Thrive 0.8.0 is releasing in one week so the usual public test builds are here. It hasnt been too long since 0.7.1 but we are squeezing one more release into this year so there isnt much time left to make that goal. The major goal of this release was to complete all of the remaining 0.7.x roadmap items, which we have managed to do as is evident from being able to call this release 0.8.0. In addition to the general polishing work of the editor and microbe stage heres a few highlights: improved dynamic compounds, tweaked microbe visuals, added new editor features like controlling organelle split order and organelle adding suggestion. In addition to the new features weve fixed a ton of bugs and improved the AI code to better use recently added features. Also as a major feature the experimental Mac support is back! This means that for the first time in a year people on macOS can play the latest version of Thrive. This isnt yet a fully supported platform for us and as a result this build is not part of the Steam version but can be downloaded separately if someone on Mac is wanting to give it a go. Hopefully we can make the Mac version a fully supported platform next year. See here for a wishlist goal weve had for a long time for people to show support for wanting to Thrive fully support Mac. So if you are on a Mac and would like to see Thrive there, please make sure you've wishlisted Thrive and set your platform preference in the Steam options correctly to be counted. To access the beta, right click Thrive in the Steam client and in the properties select "beta" as the active beta version. As usual please post any feedback you have related to this build in the dedicated feedback thread or the comments below. We are especially interested in any game breaking bugs or regressions that have accidentally slipped in. We hope to correct as many of the found problems before the full 0.8.0 release as possible.

[ 2024-12-14 13:07:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Brace yourselves for another feature-packed update: 0.7.1 is here! Along with enhancements to the various reports available to the player in the editor, a lot of visual improvements to our cells, backgrounds, icons, and textures are here. Furthermore, oxygen is now dynamically simulated, being introduced by photosynthetic life forms on your planet. This has an immense effect on gameplay and progression throughout the Microbe Stage. Your organism, which now starts its journey on an anoxygenic world, must now strategically evolve its metabolism around the pace at which oxygen is introduced to your atmosphere. A significant chapter in Thrives development has begun the introduction of a changing, scientifically accurate world that evolves with the life on your planet!

Thrive 0.7.1

[previewyoutube=m7g-_lwM29k;full][/previewyoutube] Read on for more details, or just jump in the latest version and play it.

Food Chain Tab, Auto-Evo Report, Thriveopedia Revamp

Consistent with the theme of our roadmap items for version 0.7.x, significant work has been put into reworking and adding upon our auto-evo reports. Players will now have a better understanding of what exactly is going on in the world they inhabit. Among the most notable additions is a long requested feature: the Food Chain Tab! Players will now have a chart of the food web within a patch, letting them know the distribution of organisms across different trophic levels. You will be able to see what metabolisms each organism utilizes, the primary producers in an environment, the top predators in an ecosystem, and overall predator-prey relationships.
Various other important changes have also been made to make information more accessible. The auto-evo tab is now much more visual, allowing players to know exactly what organism is being referred to, their population, and other notable characteristics important to performance.
Finally, the Thriveopedia has also been expanded, bringing much more relevant information from the developer wiki into the game. This will allow players to have an in-game reference regarding important mechanics, parts, and strategies. More work has been done on information accessibility as well for example, the microbe editor has additional functionalities, allowing the player to see net production at rest and at maximum movement, their cellular processes, and their energy balances with or without specific metabolisms. We hope that players now have much more relevant information, and are now better able to understand exactly what is happening.

3D Membranes, Backgrounds, Bloom, and More

With improved backgrounds, graphic effects, and texture reworks, this update continues to bring significant improvements to Thrives visuals! First, our membranes are now fully 3D, making cells look more realistic. Cells are now represented with membranes that have height creating a visually-pleasing appearance of depth and shape. A different normal map has also been applied to our membranes, making their texture stick out more and creating a realistic look to our cells. Their opacity has also been altered slightly, which helps to make it so that cells look distinct. Second, our backgrounds are much more dynamic, with the introduction of mobile background elements like bubbles, and a new optional distortion effect. Rather than a simple parallax display, layers which contained elements that should move around a bit have some independent motion. A toggleable distortion shader (accessible in the Graphics option menu) is also applied to the layers below, resulting in distortion similar to that of light reflecting through fluid. Furthermore, a bloom effect is now available, making colors pop and, combined with the background, creating a feeling of depth in a previously flat visual landscape. Like the distortion backgrounds, bloom can be turned on and off, though performance should not be significantly affected on most PCs. More subtle work has also continued in increasing visual richness. New ice chunks have been introduced, resulting in more variety in frozen ocean patches. Some work on the assets of the later stage prototypes, such as the Societal and Space Stages, has also been completed. We would like to note that several visual improvements, such as those to the membranes, backgrounds, textures, and bloom, are going to see more work. The distorted background will likely eventually be enabled by default. If you have feedback after playing the update, please share it with us in the comments below or on either our forums or our Discord!
Bloom, enhanced backgrounds, and 3D membranes resulting in a more polished look for the Microbe Stage.

Oxygenation Events

After many years of conceptualization and development, a highly requested feature oxygenation has finally been implemented! Similar to Earths history, players will now initially spawn in a world without oxygen. However, as photosynthesis emerges, oxygen will be slowly produced by the lifeforms on your planet either from other cells, or your own. Tweaks to existing metabolisms, such as iron respiration, have been implemented to provide options for the player. A new anoxygenic metabolism has also been introduced in the form of clostridial fermentation, represented by the Hydrogenase part. With time, oxygen will increase to the point of allowing more powerful, aerobic forms of respiration to form, and ultimately, more complex life. In other words, the Great Oxygenation Event can now be simulated.
A picture of the atmospheric auto-evo report tab, indicating changing oxygen levels in light blue. The dark blue line represents carbon dioxide levels, which also dynamically changes based on the organisms present within a patch. Dynamic oxygenation represents the first of a string of new features which will culminate in a fully dynamic world that changes from generation to generation. These updates will likely require a lot of fine-tuning and balancing to get just right, so feedback is always appreciated. A more dynamic simulation of the environment is available as an experimental feature (needs to be enabled when starting a new game), though the experimental version is less balanced.

Additional Features

• Flagellum length can now be modified: longer flagellum length results in faster speed but use more ATP, while shorter flagellum results in slightly slower speed but uses less energy.
• Two new patch-specific themes have been added, one for ice shelves, and one for tidepools.
• An improved wiggle animation for cells has been introduced, making membranes look more dynamic.
• Balancing and bug fixes related to engulfment and the strength of currents generated from cilia while engulfing.
• Reworks of certain compound icons, such as those for Nitrogen. And many more icons have been redone as SVG images.
• Improvements to rendering of macroscopic organisms, allowing smoother high-poly meshes with minimal performance impact
• And many more changes

A full list of changes is at the end of this post.

Art Contest Winners

After a long time coming, we have hosted our first Thrive art contest in years on both our forums and discord. We had some amazing submissions, and we are proud to show off the winners below!

