Usual warning: Below text contains technicalities and developer insight. If You are just interested in playing Creatura - TL;DR: As always an update is coming, almanac has been replaced and now stores genomes for later use. Details are below, cheers! Since the inception of the almanac feature in August 2018, it wasn't really part of any update cycle spotlight. In fact, the word "Almanac" on the changelog has been only a hero of a single category: "Fixed"; single handedly introducing many crashes and bugs into the game, as long as it was part of Creatura. Until now.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Most of us, given a problem, will attempt to solve it with the most efficient solution. Some classical solutions, however, could be seen by an inexperienced naive newcomer, as deserving upgrade, or worse - inventing them from scratch. That's an unfortunate part of the Dunning-Krugger effect - our inability to assess the complexity of what we don't know. Lacking necessary knowledge, one often assumes things are deceptively simple, or can be easily improved. Unfortunately as a new and naive developer, I have fallen into this exact trap. Taxonomic systems are hundreds of years old. The people who have designed ways to visually represent them either had scientific titles longer than my name, or have spent most of their careers working with taxonomic systems. The chance to improve something in a field that has been meticulously shaped by experts over decades is relatively small. The chance to make it better from scratch is basically none. The chance to make it an unintuitive, confusing mess - is exactly what I did while designing the old almanac.

Premature micro-optimizations

While designing games, we are always limited by either computing power, or memory size. "Stuff" and "things" can be generally either calculated or stored. In 2018, my concern with designing the almanac was its possible size. After all, granting players the ability to create an infinite collection is a risk - inevitably a large enough collection of data will affect performance of any computer, no matter how good it is. That's why the old almanac would show only up to 10 entries from common ancestors to selected species.
Was it a reasonable fear? Probably. Will the large enough almanacs slow down older computers? For sure. Is it a good enough reason to artificially cap the players with better rigs to enjoy their unique evolutionary adventure in some sad, limited representation? Probably not. Why have I designed it to represent the entries in such a confusing way? I'm not sure, but I can say that the code behind it was even worse, as the almanac crashes have proven over and over again.

It's Trees All The Way Down

After a couple years of working on Creatura and a lot of feedback from players perspective, it was clear that almanac not only requires fundamental change of UI, but also new features to improve the game flow. Is your inventory stacked with chests and cuttings, to the point of just using vivariums as storage rooms? Have You ever tried to map a gene expression You've handled already, only to realize that the specimen is now gone from inventory and the 5 edyGene genome slots? Or maybe You've just repeatedly crashed while filling up the almanac, asking yourself what's even the point of it? Well - meet the new almanac.
It's a simple tree graph. From top to bottom, it will represent not only all the species discovered in the vivarium, but also any major missing link between them and the common ancestors. No longer is it necessary to start the almanac from the very first fauna and flora to not miss on any species - the entries store now not only description and images, but also the species DNA, usable directly in edyGene. Just click on the genome in the bottom part of the almanac entry, and it'll be loaded verbatim, ready to get applied right into the active specimen unexpecting sudden genetic transformation.

To The Infinity, And Beyond Available System Memory

This relatively small change has a huge impact on gameplay in general. Almanac can be now used as an infinite inventory for common plants, and a great help when mapping genomes. It also gives opportunity for completionists in the "end-game", and let's be honest - quite a cool widget to play with and appreciate the evolution of our vivariums (with the feature to 'screenshot' it as a whole into a file incoming soon).
The new almanac, as well as new sponges and a ton of bug fixes is a part of update 1.1.2, and should be live (with a soft-wipe of existing saves) in a couple days. Hoping to see many tree graph representations of evolution, just as it should be represented - in a simple, straightforward way. Have fun!

[ 2022-01-18 05:43:47 CET ] [ Original post ]