Another few months, another Thrive update full of game-changing new features and improvements! Headline features of Thrive 0.6.5 include organelle unlocking mechanics and fog of war for the patch map, adding more elements of progression to our evolving gameplay loop, together with further performance enhancements on top of those made by the rework last release.
Following the relatively feature-light release of Thrive 0.6.4, Thrive 0.6.5 brings you some major updates in mechanics that should make the whole game a more satisfying experience. See our patch notes at the end of this post for full details, or read on for some of the highlights.
Organelle Unlocks
The most notable feature of this update is the introduction of unlock mechanics for some organelles. In a regular game, several organelles are now locked from the start and the player must meet certain criteria to evolve them.
These criteria include:
Being in a patch with a certain amount of a compound.
Having another organelle in your cell for multiple generations.
Engulfing a certain number of other cells.
Having a certain amount of excess ATP production.
This list will likely grow in future as we extend the mechanic to other organelles and fine-tune current unlock conditions in light of player feedback.
Organelle unlocks should give a greater sense of progression and achievement to the game and lessen the impact of overpowered strategies. They also open the path forward to endosymbiosis, where advanced organelles can be unlocked by engulfing other cells with simpler organelles, a reflection of real theories about the origin of organelles such as mitochondria. We’re eager to hear your thoughts on this feature, so please let us know what you think on our community forums.
If you don’t want to play with organelle unlocks and preferred having all parts available from the start of the game, don’t worry! The feature in its entirety can be turned off in new game settings.
Patch Map Fog of War
While we hope organelle unlocks add a better progression system to building your creature, patch map fog of war should increase engagement with exploration. Patches not directly connected to your starting patch are now shrouded in mystery and must be revealed by traveling between patches.
Again, this feature is entirely optional, so head to new game settings to configure your desired exploration mode. You can even select a more intense variant for the truly adventurous where patches aren’t revealed until you enter them.
Further Performance Improvements
With the performance refactor from Thrive 0.6.4 as a base, we sought to push the game further and scrape out any performance advantage we could in this release. Overall performance is now significantly better than it was pre-0.6.4, which we hope will make playing a much more enjoyable experience.
In particular, this release adds multithreading for ECS systems to take advantage of hardware with multiple CPU cores, alongside some general tweaking to extract performance from some ECS systems. We’ve also analysed the game’s memory allocation to reduce overall memory allocations by about 75% during gameplay.
Aside from any potential gains from moving to Godot 4, it’s unlikely we’ll see any further performance work in the near future. We’ve come a long way from the game’s past performance issues though.
Expanded Thriveopedia and Tutorials
We’ve worked on improving information availability and clarity for the player in this release through a number of routes.
The Thriveopedia – our in-game information store – now supports inter-page linking. This has been especially useful as we’ve filled out the organelle pages with content taken directly from our wiki. To make the Thriveopedia more visible to players, we’ve added hotkeys while hovering over organelles in the editor. By default, press F1 to open expanded information about an organelle in the Thriveopedia.
We’ve also added a number of new tutorials and reworked some messaging within existing ones, particularly around organelle operations within the editor. Remember to ensure tutorials are enabled in the options menu if you want to use them!
Other Notable Changes
Auto-Evo predictions in the editor now show energy first and population second. This should reduce confusion over population reductions due to larger individual cell size despite higher energy gained.
Hovering over a species name in the patch map (in the editor or Thriveopedia) shows a preview of that species. We’ve found this very handy for understanding what prey and perils await you in nearby patches!
New music track exclusive to volcanic vents.
Reimplemented pilus damage cooldown to prevent cells dealing way too much damage.
Added hotkeys for the macroscopic editor in later stage prototypes.
Late multicellular speed now depends on the number of metaballs with myofibrils.
Plenty of small fixes and additions.
Looking Ahead
We intend for the focus of our next release to be porting Thrive to Godot 4 to take advantages of benefits not available in Godot 3. While this will be a substantial amount of work, it’s likely new features and the gradual stream of small fixes will continue as well. After Thrive 0.6.6, focus will shift to completing features in line with our release roadmap.
As always, remember to join us for our developer Thrivestream starting very soon, 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 (or comment below) to give your thoughts on this update.
Full Patch Notes
Implemented fog of war for the patch map, you now need to explore the map to find all the patches that exist
Added part unlock system. Some organelles are now locked until the player fulfils certain conditions.
Added multithreaded running of ECS systems. This improves the performance a bit more on systems with enough CPU cores.
Reduced memory allocations during normal gameplay by 75%
Auto-evo prediction now shows the gained energy first and population second
Hovering over a species name in the editor report now shows an image of the species in a tooltip
Added button to eject all engulfed things, helpful when you have ingested too poisonous prey
Thriveopedia now has inter-page links and external links
Added a button to open an organelle's Thriveopedia page when hovering over the organelle
Added multiple new microbe stage tutorials and reworked many existing ones as well as changed the tutorial flow in the editor
The initial tutorial message is now customized based on the life origin selected in the new game options
Added a new microbe stage music track that is exclusive to the vents biome
Reduced bacteria swarm spawn counts for larger bacteria to try to balance large swarms of killer bacteria that clear out all smaller species
Reimplemented pilus damage stab cooldown when dealing large amounts of damage at once, hopefully to prevent ejected cells from very quickly killing their engulfer
Previous gathered energy is now shown in the prediction tooltip for comparing to see how much the increase/decrease is
Did some further small system tweaking based on profiling for a bit more performance
Increased minimum entity counts a bit now that we have more game performance
Reduced density of big iron chunks to make them pushable by cells again
Fixed big iron chunks having their collision models rotated differently than the visual modes (this caused the visuals to now be rotated differently than before until someone can remake the model)
Added explicit check for available CPU features and making the game exit cleanly if the current CPU is not new enough. This is implemented through a small library which is loaded first and only after confirming things are good loading the main native code of Thrive is done.