First place: Zorkman

All stories have to begin somewhere, and ours did so an unfathomable amount of generations ago when we first peeked beyond the waters surface. Enarosat Xday, renowned biologist and archaeologist from the Avoreth Academy of Natural Sciences The runner ups are highlighted on our website at: https://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/devblog-44-oxygenating/

Whats Next

Most items under section 0.7.x have been knocked off the roadmap through this update, a great sign of progress for the completion of the Microbe Stage. Some items remain however, so it is likely that our next update will be named 0.8, and might contain some features listed under the next phase of Thrives development. Development focus will likely switch towards fleshing out the world the player lives in, particularly related to dynamic environments and compounds. Again, such a feature will likely require thorough balancing to get just right, so it could be a very iterative process. Remember to join us for our developer Thrivestream that's starting very soon, where we will answer questions asked by you, the community, and cover the results of our latest community art competition! You can leave feedback in the comments below or visit our feedback thread on the community forums to give us your impressions on the release. [previewyoutube=96KldIqwl-o;full][/previewyoutube]

Full Patch Notes

• The world now starts off with no oxygen and photosynthesis, once evolved, will add oxygen to the world. This effectively locks many organelles that require oxygen during the early game.
• Created a new much more graphical auto-evo report screen
• Implemented the food chain tab in the editor
• Added 3D membranes for microbes
• Improved the Thriveopedia with various new pages
• Converted the old help menu to open a relevant Thriveopedia page with links to important pages
• Upgraded to Godot 4.3
• Added a microbe background distortion shader effect that can be enabled in the options (this may become the default in the future)
• Added an experimental bloom effect that can be enabled
• Added mesh subdivision for the convolution surfaces to make them look better
• Metabolosomes are now locked until reaching a patch with oxygen
• Added hydrogenase as an early game glucose to ATP converting organelle
• Switched default toxin type to cytotoxin and modified the toxin creation process to not always require oxygen
• Renamed oxytoxy to just toxin in general toxin contexts where other toxin types are also used
• Iron respiration no longer requires oxygen to keep it viable in the vents biome
• Added an upgrade for flagellum for picking between long and short variants that have different energy cost and speed
• Added a new music track for the tidepool biome
• Added a new music track for the ice shelf biome
• Buffed engulfing resource gain
• Increased engulf size requirement for big phosphate chunks
• Added multiple new ice chunk types for more variety
• Made AI wait behaviour not trigger as much when out of just one compound type to reduce unnecessary AI sessility
• Added resource limiting mode for the ATP bar to view what would happen if some resource was missing from the cell storage
• Increased opacity of microbe membranes
• Added a new bump map for the microbe membranes
• Changed membrane bump map UVs to not distort with the membrane animation
• Added new radio and check button icons as SVG images
• Added one new microbe loading screen image
• Added type icons for compound and environment panels
• ATP balance bar tooltips now show which compounds are required to produce that amount of ATP
• Tweaked editor GUI to be closer to what it was before the Godot 4 update
• Abbreviated per second as just "s" in chemical equation speeds
• Updated the space and industrial stage prototype visuals
• Reduced pulling cilia power a bit when there are many of them
• Added an animation for when something is digested so that it shrinks to a small size instead of just visually popping out of existence
• Redid compound icons as SVG images
• Reworked patch and some UI icons as SVG files
• Created priority levels for PhotoStudio image generation to avoid important images taking minutes to load on slower computers
• Added an in-memory image cache for the PhotoStudio to speed up displaying images of the same species again
• Added a GDExtension for Thrive that will be used in the future to improve various things
• Added a compound cloud benchmark
• Added experimental dynamic compounds feature where patches dynamically change their available compound amounts based on the species that are in it
• Fixed mucocyst to work in cell colonies
• Fixed water currents not affecting chunks correctly ever since the ECS refactoring probably
• Fixed loading screen loading spinner not spinning smoothly
• Fixed Thriveopedia search not working
• Fixed a bug where the editor showed patch compounds as they were during the previous generation
• Fixed initial species compounds calculation never giving iron due to calculating only with available compounds in the default biome type
• Fixed the strain system always taking movement ATP while not moving
• Fixed used matter storage size flickering when ejecting too big objects that no longer fit in storage
• Fixed some cases where ejected cells wouldn't properly die and despawn
• Fixed saving status text not fading out properly
• Fixed image sizes in concept art gallery cards
• Fixed clicking on a miche node that is empty not clearing the info box which was pretty confusing GUI behaviour
• Reduced lag spike on selecting different patch to show details for
• Added a limit to the recent patch notes shown to ensure it doesn't try to display truly ridiculous number of notes for someone who hasn't played Thrive for years
• Fixed editor saves failing to load with a completed endosymbiosis action
• Fixed right editor panel being able to be too wide in certain translations
• Fixed auto-evo being able to remove the nucleus as a mutation
• Fixed art gallery model viewer not working correctly with 3D menu backgrounds being enabled
• Fixed "x worlds" text not being translated initially in the auto-evo exploring tool
• Hopefully fixed some engulf digestion and cells dying during it issues that caused cell chunks to spawn
• Added missing models to the art gallery model viewer
• Reimplemented debug line renderer as a GDExtension to make it much faster than before
• Refactored our compound related code to use enum values to simplify a lot of our code that needed to define special operations for various compounds
• Added code project for running small code benchmarks easily in the future
• Organelle tooltips are now dynamically generated from the organelle JSON data
• Improved our setup instructions for compiling on Linux
• Added new automatic code style checks related to post-increment
• Updated YamlDotNet from 16.0.0 to 16.1.3
• Updated Jolt Physics Engine
• Tweaked the pre-commit hook to be much shorter
• Updated code checking tools
• Improved our wiki content updating script
• Updated wiki text content
• Updated translations

[ 2024-10-26 17:39:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

The time to test 0.7.1 is here! This release was almost called 0.8.0 as most of the 0.7.x roadmap is now complete, but a few items are left. The most immediate noticeable thing in this release is that the world will start off without oxygen and only get oxygen after photosynthesis is evolved. That has required various tweaks all over the game to keep things working nicely with the new starting conditions. Theres also a ton of the usual small changes, features and bug fixes. Theres also some new microbe stage visual effects that can be enabled in the options menu. If people like these, they may become default options in the future. 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

[ 2024-10-18 12:18:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Continuing the momentum from our previous update, many new features have been added to Thrive which will enrich the player experience. Symbolizing another monumental step forward towards a complete Microbe Stage, we present to you Thrive 0.7.0! 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. Theres 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

[previewyoutube=IUXOp3PgWPM;full][/previewyoutube] 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 wed love to see what the community comes up with.

Auto-Evo Reimagined

Thrives 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 Thrives purposes since the making of this video, but this is the easiest existing introduction to the core concepts of miches. [previewyoutube=Ka4btpy9jlk;full][/previewyoutube]

Expanded Cellular Gameplay

The microbe stage has received a host of new exciting features that greatly expand on its 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

Thrives 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 doesnt 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 well cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development. [previewyoutube=dJkveuM2SUU;full][/previewyoutube] 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

[ 2024-08-31 11:28:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

The upcoming Thrive release 0.7.0 marks the end of the 0.6.x series of releases as we have completed all of the roadmap items. This marks a major milestone towards the completion of the microbe stage. As usual we are making a public test version available to make sure the release can be more polished. The most major change is a new auto-evo algorithm that should vastly improve the AI species. Theres also a ton of small new features and tweaks in the microbe stage. Finally wed like to highlight a feature made by a new contributor to the game: convolution surfaces are finally here! This means that in the macroscopic prototype theres now a skin wrapped around the metaballs which will give much more of an impression of what the end goal of the visuals for that stage of the game are. 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

[ 2024-08-24 11:34:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a quick small patch release to fix a few major issues that were resolved since the last release. The most major fix is that many more older CPUs should be able to run Thrive now. This problem was caused by a build configuration setting unintentionally targeting much newer CPU instructions than intended. 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

[ 2024-06-19 11:39:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

With the slew of backend changes from previous updates now finally done and out of the way, development was centered entirely on the development of new features for the past few months. And now, with the release of Thrive 0.6.7, we bring you the long awaited endosymbiosis feature, toxin customization, ferroplast organelle, and much more!

