space and compound production during the day is enough to survive the night for photosynthesisers
- Added a display in the editor showing how long each compound takes to fill up, this will hopefully help in planning for how to survive the night with enough resource generation during the day
- Made auto-evo consider surviving the night more to penalize species with not enough storage or resource stocking up during the day
- Created a new custom model for ice chunks to be separate from the particle effects also present in the patch
- Added support for organelle upgrades overriding the base model of the organelle, which will be used more in the future
- Added custom model and icon for injectisome upgrade
- Added custom physics time to metrics panel, this feature was done last December but somehow forgotten to be added until now
- Added support for loading more shape types to our physics engine integration in preparation for use with organelle shapes
- Created custom collision shapes for all organelles to finally properly fix them
- Tweaked glucose reduction effect code a tiny bit to be clearer
- Made orphaned node count in metrics panel ignore intentionally cached nodes
- Improved organelle model data handling to keep model path variables and scenes in a single data container to avoid future mistakes with mixing up data for different scenes
- Fixed some code warnings and fixed a bug in metaball moving that this uncovered where the parent metaball reference was not updated correctly
- Removed unused thermoplast mesh file
- Updated Jolt Physics engine
- Updated YamlDotNet from 15.1.2 to 15.1.6
- Updated xunit from 2.8.0 to 2.8.1
- Updated code checking tools
- Updated translations
Thrive 0.6.7 Release Candidate Available
To play this early test build you need to right click Thrive in the Steam client and in the properties select "beta" as the version to play.
Please provide any feedback you have about this new upcoming release, we are especially interested in feedback related to balancing of the new features as well as any major game breaking bugs. You can provide feedback in the comments below or on the dedicated thread on our community forums: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-6-7-release-candidate-testing/7497
Thrive Patch 0.6.6.2
Patch Notes
- Fixed the size of the patch extinction screen
- Updated translations
Thrive Patch 0.6.6.1
The version of the included Thrive Launcher was also recently updated. This new launcher version will now show a warning if the current CPU is detected as not being suitable for running Thrive.
Please continue reporting any bugs with loading saves or the game locking up (as we'll need more information to track down this problem).
Patch Notes
- Fixed organelle models looking bad in Godot 4
- Improved the visuals of the chemoreceptor and tutorial lines
- Turned off compression on the clouds perlin noise texture which was accidentally turned on with the Godot 4 update
- Did some minor organelle visuals tweaks
- Organelle placement sound is now only played if a placement action was done (fixes it being played for organelle removal)
- Fixed evolutionary tree zooming in and out not working correctly
- Fixed screen effects in miscellaneous settings not working
- Fixed win and extinction screens
- Fixed various GUI popup related problems in the later prototypes
- Increased audio latency to 20ms which helps crackling audio if the game was running slightly too slow
- Added extra error handling to Thriveopedia load and save load against scene load failures which seems like a randomly occurring bug in Godot 4 engine itself
- Added extra safety checks around native library load and printing of current CPU name if it is not detected as sufficient for running Thrive
- Added extra checks to our simulation running code to maybe start to narrow down a few bugs
- Redid modal manager connect and check operation to hopefully fix one case of signal connection errors printed in Godot 4
- Fixed position of our links popup in the main menu
- Other GUI fixes
- Added hyperthreading throttling instructions to our busy-wait loops
- Our CI builds system works again
- Updated our automated code checks to work on Windows again
- Removed trailing spaces in shaders that Godot did automatically
- Added game export script flag to ignore problems with installed Godot to just try to export anyway
- Updated Nix flake to use Godot 4.2.2
- Updated xunit from 2.7.1 to 2.8.0
- Updated translations
Devblog #41: Godot 4 is Here
This conversion didn’t require us to fix the gameplay once again thanks to the ECS rework that was done last year. That protected our gameplay code from all of the Godot changes. A lot of the GUI needed to be tweaked and fixed, though. This upgrade to Godot 4 now allows us to use a modern C# runtime and language version features. As an added bonus the new runtime has increased the game performance. While Godot 4 initially looked like it made the game a bit slower, that runtime upgrade should have the net effect of the game being again just a bit more performant. All this background work is setting up for the future of Thrive. For the next release we’ll get back to working on microbe roadmap features so hopefully everyone can have a bit more patience with us before we can bring out some new major features. Unless of course an overwhelming amount of new high priority bugs are discovered after this release, but here’s hoping that that doesn’t happen.
See our patch notes at the end for full details, or read on for some of the highlights.
Godot 4.2.2
This is a massive upgrade to the Godot engine, as such it has been pretty painful to upgrade to, but we got it done. Godot 4 has overhauled their rendering, improved and changed almost all of their systems, it’s not a brand new engine but this is almost that level of overhauling the engine. The biggest visible changes are the new Vulkan-based renderer, which requires a more recent GPU than before. Thrive can be played with the OpenGL 3 fallback renderer, with very few graphical problems, which is an improvement compared to the GLES2 fallback renderer.