Improved the handling of native library load not succeeding and the game needing to close (this shouldn't be a hard crash anymore)
Made compound cloud creation use interlocked operations rather than locks to slightly improve performance
Added middle mouse button for panning to the list of rebindable keys
Middle mouse button can now be used to pan in the society stage
Made the move and delete hotkeys work for macroscopic editor
Late multicellular speed now depends on the amount of myofibril metaballs
Added a cheat for unlimited growth speed
Cells now stop emitting mucilage when joining a colony, this should fix a really old reported bug
Tweaked auto-evo prediction GUI a bit to give more horizontal space for numbers
Fixed bug with colony member attach positions sometimes being incorrect which has been a bug for a really long time (note that this is different from multicellular body plan change bug)
Fixed engulfing used storage not taking things currently being pulled in into account leading to overuse of storage and ejection
Fixed engulfing not taking targets being in colonies into account, now the lead cell is no longer always yanked out of a colony
Fixed regression in previous Thrive version with multicellular growth buff not working leading multicellular growth to be half the intended speed
Fixed regression in entering engulf mode in a colony where other members could engulf but the player couldn't
Fixed editor button not re-enabling after exiting a colony
Fixed some bugs related engulfable being stuck with 0 contents, at least infinite toxin damage should be fixed
Fixed a crash when accessing incorrect cell colony member index due to one missing "=" character in the code
Fixed Thriveopedia map not displaying if opened before going once to the editor
Fixed slime jet activation only playing a single frame of animation, now a full animation cycle is always completed
Fixed bug with visual system setting Godot scale directly when a separate system should be doing it
Fixed microbe sound effects continuing after cell death
Fixed mouse click not working regression in signaling agent command wheel
Fixed toxin projectile visuals not loading properly from saves
Fixed fossilise buttons not updating their state when a species was fossilised, now the buttons correctly show the species as being fossilised
Fixed bugs with body plan editor and cell editor displaying their graphics at the same time
Fixed the 3D environment colour leaking into the cell editor in multicellular editor (the background is now disabled while in the cell editor and enabled when returning)
Fixed saving not working in the editor if a save made in the editor was loaded and the stage was not entered in between
Fixed an error being triggered when exiting from a save loaded in the editor without going to the microbe stage before quitting
Fixed the metrics panel entity counts not making much sense with the ECS changes
Added option to turn off the multithreaded world simulation in case it is slower or has other issues
Added new setting to control the number of native executor threads (affects physics performance)
Added some more models to the list in the gallery
Added some extra safety checks to task executor based on one recent crash report
Added some safety code to ensure ejected cells will despawn in a few seconds if they are dead
Added safety code against entities being stuck in dead engulfers, instead the engulfing state is now properly cleared
Added safety checks in editor enter button state apply to ensure the player hasn't died during the one frame it takes for the state change to apply after it is triggered
Added code to force all cells into normal mode when they are engulfed to make sure engulfed cells can't be in weird states
Added a check to ensure gas compounds add up to 100% in biomes
Made the benchmark get progressively more intensive to ensure it should always eventually end
Removed protoplasm from the game, it was an old buff for AI bacteria cells
Removed a few unnecessarily saved fields from save files
Added debugging feature to draw debug lines easily
Added debugging helpers for verifying ECS component access patterns
Wrote an overall Thrive ECS architecture describing document
Implemented dependent entity delete for future use in Thrive
Added .mo files to gitignore to stop people accidentally sending those in PRs
Updated our scripts to run on .NET 8
Fixed a few problems in the setup instructions (.NET 8, gold linker), added more info on submodules
Updated code style rules and checking tools
Added a styleguide section on avoiding memory allocations
Removed unused code constants
Renamed an interface in the code to clarify its purpose
Renamed UsedIngestionCapacity to UsedEngulfingCapacity in the code to improve clarity
Setup dependabot to automatically update our git submodules
Some native side code build options improvements
Applied our single letter LINQ lambda style across the codebase
Updated AngleSharp from 1.0.7 to 1.1.0
Updated YamlDotNet from 13.7.1 to 15.1.1
Updated Jolt physics engine
Switched translation files to no longer have source reference lines, this should reduce merge conflict amount massively, but most translation tools don't know how to look at the translation template file to find the reference line information
Updated translations
Thrive 0.6.5 Release Candidate Available
Thrive 0.6.5 will be released next week and as such the usual early test build is here. This should be a more normal testing version compared to the one for 0.6.4 with a lot less radical changes included in this version. This version mostly focused on improving performance with not redoing almost the entire game logic. The most major new features re the fog of war for the patch map and organelle unlocks. If you test this version you can let us know how the game performs now. Please include info on how many threads was used and if game simulation multithreading was enabled. Slightly tweaking those settings may change the performance a lot which would help us pick good defaults if we get reports from multiple people how those impact things.