Thrive 0.6.7

[previewyoutube=AxKTO3iglGs;full][/previewyoutube] 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 its 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 its 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 well cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development. [previewyoutube=LWHaFapWQYE;full][/previewyoutube] 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

[ 2024-06-15 17:28:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

After a few releases thin on new features this version of Thrive has focused purely on new features. The main 3 major new features are: endosymbiosis, day/night cycle enabled by default, and toxin customization. These add much more variety to the microbe stage and hopefully make the game significantly more enjoyable. Endosymbiosis allows you to create an endosymbiont organelle from another species giving a free copy of that organelle and unlocking placing that organelle. Day/night cycle has been polished up with some new GUI features in the editor to make it easier to determine if you can survive the night and as such is now enabled by default. The toxin customization feature allows using different toxin types that have different effects for more interesting toxin gameplay. Besides the major features we also have a variety of smaller changes and bug fixes (including one fix for the game freezing during gameplay). 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

[ 2024-06-08 10:58:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Here is another very quick patch release to address one major bug that prevented playing normally. This release now fixes the patch extinction screen not being properly sized, which made using that important part of the game very difficult.

Patch Notes

• Fixed the size of the patch extinction screen
• Updated translations

[ 2024-05-13 08:21:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a quick patch release to address some of the biggest issues with the previous release. This doesn't fix every single issue report we got after 0.6.6 as many of the issues still don't have known root causes and wouldn't be easily fixable in a small amount of time. The biggest visible things are the fixed organelle models as well as fixing the size and position of many GUI elements. 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

[ 2024-05-08 13:16:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

After over a year since Godot 4 was released, Thrive has finally made the huge leap to go from Godot 3 to 4. This release is sadly thin on new features as Godot 4 is so different from 3 that it took a lot of time to go over everything that needed to be updated to work with Godot 4, as the automatic upgrade process was missing a ton of things. Also we needed to bugfix and tweak a lot of our code that relied on how Godot 3 worked which was changed in 4.
This conversion didnt 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 well 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 heres hoping that that doesnt happen. [previewyoutube=45Fy6j_gNx4;full][/previewyoutube] 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, its 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 its 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

• Theres now a native library variant that doesnt 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 Godots has all the needed features

Looking Ahead

We have recently spent quite a lot of development time working on background systems that dont 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 cant 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 well need to correct any new impactful bugs that still exist in the game. But hopefully there isnt too many of those so that theres 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 well cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development. You can watch the stream here: [previewyoutube=Vt4RvqKzr_Y;full][/previewyoutube] 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

[ 2024-04-27 17:28:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

Thrive has updated from Godot 3 to Godot 4. This engine upgrade has caused a ton of problems, but the game is now back to working well enough that a new release can be made. This is the usual early testing build before a release. The gameplay should be the same as the previous release but there are some small graphical artifacts on organelles. And there might still sadly be a game lock up problem where the game just freezes and no longer does anything at all (gameplay is frozen and GUI cant be interacted with either). If anyone sees this happen, please let us know. Hopefully this is not too prevalent of an issue that would prevent the release. 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

[ 2024-04-20 10:01:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. [previewyoutube=Hg6jv75cbgU;full][/previewyoutube] 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. Were eager to hear your thoughts on this feature, so please let us know what you think on our community forums. If you dont want to play with organelle unlocks and preferred having all parts available from the start of the game, dont 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 arent 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. Weve also analysed the games memory allocation to reduce overall memory allocations by about 75% during gameplay. Aside from any potential gains from moving to Godot 4, its unlikely well see any further performance work in the near future. Weve come a long way from the games past performance issues though.

Expanded Thriveopedia and Tutorials

Weve 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 weve filled out the organelle pages with content taken directly from our wiki. To make the Thriveopedia more visible to players, weve added hotkeys while hovering over organelles in the editor. By default, press F1 to open expanded information about an organelle in the Thriveopedia. Weve 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. Weve 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, its 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 well cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development: [previewyoutube=Rp6KNb4FTp0;full][/previewyoutube] 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

[ 2024-02-24 18:46:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

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 well make sure those problems are taken care of before the full 0.6.5 release.

[ 2024-02-17 11:30:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

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 everyones 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

[ 2023-12-16 19:02:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

For five entire months straight our developers have worked and toiled to bring about a massive rework in the functionality of Thrives 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 its 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.
[previewyoutube=TxSrcFVlqjY;full][/previewyoutube] Our developers have worked hard to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. Weve 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 thats 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 cells membrane rather than its 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 its 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. Its general stats, its processes, the customization options available to it, strategies on its 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 its raw physical damage for toxic damage. This allows its 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 cant 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 isnt 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.
• Theres 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 Thrives 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: [previewyoutube=n5NleSuXuhE;full][/previewyoutube] 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

[ 2023-12-09 18:52:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

We had a beta build last week, and quite expectedly it had a bunch of problems. Weve spent the last week fixing as many of them as possible. Right now there shouldnt 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 cant 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. If you have feedback about the new build, you can share it here: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-6-4-release-candidate-testing/7039 where we'll be able to easily see and respond to all the feedback. 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.

[ 2023-12-02 19:17:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2023-11-25 18:49:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.
[previewyoutube=V6qKN8F5I1M;full][/previewyoutube] Our developers have worked hard to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. Weve 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 dont 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: [previewyoutube=KXIqkUc4R1k;full][/previewyoutube]

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

[ 2023-07-01 17:21:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2023-06-22 11:13:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.
[previewyoutube=jRjg7QndzxE;full][/previewyoutube] Our developers have worked hard to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. Weve 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, youll 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: [previewyoutube=nhoZn6yCLQY;full][/previewyoutube]

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

[ 2023-04-29 17:40:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. Theres 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 Well try to fix the most major found problems before the full 0.6.2 release next week.

[ 2023-04-22 11:43:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Were back again with our latest tri-monthly release of Thrive! This update brings to you a long awaited feature; The further adaptation and specialization of otherwise familiar parts. That is to say, part upgrades are finally here! As of now, only one upgrade exists, which provides cilia with a brand new functionality for players to experiment with. This and more, will be elaborated upon further into the post. [previewyoutube=tpatXf9YkyE;full][/previewyoutube] Our developers have worked hard to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. Weve outlined the major changes in this devblog, but you can see the patch notes for a full list of features and bug fixes at the end of this post.

Part Upgrades

With the introduction of part upgrades, individual parts of the cell can now be customized to introduce new and innovative functionality. This allows players to further adapt to a playstyle of their choice in increasingly deep and interesting ways! Contrary to what the name implies, the upgrades system will rarely if ever introduce a purely positive effect. Every change has its tradeoffs As of now, only one upgrade has been implemented; The new pulling cilia variant augments your engulfing ability by pulling in prey from further away. The more upgraded cilia you have, the stronger the pull!

Performance Benchmark Test

A new tool has been developed to test the limits of a players device. This benchmarks test puts your PC through a gauntlet of performance-intensive situations and records the results for you to consider. Notice anything odd about the results? Let us know!