This upgrade finally allowed us to switch to .NET 8 runtime, which we have been wanting to use for a longtime now and have had to do various workarounds in Thrive due to being stuck on an ancient runtime while using Godot 3. This runtime upgrade also nicely has improved the performance of our C# code. The engine upgrade also now allows the Thrive Launcher to set an audio delay override which when increased enough can fix crackling audio in the game.
Engulfing Animations
Through the magic of shaders, cells no longer flash blue when they try to eat something. You can now feast your eyes on the hypnotic undulations of predatory engulfment each time a cell is engulfing it’s prey!
Varied Environmental Conditions
Returning players may notice that oxygen levels now have a little bit of variation between oceanic patches. Make sure to account for this fluctuation in available energy generation in your cell as you make your way through the sea!
Moving forward, these values may be subject to change, and someday might even be determined by the activities of life itself.
Other Notable Changes
- There’s now a native library variant that doesn’t require AVX, this should make Thrive playable again on some older CPUs
- Osmoregulation cost values are now shown in red as it is a negative property
- Engulfment storage full tutorial now has an end trigger once the player has digested enough things
- Memory usage metrics now works on Windows
- Removed our custom checkbox implementation now that Godot’s has all the needed features
Looking Ahead
We have recently spent quite a lot of development time working on background systems that don’t have much visible impact on the gameplay. We feel like this has been necessary for the long-term future of Thrive as the game will take at least more than a decade to “complete.” As a result we can’t neglect keeping the game architecture clean and on up to date engine versions, as what we have now would be extremely ancient by the time the game is complete.
Now with the engine upgrade done, we will focus on new features for the next release, 0.6.7, from our roadmap to get us closer to a complete microbe stage. Of course we’ll need to correct any new impactful bugs that still exist in the game. But hopefully there isn’t too many of those so that there’s enough time to make many new features for 0.6.7 which is probably going to be released by the end of June.
As always, remember to join us for our developer Thrivestream later today, where we’ll cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development. You can watch the stream here:
You can comment below or visit our feedback thread to give your thoughts on this update.
Patch Notes
- Updated to Godot 4.2.2 (we were previously on 3.5 so this is a massive upgrade)
- Updated to .NET 8 runtime and C# 12 as it turns out this can be used with Godot 4
- New engulf animation that creates wave lines instead of the old just flashing blue animation
- Oxygen now has different levels in different patches which affects the utility of certain parts a ton
- There's now a native library variant that doesn't require AVX, this should make Thrive playable again on some older CPUs
- Arabic fallback font had to be removed as it caused buggy line heights in all text in Godot 4
- Osmoregulation cost values are now shown in red as it is a negative property
- Engulfment storage full tutorial now has an end trigger once the player has digested enough things
- Fixed new player species name not immediately applying after exiting the editor
- Fixed new cell button crashing multicellular freebuild editor
- Fixed data cache disposed errors that only seemed to trigger in exported version of the game
- Fixed no changes in editor tutorial being able to prevent multicellular editor exit
- Memory usage metrics now works on Windows
- Fixed CPU check only checking AVX and not AVX 2 which was then used anyway causing a crash on CPUs that have AVX but not AVX2
- Switched the AVX feature check to use standard C# function, which is hopefully more accurate than the previous approach that we got reports about false negatives
- Tweaked wording on the fallback opengl renderer use and disabled the 3D backgrounds again for that as they still aren't fully correct
- Updated our colour picker customizations for Godot 4 (pick from game window seems to not work currently on Linux)
- Removed our custom checkbox implementation now that Godot's has all the needed features
- Switched from the previously used tar compression library to C# standard one which shouldn't have any save corruption issues (due to this we were stuck on an old version of the compression library)
- Added check to tools against omitting part of a version number this removes potential for a mistake that almost was in 0.6.5
- Added simple C#-code-only unit tests for a few things
- Converted some things to use direct references instead of NodePaths
- There's now a nix flake for Thrive developers
- Updated our documentation impacted by the upgrade to Godot 4
- Updated Jolt physics engine to newest version
- Updated YamlDotNet fro 15.1.1 to 15.1.2
- Updated AngleSharp from 1.1.0 to 1.1.2
- Updated code checking tools version
- Updated translations
Thrive 0.6.6 Release Candidate Available
Status of the Godot 4 conversion along with all still known issues is here: Godot 4 Board
For audio crackling issues or the game not starting due to missing Vulkan, there are new options for starting Thrive in the Thrive Launcher that might help with these problems. Any experiences, either working or not working, related to these options would be great to hear about.
This version is available through Steam as the beta version (right click the game and select the beta in the properties).
Please let us know if there are things you notice that are now worse in this version than in 0.6.5. But please check first that no one else has mentioned the same thing in this thread yet.
If you have any feedback about this version please share it below or on our forums: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-6-6-release-candidate/7421