This beta version is available as the beta version through Steam (can be selected in the Steam client game properties)
If you have any feedback about this version please share it below or on our forums: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-6-5-release-candidate-testing/7288
Especially if any game crashes or lockups are found please report those along with saves / steps on how to trigger the problem and we’ll make sure those problems are taken care of before the full 0.6.5 release.
Thrive Patch 0.6.4.1 Out Now
Having just released our performance refactor update 0.6.4, we quite quickly became aware of a large amount of bugs and other issues brought up by our players. Thanks to everyone’s help and reporting, we were able to track down the source of many of these bugs and patch them up with care.
The resulting patch has just been published today, and should result in a significantly more stable experience for our players. With the bulk of these bugs now dealt with, we should be able to begin focusing on the contents of our next update soon enough! Unless of course we still get many new bug reports after this patch.
Patch Notes
Balancing improvements: movement speed for larger cells was increased a bit, bacteria can now again spawn in larger swarms than just 2 at once, and debuffed colony movement bonus a bit to make sure colonies aren't faster than individual cells.
Added better tooltips for microbe action hotbar and become macroscopic button
Added panoramic 3D backgrounds for late multicellular editor. Before they were used just for the stage itself.
Fixed cells not appearing at all when using low thread count. The same root cause also caused cell rotations to stop working after some time in the game.
Hexes placed in previous editor session are now slightly darker to make them actually visually distinct
Engulfing animation now correctly stars from the engulfed object's world position
Fixed eukaryotic size bonus for engulfment not working
Fixed new health max not applying after exiting the editor
Fixed engulfing pulling in animation playing twice in a row
Fixed engulfing endosome graphics scale blowing up a ton when engulfing a specific object type
Fixed engulf eject animations not working at all
Fixed a crash related to despawning engulfed objects
Fixed a save error when a species had a chemoreceptor set to detect that species it was in
Fixed incorrect data being generated for multicellular body plan indexes which lead to a crash when colonies regrew lost cells
Fixed tutorial about leaving colony to be able to enter the editor being able to trigger in early multicellular stage
Fixed the reproduction bars staying white if the player died when the editor was available. Also with the same change compound bars will only update while the player is alive.
Fixed softlock when pressing the editor button but the player was in a microbe colony (not multicellular)
Fixed Godot warning that was printed when the editor was exited (this was from the options menu sound device list)
Fixed a Godot error when shutting down the game that was caused by PhotoStudio
Fixed crash in early multicellular stage related to organelle repositioning when exiting the editor
Mostly fixed microbe colony member positions. Members bound 3-4 cells away from the lead cell still have some rotation and positioning issues.
Made multicellular lost cell tracking ignore cells that no longer pointed to a valid cell index in a species' body plan. Most likely caused by removing cells from the body plan after that cell colony was spawned.
Going to the art gallery now disables the 3D menu background performance tracking which should fix unintentional low performance detection due to a lag spike
Removed old evolutionary tree build error message that should not be able to trigger anymore as we have had a save breakage point
Made speed cheats work much better, especially for larger colonies which got way too much bonus speed
Unified the cases of our JSON files, properties are now PascalCase everywhere (with internal names still keeping camelCase naming)
Fixed native library symbol upload script
Updated Nito.Collections.Deque from 1.1.1 to 1.2.1
Updated translations
Devblog #39: A Foundation for Tomorrow
For five entire months straight our developers have worked and toiled to bring about a massive rework in the functionality of Thrive’s background processes. A massive undertaking that has left nothing untouched, and everything entirely different. This is without a doubt a fundamental change in the underlying rules of reality in the world of Thrive; A brand new physics engine complete with better performance. Nothing will quite feel the same as it once did, but it’s still Thrive, and it can only get better.
In focusing on this grand refactoring, we regrettably have little to show on the gameplay side of things, but it will be smoother sailing from here on out.
Our developers have worked hard to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. We’ve outlined the major changes in this devblog, but you can see the patch notes at the end for a full list of features and bug fixes.
Performance Like Never Before
Having gone through a massive refactor behind the scenes, Thrive now runs at a greater speed than ever before. framerates will be higher, autoevo will be faster, and you may just be able to increase that entity cap in your settings. But that’s not all that has changed behind the scenes! The physics calculations of Thrive have been entirely reworked.
Players might notice a tangible sense of weight during gameplay now; Large heavy cells are able to easily bat aside small chunks and bacteria as they make their way through. Cells have an average density that determines how quickly they can turn, and how fast they are able to move. You can even drift a little as you decelerate instead of coming to a complete stop on command. And even the generation of hitboxes is entirely different now, with the hitbox being determined by the shape of the cell’s membrane rather than it’s internal parts.
These changes are huge, and while they may not bring anything substantially noticeable to the realm of gameplay, they lay a vital foundation for the future of Thrive going forward.
