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

• 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