Thrive
Updated binaries for 0.5.8.1
Patch 0.5.8.1 is out now
Of special note is that the game should now work on Windows 7 through Steam thanks to us switching the library we use for interacting with Steam. Also we have added inbuilt support for Harmony based mods for this release. There are 2 new example mods from us on the workshop showing off this feature. They are cell autopilot for letting the AI take control of moving your cell and random part challenge which is a challenge where you are given one random organelle per editor cycle and you need to try to survive.
Patch notes for this release:
- Fixed major problem with the spawn system not being able to despawn things as fast as it spawned. This should give a major improvement to later game performance
- Improved game object processing speed and added some multithreaded processing to them
- Fixed crashing in text formatting when using our localized text class to guard against bad translations
- Fixed incorrect translation bbcode being able to crash the game
- Updated to Godot 3.4.4
- Switched to a different Steam client library to make the Steam build work on Windows 7
- New mod loader improvements to have inbuilt Harmony support
- Fixed enemy spawn cheat not making the spawned cells despawn
- Fixed auto-evo using energy balance instead of consumption when calculating populations
- Reduced flagellum energy cost to 4
- Fixed unintended cannibalism when player becomes multicellular
- Fixed an issue with the player species not spawning in multicellular
- Fixed dead cells being able to be added to a colony causing issues
- Fixed bacteria group spawns spawning things that immediately despawn
- Added a new more detailed metrics panel (default key is shift+F3) to be able to see game performance in more detail
- Microbe editor now shows the total storage of a cell
- Added a new microbe stage ambiance track
- The options menu now shows the resolution the game renders at
- Main menu music now fades out when starting a new game instead of cutting out immediately
- Fixed patch map nodes reacting to the scroll wheel
- Partially fixed NaN compound storage amounts by resetting them to 0
- Fixed incorrect "{0}" shown in save upgrade fail message
- Fixed our custom colour picker leaking Godot objects
- Simplified logic slightly in name permutation generation
- Romanian language is now available in the game
- Updated translations
Devblog #32: Making History
[previewyoutube="7ygUoOw5kJo;full"]
If you want a summary of what this version brings, here are the full patch notes for this release.
The Multicellular Stage Prototype
Included in 0.5.8 is the exciting prototype for the next stage of Thrive; Multicellular! Once you have acquired the nucleus and binding agents, you will be prompted with the option to proceed to the next stage should you have a per-requisite number of cells in an active colony at the time. Clicking this button will bring you to the multicellular editor where you will be able to design your newly multicellular organism! (Note that the multicellular stage cannot be entered in free-build mode.)
When you initially enter the editor, your organism will only consist of your initial cell. You can quickly change this by placing more of this type, or duplicating it to create an entirely new class of cell. At any time you can edit your cell types in the familiar microbe editor to change their functions and purpose.
There is only one reproductive method available in the prototype, which is Budding. When you exit the editor, you will split off from your parent as a single cell, but will gradually grow other cells as you acquire the appropriate resources. Once fully grown, you only need to acquire a few more resources so that you can create a budding cell of your own, and thus repeat the cycle.
We hope that everyone enjoys this exciting new feature, but remember; It is a prototype, and is far from a polished product. Merely a glimpse into the future of Thrive through the murky lenses of development. We will remain focused on wrapping up our plans for the microbe stage before we can focus on developing the multicellular stage proper.
New Signaling Agents Part
With signaling agents, the player is now able to communicate with allied cells. This grants a new angle of control that creative players will undoubtedly delight in.
Accessed by holding down the V key, the signal menu presents the player with 4 basic commands.These commands remain in effect until the player selects the “No Command” option to disable them.
“Follow Me” orders nearby cells to accompany the player.
“Move To Me” prompts nearby cells to approach the player’s position.
“Become Aggressive” alters the behavior of nearby allies so that they become much more likely to attack other cells.
“Flee” encourages allies to disengage and move out of danger.