A Guide To Thrive
The Thriveopedia is ever closer to becoming as we originally envisioned; Now performing it’s role as a guide for players to consult during gameplay to achieve a greater understanding of the parts they have at their disposal. Now included in the latest release is comprehensive information relating to each part available in the microbe stage.
Each page will be filled out with everything a player could ever want to know about a part. It’s general stats, it’s processes, the customization options available to it, strategies on it’s use, and even information on how the part functions in real life!
Regrettably, not all of the organelle pages are fully filled out as of this release. So please look forward to more information becoming available to the Thriveopedia in each subsequent update!
New Part Customization
While they may be small, 0.6.4 does still bring some brand new features to the table. Players can now diversify their equipment with the brand new injectisome pilus mod, which exchanges some of it’s raw physical damage for toxic damage. This allows it’s user to bypass physical defenses with the pilus.
In addition, the vacuole has received a modification menu that allows players to specialize them for specific compounds. This greatly increases their overall storage value, but only for one compound.
Not to be left out of the fun, the chemoreceptor also has new customization options, with the ability to directly track nearby cells and not just loose compounds.
Other Notable Changes
Added two new context specific microbe tracks that can play instead of the normal microbe ambiance when in those specific patch types.
Fixed two very common multicellular crashes: InvalidOperationException: Sequence contains no matching element and ArgumentException: OrganelleTemplate can’t be placed at this location.
When low performance is detected in the menu the game will now prompt the player to disable the 3D menu backgrounds.
Improved the visuals of the organism statistics panel and added / updated related tooltip icons as well.
Multicellular colonies now use absolute positioning of members set by the editor. This isn’t perfect (leaves gaps) but the problem with cells growing at the wrong positions randomly should be gone now.
Membrane data generation now happens in a background thread to reduce stuttering happening while cells spawn.
The AI will now avoid engulfing something it cannot digest, though they may still try occasionally. Depends on behavior values.
There’s now a tutorial for the become multicellular button as many players seemed to not realize it was a button.
Full patch notes are at the end of this post.
Looking Ahead
With the massive rework to Thrive’s underlying systems, much of our focus is going to be centered around fixing any and all emergent bugs as we can. Most importantly of all, recent updates to Godot 4 has made porting Thrive to this newest version more of a possibility, which may potentially take precedence in the near future.
Want to hear more? Come join us in our upcoming developer Thrivestream to ask us whatever you like, and celebrate the new release:
You can also share your thoughts and feelings on these latest changes on our community feedback thread.
Patch Notes
Refactored the entire microbe gameplay code to use an Entity Component System (ECS) architecture and a different physics engine (Jolt). This took up the vast majority of the time spent on this release. As a result of this many things in the game will feel slightly different and there will definitely be new bugs that have slipped past us. We will attempt to quickly fix any new bugs introduced with this change.
The game performance is now 20-100% better than before thanks to the ECS and physics rework (different benchmark parts have different improvements, and different gameplay conditions also have different performance gains)
Improved auto-evo performance by about 50%
Added a native C++ library for Thrive that has the physics engine integration for now but we can in the future move computation heavy parts of the game there that might benefit performance
Added two new context specific microbe tracks that can play instead of the normal microbe ambiance when in those specific patch types
Added Thriveopedia pages for each of the organelles currently in the game
Fixed 2 very often reported multicellular crashes: InvalidOperationException: Sequence contains no matching element and ArgumentException: OrganelleTemplate can't be placed at this location
When low performance is detected in the menu the game will now prompt the player to disable the 3D menu backgrounds
Improved the visuals of the organism statistics panel and added / updated related tooltip icons as well
Chemoreceptor can now be upgraded to detect cells of a certain species
Added vacuole upgrade to specialize it for a certain compound. Specialized vacuole stores double the normal amount of the specialized compound but provides no storage for other compounds.
The pilus now applies damage based on the physics penetration amount instead of always a fixed value. Faster collisions result now in more physical damage.
The pilus can now be upgraded to an injectisome to switch the damage to be toxic (instead of physical) and also to apply the full damage no matter how light the hit is
Microbes now use the physics engine to turn which should result in reduced rotation related bugs or slight issues
Microbe physics shapes are now a single convex body which performs better and it much more closely matches the visual size of the membrane
Microbe colony physics shape is now a single combined body. This should fix rare bugs with pili detaching or toxins hitting self when firing them.
Multicellular colonies now use absolute positioning of members set by the editor. This isn't perfect (leaves gaps) but the problem with cells growing at the wrong positions randomly should be gone now.
Membrane data generation now happens in a background thread to reduce stuttering happening while cells spawn
Added a tutorial for negative ATP balance
The AI will now most of the time not try to engulf something it cannot digest
The AI will now remember what it was doing before a save thanks to the component data being easier to load fully intact
Added 3D panorama backgrounds for various patch types for the late multicellular underwater part. These were completed a while ago but were never accessible in game until now.