Other Notable Changes

• Patch notes are now shown in the main menu first time when playing a new Thrive version (starting the first update after 0.6.1, i.e. 0.6.2)
• Added buttons in main menu and the pause menu to open the link for reporting bugs
• Added new auto-evo exploring tool features (exporting data, running multiple worlds in a row + others)
• Evolutionary tree now works for freebuild games started with a fossil
• Added day/night cycle tutorial
• It is now possible to rebind and see controller buttons in the options menu

Looking Ahead

With a rise in performance issues and complaints from players, the next update is looking to be performance-focused with much of our effort going into optimization of Thrive. Unfortunately this means that it may not bring anything significant to the gameplay table. Theres still a few features that didnt quite make it into this release potentially to be followed through for the next, such as part unlocks. With functionality for upgrades added into the game, you may also expect more interesting options for present parts to become available! Want to hear more? Come join us in our upcoming developer Thrivestream to ask us whatever you like, and celebrate the new release: [previewyoutube=tbD3jbpMZNY;full][/previewyoutube]

Full Patch Notes

• Cilia now has an upgrade to make it pull in nearby objects, which is useful for predation
• Added our website news feed to the main menu
• Patch notes are now shown in the main menu first time when playing a new Thrive version
• All patch notes can be accessed from the options menu
• Added a new movement mode (screen relative) that can be used for keyboard input (it is the default mode for controller input)
• Movement tutorial now works with a controller but has a warning that controller support is not fully done and is buggy
• Added a microbe benchmark tool for more easily seeing what the game performance is on different hardware or testing changes that are meant to improve the game performance
• Added new auto-evo exploring tool features (exporting data, running multiple worlds in a row + others)
• Added day/night cycle tutorial
• Added buttons in main menu and the pause menu to open the link for reporting bugs
• Improved dynamic MP calculation to better handle some cases, especially the new general organelle upgrades system
• The resource and health bars now show up to 3 numbers before switching to "k" suffix notation. This fixes a problem where ATP amount could overflow the box reserved for it
• Microbe stats are now updated when doing move or upgrade actions this will make the numbers more accurately represent the current state of the edited microbe
• The evolutionary tree is now in the game when playing freebuild (doesn't work in older saves)
• GUI button focus visuals where they look bad should now be fixed
• It is now possible to rebind and see controller buttons in the options menu (note to get default controller keybindings you, the input options needs to be reset to get them to appear)
• Added controller button icons from Xelu
• Evolutionary tree now works for freebuild games started with a fossil
• Process panel now keeps working even when the player is ready to enter the editor
• Auto-evo exploring tool now shows the total simulation run time
• Much more of the game GUI is now usable with a controller or the keyboard
• Implemented controller navigation of tabbed GUI interfaces
• Welcome tutorial message now focuses the start thriving button by default
• Fixed a bug with options menu thinking there are changed options, if the settings file didn't exist
• Fixed a bug where left and right keys didn't work for GUI focus control
• Fixed a crash when an entity with attached fossilisation button was destroyed
• Added fossilisation buttons to more places
• Invalid fossil files are now skipped instead of crashing the game
• Fixed a bug in world generation where it failed due to not keeping track of a created tidepool patch
• World seed is now logged when map generation fails
• Light level updates are now no longer applied each frame to save slightly on performance
• Fixed a few errors that happened when Godot loaded our code into the Godot editor process
• Input rebinding controls are now destroyed when the options menu is closed. This reduces the number of background objects listening for inputs constantly.
• Cleaned up some old unused stuff in organelle data file
• Removed negative (or zero) passed time checks as Godot Engine should have a fix in now to guard against
• Removed the dependency on Python for our translations script now there's one less tool required when developing Thrive
• Updated our tools and scripts to use .NET 7
• Updated our style guide for .NET 7 new code checks and fixed new warnings they found
• Highlighted git submodule importance in our setup instructions
• Unified codebase by removing use of Godot meta in one place
• Improved the Github issue bug report template
• Added a support in our packaging script to target the web platform, but as expected the game is totally broken when exported that way (someone might come along at some point in the future and make it actually work, but we aren't promising anything regarding this)
• Improved text extraction for translation tool
• Translations files are now alphabetically sorted based on keys, which will hopefully make fewer PRs required to update translation files
• Fixed some trailing new lines in English text
• Added a new code formatting check to ensure correct XML documentation formatting
• Added a new custom code checking tool that finds some C# style problems and corrects them automatically
• Added code style check for incorrect whitespace in English text
• Updated translations
• Added a warning popup when Steam initialization fails

[ 2023-02-18 18:28:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

0.6.1 is soon here so it is once again time to test the release ahead of time. The highlights of this release are the new pulling cilia upgrade (and finished general updates framework), new movement mode selectable in the options along with further work towards full controller support, a microbe benchmarking tool, showing our news feed and new patch notes in the game, additional features for the auto-evo exploring tool, and of course various smaller bug fixes and tweaks. To test the version early switch to the "beta" version on Steam (in the game properties) and you can then play the test build.

[ 2023-02-11 12:01:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Steam version of the launcher has been updated to version 2.0.3, this brings in various bug fixes and small improvements over the previous launcher version. Luckily there weren't any critical issues with the huge 2.0 release of the launcher, which meant that we didn't have to put out multiple small bug fixes immediately after. The most visible change with this should be that the game launch failure detection advice should get displayed more reliably.

[ 2023-01-04 12:34:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today we are proud to present the final update within the year of 2022; Thrive 0.6.0! Twilight now falls on the seas of Thrive, and the normally dominant autotrophs now face their greatest enemy It is always darkest before dawn with the beautiful addition of the day/night cycle! Found a species you love and want to remember forever? Immortalize it with the all new fossilization tool included in the long awaited Thriveopedia, future home of all things informational. These and more, in Thrive 0.6.0! Specifically in the Steam version one of the most major things you'll see (or won't see) is that the Launcher will no longer be visible before Thrive is started. The launcher is still able to open automatically when there is a reportable crash or if you use the special button in the Thrive main menu to exit to the launcher. If you prefer, you can configure the launcher to be shown before starting Thrive to get back the old functionality. [previewyoutube=tko9CMr7Adk;full][/previewyoutube] Our developers have worked hard to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. Weve outlined the major changes in this devblog, but you can see the full patch notes at the end.

The Thriveopedia

Weve always wanted it and now we finally have it; The go-to resource for all things Thrive! The Thriveopedia is the future home of any information on the world, the game, and its mechanics, that the player could ever need to know. As of now, the Thriveopedia only contains a home page with links to our wiki and forums, a map of your current world, evolutionary tree, and the museum. In the future, this guide is planned to contain information on the games features, including information about their real-life counterparts, and strategies on how to best use them.

Fossilization

Individual species can now transcend the confines of their home worlds at the behest of the player, with the powerful fossilization tool. While in the pause menu, the player can now select any species in view to capture its information and study it, and should they so desire, save it forever in their personal museum!
Amass all the species you could ever want within the Museum section of the Thriveopedia where not only can you admire your collection, but you can also freely start a new freebuild session as a select species of your choice! Share your favorite cells with other players by transferring your .thrivefossil files with each other! Gotta collect them all!