While simple, these commands can be used for many various effective strategies previously impossible to the player, such as pincer maneuvers when hunting particularly dangerous prey, or simply calling nearby cells to bind to.
Misc. changes
- Colony members now affect how fast a colony can move, their mass now has a slowing effect but their flagella will help the colony move
- Increased compound cloud brightness in brighter biomes to make them much easier to see
- AI now knows how to use the chemoreceptor
- Generated membranes are now cached to reduce lag spikes also slightly made the membrane generation algorithm faster as well
- Cell corpse chunks are now added to be counted in entity limit which seems to help a bit with performance
- Increased entity limit considering the recent performance improvements. It’s also no longer save file specific so older saves will also use the new limit now
- Taking damage due to being out of ATP now has a specific sound for it
- Auto-evo now takes environmental compound availability into account when calculating fitness
- Balance tweaks, includes adjustments to organelle costs
- AI will now stop moving if it is out of ATP and wait to recharge
- Brought back the accidentally deleted win screen background
- Binding mode sound now fades in and out better
- Chemoreceptor colour is now automatically selected to match the compound colour in the modify GUI
- Extinction music now starts earlier to sync up more dramatically with the appearing extinction text
- Tweaked the wording of most of the tutorials
- Made the tutorial highlight background darker to make tutorials pointing to GUI elements more obvious
- Added a command line flag (to be used with a new launcher version) that disables all videos as one player had a problem with the intro video crashing their game
- Disabled the X button on the organelle modify popup as that seemed a bit too error-prone to a player
- Saving will now detect if the save name is too long or invalid and give an error instead of silently failing to write the save to disk
- Charts will no longer show “x” or “y” incorrectly when they weren’t supposed to
- Added some code to the binding process that tries to detect disposed cells earlier, hopefully improves sometimes buggy binding
- Implemented custom logic to workaround Godot colour picker pick from game window having a (potentially crashing) bug
- Improved theming for file dialog
- Removed duplicate phosphate icon file
- Disabled resizing the editor report tab panels as that could break the text layout
- Translations now use no line wrapping, this time unnecessary changes caused by that with Weblate disagreeing with gettext seem to be finally fixed
What’s next?
We hope to continue work on the Microbe stage, in a constant effort to wrap up it’s development in preparation for moving on. There are still a lot of big features that need to be completed before we can officially begin development on the multicellular stage, but this goal becomes ever closer as our development team expands, and rate of progress only increases in speed.
We have a Thrivestream starting in a few minutes.
0.5.8 Release Candidate now available
Progress Update 4/2/2022
0.5.8 is currently scheduled to release later this month.
Development progress this week:
- Chemoreceptor colour is now automatically selected to match the compound colour in the modify GUI
- Early multicellular prototype, which is very rough currently
- Updated translations
Some highlights from before this week that will be included in 0.5.8:
- Added new signaling agent organelle
- Increased compound cloud brightness in brighter biomes to make them much easier to see
- Tweaked the wording of most of the tutorials
- Switched chemoreceptor to use a different algorithm based on rays around the cell to find compound positions
- AI now knows how to use the chemoreceptor to find compounds
- Added some code to the binding process that tries to detect disposed cells earlier, hopefully improves sometimes buggy binding
Devblog #31: What’s that smell?
Note that if you are upgrading an old save game to this latest version, the player cell needs to first die and respawn before the chemoreceptor functions properly.
Patch notes for this release:
- Added chemoreceptor organelle which shows lines towards detected compounds. Note: old saves are compatible but the chemoreceptor won't work until you die and respawn if you loaded an older save.
- Implemented the organelle modify menu. For now only used for the chemoreceptor
- Implemented the timeline tab in the editor showing world or patch related events that have happened in the game world
- Updated to Godot 3.4.2. We are using a custom Godot build as our Breakpad code was not merged yet.