There's now a basic page name search in the Thriveopedia
Improved initial compound handling for multicellular colonies
There's now a tutorial for the become multicellular button as many players seemed to not realize it was a button
Duplicating a cell type now selects it in the early multicellular editor
Becoming multicellular now has a timeline entry for permanent record when it happened
Added early multicellular freebuild mode
Organelle chunks that are dropped now stop playing animations (for example flagellum swim animation)
Fixed the most often reported crash, which was likely due to Godot integration with Bullet physics, by switching physics engines
Fixed subshape out of range errors from physics also thanks to entirely redoing the gameplay physics
Fixed the osmoregulation editor tooltips not updating based on the difficulty and current membrane
Fixed the AI shooting too early at a target it wasn't pointing at yet due to rotation no longer being almost instant
Fixed bug with glucose reduction showing up sometimes as NaN
Fixed the global timeline not showing populations correctly
Fixed a bug with incorrect resulting MP in early multicellular from incorrectly calculated actions on separate cell types
Fixed saving bug with ObjectDisposedException with HostileEngulfer
Fixed an exploit with deleting and duplicating cell types giving infinite MP
Fixed a crash when double clicking on organelle move
Fixed organelle popup menu not being tall enough with certain languages selected
Fixed symmetry trying to place multiple unique organelles
Fixed a crash when loading a save while load was already in progress (the new load is now prevented until the previous save/load operation completes)
Fixed the auto-evo exploring tool map not panning to show the selected patch initially
Fixed keyboard navigation in input options
Added one more fix (the 4th) now against accidental cannibalism (when turning multicellular)
Added multithreading to microbe growth, made easier thanks to the ECS architecture
Improved externally positioned organelles to use much less CPU time
Various disposed object exceptions should no longer be possible to happen with the gameplay no longer using Godot Nodes to implement it
Player cell related change callbacks now use invoke to trigger to reduce the chance of a rare bug triggering with them
Failure to delete a save should now give a popup warning about the error
Art gallery slideshow now works for models as well as images
Added a new separate icon for oxytoxisome to no longer use the toxin vacuole icon
Added a new icon for osmoregulation
Photostudio is now slightly faster at creating images of cells
Switched the early multicellular editor to use images of cells instead of cell objects for showing the body plan. This improves the performance a ton when there were large body plans being edited.
Tweaked the colour of the editor confirm button warning badge to make it more consistent with the other GUI
Fixed some situations where the editor confirm button warning got stuck on
Added new cheat in the microbe cheat menu to control the current time of day
Improved the handling of creating organelle upgrade actions / changes in the editor
The GUI no longer grabs focus during intro video to reduce chance of accidentally interacting with the menu while the video is playing
Fixed art gallery filter categories not reacting to language change
Species colour not applying to all organelles problem should now be fixed due to the component architecture where all organelles should read the consistent colour values that are copied
Organelle graphics are now slightly more colourful and pop out against the membrane more
Some microbe colony related corner cases are no longer relevant, but there's undoubtedly new bugs still left to fix with the newly redone system
Steam: fixed username display not reacting to language change
Steam: fixed bug with displaying library licenses
Split microbe HUD to its own scene to have better organization of the microbe stage
Moved enzyme descriptions to our JSON files to no longer have hardcoded descriptions in the code per enzyme type
Improved internal organelle position code to use read only data references when the data should not be modified. Same improvement was also made to some simulation parmeters data that was also returned as modifiable objects.
Git submodule info (current commits) is now included when packaging the game
Created a system to distribute precompiled native libraries for Thrive to more easily setup the new version for partial development
Updated code checking tools version
Updated YamlDotNet from 13.1.1 to 13.7.1
Updated Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp from 4.6.0 to 4.7.0
Updated AngleSharp from 1.0.6 to 1.0.7
Added new languages: Bengalian, Belarussian, and Macedonian
Updated translations
Thrive 0.6.4 Release Candidate now Available
We had a beta build last week, and quite expectedly it had a bunch of problems. We’ve spent the last week fixing as many of them as possible. Right now there shouldn’t be any blocker issues on releasing 0.6.4 and as such it is scheduled for next week. For now there is a public test build to just to make sure that the release will be good enough quality as it is always the case that random people find bugs we developers have not seen at all.
The new test build is available as the beta version through Steam (selectable in the Steam client game properties). It has various improvements over the previous public beta test. Here's a short list of the most major things:
New feature: mucilage can be selected for vacuole storage specialization
Reimplemented early multicellular, game should be playable again all the way through the prototypes
Buffed base movement, especially for larger cells, set slightly even higher microbe physics damping
Massively buffed mucilage jet speed
Reimplemented organelle render order to get things to look more like they should, especially when engulfing
Reimplemented pulling cilia so that it no longer crashes the game, it's just a bit unbalanced
Various colony damage and engulfing fixes
Fixed saving and loading with cell colonies
Fixed pilus damage not working at all
Fixed engulf size not re-applying after cell grew or was edited
Fixed multiple engulfing related bugs (still at least one bug left with indigestible things getting stuck inside)
Fixed engulf progress indicator going up to 200% also fixed "devoured" text not appearing
Fixed a crash with certain entity types existing and not having expected materials
Fixed immediate crash when going to the ice shelf patch
Fixed various other bugs and crashes
Added submodule info to packaged source code
Updated translations
Please note that this build has at least one pretty serious bug: indigestible cells are not ejected from engulfers. If you as a player get engulfed by something that can’t digest you, that may softlock the game. But the game should no longer crash at all, and early multicellular (as well as the later prototypes) is now functional again. There will hopefully still be a rotation rate rebalance completed next week before the full 0.6.4 release.