Day and Night

Throughout all of Thrives history photosynthesizers have reigned supreme as the most stable and uncontested autotrophs to grace the seas. But this ends today as the world of Thrive is no longer tidally locked with its sun and now experiences the exciting phenomena of night and day. Plant players beware as you must now periodically face a trial of endurance within the shadowy depths of the night, where the once ever-reliable sunlight can no longer reach.
As it is quite a large change to gameplay, the day/night cycle is currently disabled by default. So for anyone interested in experiencing the flow of time, make sure to enable it in the advanced game-start settings! Otherwise, players will be greeted with the familiar sunny skies of classic Thrive.

Launcher 2.0

Behold the latest in Thrive launcher technology, launcher 2.0; Now entirely rewritten and featuring enhanced processing and loading speeds, a sleeker design, and greater versatility.

Other Notable Changes

• Thrive now has a new intro video when you start the game. Make sure you have it enabled in the settings so you can appreciate the exciting view!
• The main menu now features social media icons so that you can easily find a community outlet of your choice.
• Thrive now has a safe-mode triggered crashing, which disables all mods and video playing before restarting.
• Pili now feature a slight damage delay, preventing them from rapidly inflicting a large amount of damage at once.

Looking Ahead

While this update may be exciting, it is only the beginning of our plans for 0.6.x and sets The stage for the future implementation of our upgrades system, unlocking system, combat reworks, and more! 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

• Added day/night cycle. Note that due to missing tutorials, balancing etc. which we didn't have time for, you need to manually enable this feature when starting a new game in the advanced options.
• Added the first few pages of the Thriveopedia to show info about the current game and show the evolutionary tree now in the game proper as well
• Added fossilisation feature to save selected species to the museum which can be loaded through the Thriveopedia to the freebuild editor
• Pilus damage now has a cooldown to prevent a ton of damage from it very quickly
• Balancing changes
• Fixed infinite compound ejection caused by negative compound ejection (only a bandaid fix for now due to time constraints)
• Engulfing now gives extra glucose on top of what the engulfed cell actually had
• Membrane colour transparency works again. Be prepared to have AI species evolve to be more transparent again to avoid being eaten by the player.
• Refactored our code related to species colour adjusting when used in graphs
• Fixed multiple issues related to organelle graphics rendering by changing their render modes and splitting organelles into transparent and opaque ones
• New intro video
• Added our social media and website links to the main menu
• Added safe mode start up after Thrive crashed before managing to start fully. Safe mode can disable all mods and video playing
• Digestion efficiency display in the editor now shows the separate values for each type of digestion to reduce player confusion regarding them
• Fixed panspermia being selectable with LAWK being on by default now
• Enabled word wrap for credits to fix some misaligned columns
• Saving being unavailable in some prototypes now has the warning about that shown correctly when manually making a save in the later editors
• New mucilage and slime jet icons
• Starting with no mods enabled but having installed mods now shows a heads up notifying that mods need to be enabled first before they work
• Fixed evolutionary tree being cutoff even when fully zoomed out
• Added some features used by Thrive Launcher 2.0. Added button to exit to the launcher when the launcher is hidden and would otherwise be difficult to return to from Thrive. Store versions of Thrive now use seamless launcher mode to not show the launcher window before starting Thrive.
• Improved performance of our custom rich text labels by only registering input listening when necessary
• Saving now uses a new Godot API to generate the screenshot PNG this avoids an unnecessary temporary file write to disk and should be faster as a result
• Fixed a rare crash when using a lot of slime jets
• Added a bandaid on infinite compound ejection due to engulfed object having compounds with NaN amounts in it
• Added some guards against dividing compound amounts by zero this should hopefully reduce how often the NaN compounds bug happens
• Changed scene change mod callback to trigger slightly earlier
• Updated some code comments related to the saving system
• Fixed localization update script writing BOMs in .po files on Windows
• Fixed some typos in the English text
• Updated translations

[ 2022-12-10 18:31:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

0.6.0 will be released next week and because of that we are putting out a test build of the new version. To play the test build switch to the "beta" version in the game properties in the Steam client. Note before you download that the day/night cycle needs to be turned on in advanced new game settings to work. All the other major features like Thriveopedia will work with existing saves in a limited manner. And please note that for now the new launcher 2.0 doesn't yet start in seamless mode on Windows (so you'll still see the launcher before playing Thrive). This will be fixed for the full 0.6.0 release. If you have any feedback please post it on the relevant thread on our forums at: https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/0-6-0-release-candidate-testing-and-launcher-2-0-testing/5735 or in the comments below.

[ 2022-12-03 18:27:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today we are proud to announce the release of Thrive 0.5.10, which among a large host of bug and performance fixes, provides players with brand new tools to play with and study their world. Deter predators by impeding them with the sticky mucus left in your wake! Live your life to the fullest as a proper vegetative plant, without having to search for compounds! Create entire timelines to your exact specifications with the new autoevo tool! All of this and more, awaits you in the latest in Thrive. [previewyoutube=VrHI4_CrivQ;full][/previewyoutube] Our developers have tirelessly labored to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. Weve outlined the major changes in this devblog, but you can see the patch notes at the bottom for a full list of features and bug fixes.

Mucilage Jet

0.5.10 presents a new highly versatile part to the evolutionists arsenal; The Mucilage Jet! This unassuming structure grants cells the ability to process glucose into a brand new agent known as mucilage over time. The cell is able to expel this mucilage to grant themselves a quick burst of speed to escape the grasp of predators, or perhaps catch their prey in turn. The mucilage left behind in the cells wake will drastically slow down any other cells caught in the sticky goo, granting craft creatures a chance to escape! We cannot wait to see the interesting strategies players devise as they experiment with this new feature!

Time-Based Reproduction

No longer is the rate of reproduction tied directly to the players ability to gather compounds. Now in 0.5.10, all cells will passively acquire the necessary compounds over a period of time without needing to seek out concentrated clouds! No matter how large and slow you become, you will always be able to reproduce in reasonable time as the rate scales proportionally with the size of your organism. Cells will on longer be able to reproduce instantly the moment they acquire sufficient resources however, as it now takes time to put the compounds to use. Gathering ammonia and phosphates via concentrated clouds will double the rate of reproductive progress, instead of directly filling it.

Auto-Evo Exploration Tool

For those of us with a love of clades and history; The Auto-Evo Exploration Tool is now available for your viewing pleasure! This invaluable tool allows you to directly run auto-evo several generations at a time within various defined metrics. Not only does it simulate the natural evolution of AI species, it also generates an entire clade diagram of each species and its predecessors! Interested players will be able to peer into the very essence of any species by viewing its details, which reveal behavior values, precise color hex, population, auto-evo score, and more!
And what if you wanted to dive into this generated world that you have studied so well and experience it directly? You certainly can! Simply press Play With Current Setting to jump straight into the world you have generated.

Other Changes

• Auto-evo calculations have been updated to encourage sessility in AI species, and now runs 60% faster as well.
• LAWK (Life as We Know) is now toggled on by default when starting a new game. If you want to play with thermosynthesis, make sure to turn this setting off before starting!
• Glycolysis and respiration processes now consume less glucose, making life a little easier. Small
• Iron chunks now hold significantly less iron compound, preventing lithotrophs from fueling themselves indefinitely.
• Entity limit is now weighted by size, so larger cells are less likely to spawn.
• Outdated species should no longer show up in gameplay, this includes species meant to be extinct and the players own species being left behind as microbes after advancing to multicellular.
• The generation seed of your planet will now be displayed in the editor so it can be easily saved or shared.
• The compounds and environment panels have become separate, and can be toggled separately as well.
• The multicellular stage now has its own gameplay and editor themes.
• Thrive is now available in the Norwegian, Vietnamese, and Croatian languages.