- Reduced max entity count a lot again. This should make it so that extremely low performance of the game doesn't happen anymore. We are still investigating the performance issues and will increase the game entity counts again once we have addressed the part of the game that is actually too slow.
- Added a crash dumping system back to the game. Combined with the latest launcher version this allows reporting the crashes to us developers to view on ThriveDevCenter Note that the crash reporting is not implemented for mac, yet.
- Fixed the choppy intro video playback in the previous release caused by Godot removing optimized webm playback on Windows
- Fixed flagella animations not working after update to Godot 3.4
- The report tab of the editor now has a patch selector drop down that allows changing patches on that screen to easily view the graphs for other patches
- Player species is now always printed first in auto-evo results and other species are in alphabetical order
- Added a button on graphs to show the graph in bigger size to more easily see what the graph shows
- Adjusted microbe movement sound
- Added a separate ice damage sound instead of using the general damage sound for them
- Double clicking a save now loads it or asks to overwrite it if double clicked in the create save menu
- A few more tutorials are now forced (the close button for them has been disabled)
- Cell speed calculation has been improved regarding flagella that don't point backwards. Now speed is calculated along the direction the player's cell can move the fastest in, which is not necessarily forwards.
- Movement ATP drain was also updated with the above change, and now it also only considers flagella that can push in the maximum movement force direction. So no longer do forward facing flagella show up in editor as costing ATP when in fact they can't operate at the same time as backwards facing flagella.
- Added scientific flavour text for the pilus
- Disabled multithreaded rendering option which seemed to cause rare issues while not helping at all in normal use
- Improved look and tooltip positioning for the editor sliders
- Added a sound effect for when cells collide hard enough
- Increased the fade duration when changing music tracks
- Remade the trash icon as higher resolution and added a pressed state for the trash buttons
- Graphs now group extinct species separately
- Tweaked the visuals of the toxin particle effect
- Tweaked the patch name display fade animation
- Reduced small iron chunk mass so that they are easier to push around than the big chunks
- Fixed external effects on extinct species causing errors
- Fixed graphs using 32-bit integers to hold data, which caused the graphs to not display correctly when species populations got too high
- Fixed tutorial boxes being on top of the pause menu in terms of mouse clicks
- Fixed dialog resizing sometimes expanding them in the wrong direction
- Fixed pause menu, win and lose screens not resizing when the game window is resized
- Fixed a bug in our hybrid 3D audio player class not actually behaving spatially
- Fixed the widths of a few organelle tooltip titles
- Fixed refresh button in mod manager sometimes causing duplicate mod entries to appear
- Fixed really long save names causing GUI layout problems by enabling text wrapping for them
- Fixed pressing ESC in the game over load menu not closing the right thing
- Fixed folders ending in ".thrivesave" being detected as save files and causing problems
- Fixed the randomize species name button not being the same height as the text box it was next to
- Fixed some scenes (that are intended to be used like this) not being able to be started directly from the Godot editor due to resource loading order
- Disabled mouse wheel scroll on colour picker bars as they are usually within a scroll container causing issues depending on mouse positioning when scrolling
- Auto-evo prediction runs are now cancelled earlier to try to avoid error prints regarding them failing due to the player editing their species again before the run finished
- Reduced the volume of microbe-theme-7 to be more inline with other music
- Slight source code cleanup by moving the food source classes to the namespace they should have been in
- Updated our CI checking tools
- Improvements to our build scripts
- Updated translations
Release Candidate for 0.5.7 out now
We are releasing this test build to catch the most glaring errors before 0.5.7 is released. If you find any new bugs or new features that aren't working please let us know, either in the comments or on our forums in this thread. If you experience any crashes the launcher should give you the option to report them to us, if it does please send us your reports.
If there aren't showstopper bugs that we can't fix in time, 0.5.7 will release in one week. The major new features are the new crash reporting system, timeline tab and other editor GUI improvements, as well as some adjustments to address low performance.