Unless some very big new bugs are uncovered in the next few days, you'll be seeing Thrive 0.6.4 arriving next week, finally. After that release we hope to resume making more regular releases (every 2-3 months or so). Though please expect a 0.6.4.1 patch if a bunch of newly discovered issues pop up once 0.6.4 is out as the default game version.
Thrive 0.6.4 Public Beta Testing
It has been quite a while since the last update to Thrive. The reason why is that we've been hard at work switching the game to a new physics engine and converting all of the gameplay code to an ECS architecture. This improves the game performance significantly, which has been a long standing complaint that we are addressing with these very drastic measures. The game code refactoring has been a huge amount of work but hopefully the game performance gains (and future performance gains that these changes allow but didn't make it into this release) make the delay in new feature development worth it in the end. The game still has unconverted parts and many smaller issues, but the microbe stage is now mostly playable.
In order to ensure we do not release a really broken version we have made a public test build of 0.6.4. This is available as the "beta" version through Steam (can be selected in the game properties in the Steam client). We would greatly appreciate any and all reports of crashes, unusual behavior, and other bugs you might discover. Please give us instructions on how you managed to break something! As that will be very crucial in cutting down on the time it takes to fix any of the found problems. Please note that if you reach the early multicellular editor and exit it, it is totally expected that the game will crash as that is the still unconverted part of the game.
If there aren't too many major problems found, 0.6.4 will release next week, with likely a patch 0.6.4.1 following it before the Christmas holidays. If things don't go well it might still be multiple weeks until 0.6.4, but we are working very hard to get a new version of Thrive out before the end of the year. We have a dedicated thread for keeping track of all of the reported problems on our community forums, where we will be much more likely to notice any reports about issues than elsewhere: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/beta-testing-of-thrive-0-6-4/7027
Devblog #38: To the future and back
Glimpse the future of your species in the latest release of Thrive! Now including prototype versions of all planned stages going all the way to the very end of the game. For the first time ever, your species can now experience the entire journey from single cell to galactic empire, and at the very end, return once again to where it all began. All this and more, in the release of Thrive 0.6.3.
Our developers have worked hard to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. We’ve outlined the major changes in this devblog, but you can see the patch notes at the end for a full list of features and bug fixes.
A glimpse of the future
With the release of all prototypes, the player can now reach the very end of the game, so long as they don’t mind a bare-bones experience of course! These skeletal stages serve as a pale representation of the future to come, allowing players to familiarize themselves with what is in store.
Upon reaching the macroscopic stage, you will be greeted with a world of rocks and trees. Here you may familiarize yourself with interacting with a simulacrum of what could someday be a real living environment, destroying trees and wielding tools to eventually build yourself a center of society.
With the advent of society, for now the only society to ever come about in this land beyond time, you will acquaint yourself with the march of progress through technological advancement. The available technology largely consists of no more than the means of producing rockets to push ever forward in this future.
With rockets at your disposal, the final frontier can now be grasped. A single world, your own, and the sun it orbits is all you can currently reach.
At this point, you are sure to quickly master the available technology and build incredible structures, but none so important as the ascension gate. A point of egress from the space stage, bringing you to ascension.
Entering the gate grants you god-like powers that allow you to bend all of reality to your will. From this point on the universe has been conquered, and now exists for you to do with as you please. This is the end of the line, and the final stage of the game. But perhaps you want to try again?
Should you tire of this potential future, you can choose to return to the very beginning with a small gift in tow!
A stable cellular Experience
A revision of our compression library to a previous version should result in significantly less save errors in the microbe stage, ensuring that your files are safer than before. And in the event you still encounter any save errors,you will now be prompted with how to provide us with the errorlog, to make it easier to report such issues. In addition, Fossilization will now tell you if there was an error saving a species so you know to try again.
Other Notable Changes
Added a new toxin damage sound (instead of reusing the emit sound)
Improved the placeholder tree and rocket graphics for the prototypes
Added a system for window panels to reorder this makes draggable windows go on top of other such windows when they are moved around or opened
Added a new feature to the museum screen to delete fossils
Added miscellaneous fun screen filter shaders
Looking Ahead
This update was largely focused with wrapping up the prototype stages, so while it may not have been very substantial for the more complete parts of the game, it is now ensured that the next release will be entirely centered around continued development of the microbe stage.
Want to hear more? Come join us in our upcoming developer Thrivestream to ask us whatever you like, and celebrate the new release:
Full Patch Notes
Added the remaining prototype stages: industrial, space, and ascension. It is now possible to play through the skeleton of the game all the way from microbe to ascension, though the later prototypes have bare minimum content to show off the ideas of the stages.