Looking Ahead

In the near future, we will move on to 0.6.x where much of our work will involve the implementation of the Thriveopedia, upgrades system, unlocking system, combat reworks, and more! There are of course also some various features that unfortunately did not make it in time for release, such as the day/night cycle that you can look forward to. And finally, we are hosting a Thrivestream RIGHT NOW so please join us in our developer livestream to celebrate the new release!

Patch notes

• Switched reproduction to be more time based, cells now generate free compounds towards reproduction, and have a maximum use rate for growth compounds
• Added new slime jet organelle
• The player can now move to any patch their species is in or next to such a patch
• Unhandled C# exceptions are now logged in game logs. If you get any of these please send the logs to us.
• Added auto-evo exploring tool which allows running auto-evo and inspecting the results
• Balancing changes
• Auto-evo is now 60% faster by having more data caching
• Replaced the ambiance tracks with completely new ones
• Made some progress on the macroscopic stage prototype
• Fixed auto-evo population number difference between text report and graphs
• Reworked auto-evo predation calculations
• MP text on organelle selection buttons is now replaced by an MP icon
• LAWK is now on by default
• Entity limit is now a weighted so that fewer big cells spawn
• Potentially fixed a bug that allowed things to spawn over the entity limit
• Fixed entity limit constraining compound cloud spawns
• Fixed a major bug in the spawn system which caused a lot of outdated species spawners to exist. This should stop extinct species spawning and the player's old species spawning when moving to multicellular.
• Fixed a save load problem related to engulfing with clearing objects
• Fixed some situations where the dynamic MP calculation ended up at the wrong resulting MP, please let us know if you still see incorrect MP calculations
• Rigidity slider is no longer ever disabled, bugs were fixed related to its MP use
• Updated to Godot 3.5
• Added new multicellular music tracks
• Added one more piece of multicellular concept art
• Patch name overlay is now on top of the movement tutorial
• Added a welcome tutorial for early multicellular
• Added a tutorial about exiting a colony to continue growing in microbe stage
• Implemented radio button functionality for our checkboxes
• Increased species split and migration rate to fill the larger maps faster
• Tweaked procedural patch map connection logic
• Fixed patches with duplicate names in regions
• Fixed tidepool patches being able to directly connect to oceans
• Fixed classic map patch connections not saving correctly
• Added some controller input handling options in preparation for proper controller support
• Planet seed is now shown in the editor
• There's now separate button to hide/show the environment panel
• Fixed auto-evo having a chance to read gameplay adjusted population numbers, which may have caused problems
• Thrive now asks for window close confirmation if there are probably unsaved changes
• Fixed low performance in the report tab coming from our custom rich text labels way too often re-parsing their content
• Report tab now again reacts to selecting a different patch on the patch map tab. Also improved performance when selecting patches.
• New game options now mentions and links to the performance options
• Created a new system to save customized versions of game configuration objects, used for difficulty and auto-evo configuration. These allow old saves (in the future) to benefit from difficulty tweaks we do to the game
• Added a few new cheats
• Added the start of a resource loading manager system that should make the one linux crash we get reports about not happen by making the save screenshot loading happen differently
• Opening the art gallery lag is now reduced by loading images gradually
• The loading screen art now changes every 10 seconds
• Prevented broken translations from crashing the game
• Fixed an internal error with pause locks clearing with an unsuccessful save load
• Tooltips now pick their direction better
• Made a slight tweak to excess save deletion
• Fixed some text in the GUI not reacting to language change
• Fixed patch animations not playing in the patch extinction screen
• Species name entry box now check the length of the input text visually and rejects too long names
• Added GPU, current renderer and used GPU memory display to the options menu
• The game now Waits for the loading screen to fade in before starting save load
• Reduced the processing time used by axis type inputs
• Disposed properties now have their paths logged when saving
• Auto-evo now doesn't start while the stage is still fading out to prevent the game locking up for a while if only one background thread is used and auto-evo was set to not run during gameplay
• Auto-evo run is now canceled if the game is exited to not leave multiple runs in the background if saves are loaded in quick succession
• Tweaked the visibility of compound clouds a bit
• Improved the height of the difficulty setup GUI
• Updated compounds panel toggle button icon
• Mod loader now gives a better error if a mod's .pck file is missing
• Added a debugging tool to write current Godot SceneTree to a file
• Our draggable scroll containers now hide the scroll bars by default
• Fixed loading saves with engulfed objects in certain weird states
• Fixed and improved engulfment related text and values in tooltips
• Fixed warnings regarding GlobalTranslation when loading saves
• Fixed a crash when closing the game with a game pausing popup window open
• Fixed clipping not being enabled for the input configuration menu
• Added a button to open our feature suggestions site
• The exact commit and time Thrive was built is now shown in options
• Exact build info is now shown for DevBuilds in the main menu
• Save counting should no longer break if there are saves with bad numbers in the names
• Graphs now use a cache for their data points to allow their re-use
• Graph tooltips are now destroyed properly
• Converted scripts in our repository from ruby to C#
• Updated our code checking tool version
• Fixed being unable to start the microbe stage scene directly from the Godot editor
• Fixed a few code naming inconsistencies related to dB
• Fixed the code for cell visual hashes using one field twice
• Updated our setup instructions to recommend dotnet 6 SDK
• Small git config change should collapse translation update diffs now by default
• New languages: Norwegian, Vietnamese, Croatian
• Updated translations

[ 2022-09-24 18:26:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

A new release is soon here so it is time to do the customary pre-release testing. Some of the major features if you decide to test this will be the timed reproduction system, auto-evo exploring tool and various fixes and tweaks in a bunch of places. The release candidate can be accessed by switching to the "beta" branch for Thrive in the game properties on Steam. Feel free to provide feedback about any new issues you experience with the new version and we'll try to fix as many problems before the release as possible. You can leave feedback either in the comments here or on the dedicated feedback thread on our forums.

[ 2022-09-17 10:03:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

Thrive, just like the creatures it simulates, is constantly evolving and improving. But to do that, we need effective channels by which we can hear feedback from the community. We decided to make this process much more streamlined by introducing a new Suggestions Board for the game! It's easy to sign up, using either your email, Discord account, or Github account. Once logged in, you can:

• Submit suggestions
• Comment on other suggestions
• Vote for the suggestions you support
• Search for suggestions by tag, whether they're trending, the most wanted, the most discussed, and more

Check it out now at the link below: https://suggestions.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/

[ 2022-08-15 18:50:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Three months since our last release, were back with another Thrive update. Thrive 0.5.9 heralds the arrival of a large slate of game-changing features, many of which have long been stuck on our to-do pile. From procedural patch maps to 3D editors, cilia to thermoplasts: read on to learn more about these new additions. Our developers have worked hard stuffing this release full of juicy new content to make the game a richer and more diverse experience. Weve outlined the major changes in this devblog. See the patch notes for a full list of features and bug fixes. [previewyoutube=3D3u88bSHSc;full][/previewyoutube] Note that saves created in previous releases will not load in Thrive 0.5.9. This was a necessary change for some of the new features to work correctly, since the new features were so big it wouldnt have been worth the large effort to write a save upgrader.