Downgraded our compression library (SharpZipLib) to 1.3.3 which should resolve the intermittent save errors that have been happening the past few months
Added a new toxin damage sound (instead of reusing the emit sound)
Improved the placeholder tree and rocket graphics for the prototypes
Save error dialog now explicitly tells to give us the JSON debug log as without it debugging a save failure is basically impossible in most cases
Added a system for window panels to reorder this makes draggable windows go on top of other such windows when they are moved around or opened
Added a new feature to the museum screen to delete fossils
Fossil saving failure will now show an error popup
Added miscellaneous fun screen filter shaders
Added an unknown key icon
Fixed game not fading out before playing the microbe intro video
Fixed 3 microbe backgrounds having non-repeating edges
Fixed current patch biodiversity fill always checking potential species to split from in a specified order (the order is now random)
Fixed some usages of random number generation having their upper limits be off by one
Fixed player accidentally becoming awakened if entering macroscopic while already having placed neurons
Fixed the ESC key icon not being used (instead the unknown key fallback was used before)
Fixed sometimes the close X being invisible on our custom windows
Fixed the Thrive logo being blurry in the main menu and the credits
Options menu now lazily loads available language list
Switched a BOM check around to make dependabot tool updates work
Automatic checks now disallow gltf files as they are always worse than .glb files
Updated the style_guide on how to add words to dictionary to avoid typo warnings
Cleaned up some remaining references to ruby in the repo
Fixed a typo in CONTRIBUTING.md file
Updated AngleSharp library to 1.0.4
Updated a code checking library we use
Added support for Godot GUI tab names to be translated
Updated translations
Release candidate for 0.6.3 available now
0.6.3 is releasing in a bit over a week so here's a surprise early release candidate test build due to midsummer. The upcoming release adds all of the remaining prototypes for game stages that weren't ready in time for the previous release. Besides those there are a bunch of small fixes and feature improvements for the microbe stage and general GUI parts.
You can play the RC now by switching to the beta version on Steam (right click on Thrive to access properties).
You can leave feedback in the comments below or on our forums: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-6-3-release-candidate-testing/6619
Devblog #37: Background Technology Unlocked
Take your species further than ever before with the newly optimized cellular stages that will smoothly take you sailing into our latest advancements in the prototype stages! No longer are the creatures of Thrive strictly confined to the underwater realm, as now they can move onto the frontiers of land, where civilization will soon be born. Bear in mind of course, that these later stages are raw prototypes and are not indicative of the final rendition.
Our developers have worked hard to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. We’ve outlined the major changes in this devblog, but you can see the patch notes at the end of this post for a full list of features and bug fixes.
Prototypes going further than ever before.
We previously developed a bare bones macroscopic prototype, but now we have gone further still with the development of the awakening, societal, and industrial stages.
In the awakening stage, the player has developed a central nervous system, or brain, that allows them to think and ponder. At this point they will be able to begin making tools and structures.
Once a societal center is built, the player will be able to form a proper society, and enter the stage in question! In the society stage, the player will no longer be in firm control of any individual; Instead guiding the civilization as a whole to eventually reach the stars. The player will need to construct buildings and manage their technological progress to develop industrial applications to broaden their influence.
Once rocketry is discovered, the civilization will be in the space era, and begin to reach ever further into the great void beyond. For now though, this will remain unfeasible.
Rich Backgrounds
Booting up Thrive, you’ll be greeted with a fresh coat of paint in the main menu! Backgrounds have been expanded to greet you with a lively depiction of different environments that promise a bright future. What do you envision when you see these environments? Who will come to inhabit them?
Other Notable Changes
The membrane generation algorithm is now massively faster, and only results in slightly visually different membranes.
The editor compound balance now shows the situation at ATP equilibrium, instead of assuming all processes always run at maximum speed.
Compound cloud visuals have been slightly improved with a higher resolution noise layer.
Microbes now spawn with initial compounds that are proportional to their compound usage rather than fixed values.
Added HUD messages that notify the player about current events. (Such as when the editor can be entered)
Added a proper icon for the cilia pull upgrade to replace the placeholder one.
Added 2 new multicellular prototype organelles; Axon and myofibril, for future use.
You can read the entire list of changes at the end of this post.
Looking Ahead
This update cycle was mostly focused on the further development of our prototype stages. With only the space stage remaining to be prototyped, we are sure to have a complete skeleton for the game soon enough! With the prototypes out of the way, we will be able to recenter our attention to the game proper.
Want to hear more? Come join us in our upcoming developer Thrivestream to ask us whatever you like, and celebrate the new release:
Patch Notes
New further prototypes: going on land is now implemented, becoming aware and awakened has been added, added basic crafting, inventory and resource gathering, placing buildings and founding a settlement is now possible, accumulating resources and placing buildings is now possible in the society stage, and finally researching a new technology and placing a factory allows moving to the industrial stage. The industrial stage prototype is where the current prototype work ended up at. That stage has just a placeholder graphic for a city.