Procedural Patch Map

Perhaps the biggest change in this release is the procedural patch map generator. In previous versions, every game took place in the same world with the same biome layout. In Thrive 0.5.9, each game world is different, with a dynamic map to explore and adapt to. In future, we hope to extend this system to allow more detailed planet generation. While different planet types do arise in the current implementation its possible your planet may be full of ice biomes for instance, suggesting a much colder world these arise by pure chance, and still rely on only a small set of patches. But this system is a start, and adds a replayability factor the game was sorely missing. If you yearn for the familiar layout of Pangonia though, dont fret you can switch to the classic patch map thanks to our next important feature.

New Game Settings

Have you always found Thrive too easy? Too hard? Too boring to always start in the hydrothermal vents? In Thrive 0.5.9, weve addressed these issues and more with the new game settings screen. Select a difficulty preset to adapt the game to your skill level. If youre feeling adventurous, switch to the advanced view, where youll find plenty of sliders you can fiddle with to fine-tune various difficulty parameters. Meanwhile, with the planet settings, you can enter a chosen seed for the procedural map generator and choose your starting patch from a range of scientifically plausible options. The advanced view also lets you switch between procedural and classic Pangonia map layouts. Speaking of scientific plausibility, we finally have a LAWK toggle! Thats Life As We Know (it), for those unaware. If youre all about that strict realism vibe, turn this on to disable speculative game elements we havent observed in nature. More on these shortly

Engulfment Revamp

Weve given engulfment mechanics a makeover in this release. Its now more engaging than ever to swallow chunks and other cells, with custom mutations to expand your options further. Digestion is now a timed process. Engulfed objects remain inside the cell as its enzymes break down ingested material. You can evolve lysosome organelles to make this process faster and more efficient. Modifying these lysosomes unlocks the ability to digest tougher membrane types, which have been buffed with resistance to engulfment from all cells without this mutation.

Macroscopic Prototype

Following on from the Multicellular Stage prototype last release, Thrive 0.5.9 adds a prototype editor for the macroscopic portion of the Multicellular Stage. Yes, thats right a 3D editor! Right now its rather basic, consisting of a load of coloured balls representing cells. Other features meant development time had to shift away from this prototype, so theres no 3D gameplay for the time being. Still, its a strong statement of our future intent with the game, and a lot of important work went into refactoring the game to pave the way for this feature and others.

Cilia

Their icon has been in the editors organelle list since Thrive 0.3.4, so were ecstatic to finally announce the arrival of cilia as placeable organelles. Cell rotation rate now depends on size the larger the cell, the closer its agility will be to that of an oil tanker. Cilia though boost rotation rate to help you fight this inevitable inertial creep, so be sure to add a few as you grow. In future, cilia will be upgradeable, with further mutations generating currents to pull in unwary prey, but this feature didnt quite make the cut-off for this release.

Thermosynthesis

The thermoplast is another organelle weve been hoping to add for a while. Thermoplasts (and their prokaryotic counterpart, thermosynthase) are speculative organelles which produce energy from heat gradients. In Thrive 0.5.9, thermosynthesis creates ATP at a flat rate which depends only on the ambient temperature in a patch. This can be quite overpowered, so were looking to implement a more involved mechanic where the player has to chase dynamic heat gradients to keep their ATP topped up.

Spawn System Revamp

A less visible change is a revamp of the system spawning objects and clouds in the environment. While still subject to variation, the new system is less susceptible to large and frustrating regions of emptiness. Hopefully this should make gameplay more satisfying and the world more vibrant.

Art Gallery

Alongside all the above gameplay features, weve added a special treat to the main menu. Under the extras menu, youll now find an art gallery, full of some of Thrives iconic concept art, in-game models and in-game music. Browse at your leisure to the sound of a Thrive Main Theme smooth jazz remix.

Other Changes

Thats the big changes covered, but there are many more smaller changes to enjoy.

• Easter eggs Weve added one type of randomly spawned Easter egg to the game environment, and most of you will find it quite familiar. Can you find it?
• Patch-wide population system Going extinct in only one patch no longer means game over. Instead, youll be greeted with a screen to choose a patch where other members of your species reside, giving you a second chance to thrive.
• Configurable maximum entities option If youre having performance problems, head to the options menu and reduce the maximum number of entities in the performance tab. While its not a silver bullet, this should go some way to helping those with less powerful machinery play the game.
• Pause hotkey Press space to pause and unpause the game.
• Debug overlay Press Ctrl-F3 to open the new debug panel, featuring performance metrics and other helpful information.
• Nucleus damage reduction Having a nucleus now gives a 50% reduction in damage caused by enemies.
• Many other tweaks and bug fixes!

You can read the entire list of changes in our patch notes.

Looking Ahead

In our next release, well be solidifying many of these features with stability and performance enhancements. We also hope to continue expanding the Multicellular Stage prototype, and add further features to the Microbe Stage to bring it closer to its final form. Again, well be holding a developer livestream: [previewyoutube=AEsKo7SEtDM;full][/previewyoutube] to celebrate the new release, so make sure you join us to ask questions and learn more about the inner workings of Thrive and its development team. Were looking forward to seeing you there. We also look forward to seeing you here for our next release!

[ 2022-07-16 17:27:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

0.5.9 is approaching so it is time to do the usual pre-release testing. Note that this time we expect to break save compatibility between the rc1 and 0.5.9 release. So either dont put too much time into saves with the RC or be mentally prepared to not be able to load them in 0.5.9. With that out of the way some of the most major things youll see are the engulfment revamp, procedural patch map, cilia, and continued work on the prototypes. Of course theres a bunch more other changes included as well. The release candidate can be accessed by switching to the "beta" branch for Thrive in the game properties on Steam. Feel free to provide feedback about any new issues you experience with the new version and we'll try to fix as many problems before 0.5.9 is released as possible. You can leave feedback either in the comments here or on the dedicated feedback thread on our forums.

[ 2022-07-09 13:17:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a re-issued patch 0.5.8.1 as we noticed that the crash reporting system was not functioning correctly. This update only changes how the engine version was built compared to 0.5.8.1 in order to make the crash reporting system fully functional again.

[ 2022-05-05 07:58:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

0.5.8.1 is out now. This release focuses on performance improvements and other smaller fixes. 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

[ 2022-04-30 08:45:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Thrive version 0.5.8 is finally here; And with it comes the versatile signaling agents, which allow you to actively communicate with your allied cells; New randomly generated region names, which gives each world a new and unique flair; The highly anticipated multicellular prototype, which permits you to progress further than ever in the grand journey of Thrive; And of course, a grand host of other changes and bug-fixes! [previewyoutube=7ygUoOw5kJo;full][/previewyoutube] 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 players 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. Its 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 werent 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

Whats next?

We hope to continue work on the Microbe stage, in a constant effort to wrap up its 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.

[ 2022-04-16 17:48:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

0.5.8 is releasing next week. A release candidate is now available to test the new release early. It can be accessed by switching to the "beta" branch for Thrive in the game properties on Steam. Feel free to provide feedback about any new issues you experience with the new version and we'll try to fix as many problems before 0.5.8 is released as possible.