Added entirely new 3D scenes to be backgrounds for the main menu, some of these are a bit performance intensive and can be disabled in the options
The membrane generation algorithm is now massively faster, and only results in slightly visually different membranes
Tweaked membrane generation to be tighter around organelles to more closely match the physics, and made multihex organelles send all of their positions to the membrane to fix large organelles in certain cases poking outside the membrane
The editor compound balance now shows the situation at ATP equilibrium, instead of assuming all processes run at maximum speed always
Compound cloud visuals have been slightly improved with a higher resolution noise layer
Separation between divided cells and colonies is now much better
Tweaked the visuals of button focus highlights, along with a few other element types
Microbes now spawn with initial compounds that are proportional to their compound usage (instead of fixed values)
Added late multicellular stage underwater panoramic background
When the player now reproduces the game will try to keep the entity count under control by despawning existing entities if there are too many (player daughter cells are prioritized if they make up a large fraction of the total entity limit)
Cells in colonies are now counted in entity limit (except the player colony as the player is not part of the entity limit)
Added HUD messages that show to report various things to the player, for example if the player can't engulf something the reason is now shown with this kind of message
Colony members that can engulf can now enter engulf mode even if the player cell cannot engulf
All chemoreceptors in a cell colony now function instead of only the lead cell's chemoreceptors working
The spawn algorithm for filling the area around the player now only spawns up to 80% of the entity limit to allow the sector spawning logic more chances to work
There's now a warning icon on the editor finish button if ATP is negative or there's an inprogress action that needs to be finished before exiting the editor
Chunks and projectiles are now shown in the mouse hover panel (inspector)
Added music tracks for the existing prototypes and upcoming ones, they can already be listened to in the art gallery
The day/night cycle light level in the editor now defaults to current value to match the gameplay time of day
Light levels now smoothly change in the editor when switching the time of day
Organelle upgrade GUI now shows adjusted MP costs correctly, instead of just always showing the absolute costs
Added a proper icon for the cilia pull upgrade to replace the placeholder one
Iron is now shown in the patch compounds graphs
Added 2 new multicellular prototype organelles: axon and myofibril (for future use)
Auto-evo prediction being calculated now shows a waiting icon
Entering the prototypes is now prevented with a controller as the prototypes don't have any focus on controller usability
Preview cells in the editor now don't create collision shapes which makes game performance better in the editor
Patch map display now starts off centered on the current patch instead of always panning to it when opening
Patch map tooltip, for how to move it, now takes a few more seconds to appear in order to be less annoying
New game setup menu is now more clear what the buttons do (back is no longer visible while in advanced view)
Improved the process speed indicator icon in the process panel
Microbe movement tutorial now has extra smoothing in how the movement direction prompts rotate
Added a new debug panel showing player current coordinates and mouse cursor world position
More elements in the Thriveopedia now react to language change
Fixed seafloor patch background image artifact (this had been a problem for years)
Fixed a visible seam in cell wall textures that was caused by the membrane generation code
Fixed a bug introduced in previous release where organelle tooltip process numbers did not react to patch change (photosynthetic organelles were the visible place where the issue was visible)
Fixed new game menu not wrapping text which could cause long translations to push settings sliders offscreen
Fixed the current resolution display in the options menu not always updating when toggling fullscreen mode
Fixed popup window close buttons not having a visual style for the focused state, which caused it to appear like no GUI element was focused in a popup when the close button was focused
Fixed the membrane disappearing for really thin and long cells
Fixed engulfed tutorial appearing even when the player could not be ingested
Fixed crashing when changing language after having visited the art gallery screen
Fixed editor tab buttons being too wide and overlapping the light level bar
Fixed temperature "compound" being incorrectly shown in the patch compound statistics graph
Fixed uneven main menu buttons with long translation texts, all buttons now stretch to the same width when one translation doesn't fit
Switched world settings text to use safe string format to ensure it can't crash the game due to translation mistakes
Removed classic patch map option as it had bugs specific to it and it was not going to get anyone to maintain that code to be compatible with new features
Reworked our custom popup window handling, organelle popup menu now has animations for opening and closing
Microbe digestion code now only runs 30 times per second to use a bit less performance
Removed saving of usefulCompounds in a compound bag as that data can be regenerated very easily and it increased save sizes unnecessarily
Our input system now throws an exception when registering a duplicate listener object, this will help in developing the game by catching that mistake much sooner
Improved the features of our GUI focus grab system
Improved the usage and internal features of our custom tooltip system
Refactored the species details panel and fossilization dialog internally to be more reusable
Simplified our game entering code to call the same function from more places
Improved our code settings class to prevent some potential mistakes
Added a safety check against an unimplemented feature in our save data loader
Wrote a document describing our saving system
Removed some old files and fixed a broken link in the repo docs
Updated our used compression library SharpZipLib to 1.4.2, this required switching our GZip handling to use the C# standard version to avoid a bug that broke saves with the new library version. Warning: there's still an intermittent save loading and creation bug (see: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/issues/4156)
Updated Netanalyzers library version to 7.0.1
Updated our used JSON library to version 13.0.3
Updated YamlDotNet to 13.1.0
Updated some check tool package dependencies
Updated our code checking tools version
Updated translations
Release Candidate for 0.6.2 Available Now
Time for another pre-release testing of Thrive before 0.6.2 is released.
The most major things you will see are the new 3D main menu backgrounds (these are a bit performance intensive), as well as the continued prototypes which are now all the way to the end of society stage. There’s also been a ton of small changes, fixes and graphics tweaks.
To play the RC opt into the beta version of Thrive in the Steam client game properties (right click the game).
You can share your feedback either in the comments here or on our forums: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-6-2-release-candidate-testing/6345
We’ll try to fix the most major found problems before the full 0.6.2 release next week.