[ 2022-04-09 11:24:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week weve finally produced a first playable version of the multicellular prototype which currently features cell type specialization and gameplay. This is a monumental step in Thrives development, but there are yet many more steps on the long road of progress that await us. This prototype will be packaged with the 0.5.8 update, which also includes the new signaling agents part and a large host of other changes. 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

[ 2022-04-03 08:18:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today we have released version 0.5.7 of Thrive which includes a new cell part for players to play and experiment with, and an expanded report tab in the editor. Players will never need to worry about not finding what they are looking for, because by evolving the new chemoreceptor part, cells will be able to sniff out resources from considerable distances! Suddenly realized a species is missing and want to know when they went extinct? The history of your world is now chronicled in the newest feature of the report screen; The timeline tab. Alongside these new features are a host of various bugfixes and optimization to ensure that everyone can properly enjoy Thrive at its fullest. We hope that everyone enjoys this release of Thrive as much as we enjoyed making it, and are looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks. 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

[ 2022-02-05 19:10:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release candidate for 0.5.7 has been released. 0.5.7 will be released in one week so we are releasing a test build now. You can play the test build by selecting the beta version of the game on Steam. 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.

[ 2022-01-29 11:15:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week we have focused on further performance improvements for the game, and the upcoming chemoreceptor part. The chemoreceptor will act as a radar ability for your cell, pointing the way towards food that would otherwise be just out of sight. In the future, this part may become customizable to allow for targeting specific foodstuffs, or perhaps even detecting allied or unrelated cells! In later stages, this will be an important part for specialized olfactory cells on your organism. As for optimization; our investigations into the cause behind late game lag is still on-going, but we hope to resolve the issue as soon as we can. For now we are going to further limit the number of game entities that are allowed to spawn at once. With the already finished work and soon to be finished work, we have started thinking about when to release 0.5.7 to bring these updates to everyone. Right now we are planning to have 0.5.7 released within a month, maybe as soon as in three weeks. The crash reporting system that will be included in the release is already mostly done and only needs some tweaking to make sure it works on Windows. We also need to make a custom version of Godot engine for this as our PR to them has not been accepted yet. The other changes this week:

• The editor report screen now allows changing the patch on it to quickly view graphs for the other patches
• Fixed flagella positioned in a specific way messing with an accurate speed reading, now its defined as the speed in the direction the cell can move the fastest in (which is not necessarily forward)
• Added a separate sound for ice damage
• Microbe movement now has a continuous low volume sound that plays after the movement start sound
• Remade the save delete icon in higher resolution and added a pressed down state for the button
• Lowered volume of microbe theme 7
• Updated translations

As reminder we release weekly progress updates on our website. You can use the Thrive launcher to always see the latest news happening around the game. Here's some highlights that have been covered in earlier progress updates for 0.5.7:

• Added a button on graphs to open a bigger view of them to see the data more clearly
• Fixed flagellum animation not working in the previous release (was likely caused by the Godot 3.4 upgrade)
• Converted videos to theora format to fix the stuttery playback on Windows in the previous release (also caused by Godot 3.4 which removed vp8 optimized playback on Windows)
• Player species is now always first in auto-evo results and other species are in alphabetical order
• Disabled multithreaded rendering that didnt seem to help and perhaps caused some reported issues

[ 2022-01-16 09:39:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

For this patch we tried to address the most reported issues regarding auto-evo taking too long and being too punishing. Various other fixes and improvements also got done while those other things were being worked on. Full patch notes:

• Added a panel showing auto-evo prediction raw numbers to help players understand how auto-evo sees their species
• Various changes hoping to improve auto-evo experience: fixed iron not being taken into account, fixed marine snow density not being taken into account, added extinction if too many species present in a patch, greatly improved auto-evo speed (about 20x faster now)
• Pili in colony members now function correctly
• Reduced max game entities to 300 to reduce late game lag
• Excess compounds from engulfed chunks are now released as clouds
• Removed the X close button in the undo button tutorial as people were too happily skipping it
• Updated to Godot 3.4
• Fixed flagella pointing direction being sometimes broken, especially when at 0,0 coordinates
• Fixed auto evo using energy balance instead of total consumption in a few calculations
• Empty saves list now shows a text saying no saves exist
• Tweaked engulfing sound, it now fades in and out
• Fixed binding agents organelle duplicating when preparing for reproduction, now the code uses the organelle unique property to detect which ones should not be duplicated to be future-proof
• Changing maximum FPS is now possible in the options
• Fixed a disposed microbe bind by running the attach callback on the next frame, like it was supposed to run as per old code comments
• Detached colony cells now keep their rotation that they had in the colony
• Changed the auto-evo prediction tutorial to mention the new prediction panel that can be opened to show all the numbers for it
• Added validation to save names (and stricter species name validation) to ensure saving doesn't fail due to file writing issues when filenames contain invalid characters
• Added a global lock around save image resizing when loading for display, this seems to help around a Godot multithreading issue that caused / causes crashes when opening the load menu
• Fixed bugs regarding the binding agent sometimes being the wrong colour
• Fixed problems with colour picker texts being able to be too wide
• Fixed old Godot version being mentioned in our documentation
• New mod form now requires internal name to start with a capital letter
• Added documentation regarding profiling the game
• Updated our styleguide and git usage guide
• Auto-evo results now react to language change
• Fixed auto-evo prediction texts not updating on language change
• Warning popup on trying to open a non-existent directory should now work on Windows
• Dehydrated builds now ignore some file types, which should result in less dehydrated downloads per devbuild, thanks to a new godotpcktool version that supports name filtering
• Full mod info now includes internal name
• Various modding improvements: forgetting uploaded Workshop mod details, manually entering an existing ID, mods can specify if they require a restart, mod uploader now allows entering change notes and it now warns if preview image is too large, the uploader also now remembers the details that were last used to send an update, tweaked mod manager layout
• Mod manager scene can now directly be launched from Godot for debugging
• Enabled autowrap on mod load caveat text to ensure it doesn't go offscreen in some languages
• Switched to using NetAnalyzers package instead of the deprecated one we used before
• Updated translations

[ 2021-12-11 11:53:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

This hotfix contains efficiency improvements to the auto-evo algorithm which should make it roughly 20 times faster to keep even later game waiting times more reasonable. After investigation the exit code 3221225781 turns out to be a missing DLL error. We have added automatically shown advice about this problem in the launcher. The issue seems to stem from using an older version of Windows (only Windows 10 is supported) or not having latest updates for Windows 10 Universal C Runtime. The beta branch will contain a build that may work better for older Windows. This build also includes a few unrelated changes that happened to get done: auto-evo prediction text now changes when language changes, and mod manager caveat text is now auto-wrapped for translations that wouldn't fit on screen otherwise.

[ 2021-11-28 18:46:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

This month marks a major turning point in our history as for the first time, Thrive makes its official debut in stores! We are proud to announce that Thrive is now available for purchase on Steam for those who wish to support Thrives further development. For this release, we held a major focus on overall quality and bugfixes for Thrive, which ultimately resulted in a substantial improvement to stability and performance that will ensure a smoother experience than ever before. Even still; We also managed to squeeze in a few defining features that sufficiently expand the depth of functionality such as the long awaited behavior editor enabling customization of allied cells actions, the ever promising mod loader that is sure to inspire customization beyond the games convention, and an expanded auto evo system that now even include the players population. We hope that you enjoy playing with this update as much as we did making it! You can read the full, more in-depth details about the new features of 0.5.6 on our website.

[ 2021-11-28 08:35:15 CET ] [ Original post ]