This patch is focused on improving the 'late game' experience, adding things requested by the more experienced players.
New performance related settings:
* Alga, plant and animal caps!
* A setting to limit how many species are prebuilt when loading a world: fewer means faster loading, more means more accurate plant and animal models (less reusing other species' models)
Optimizations:
* Removed unused box colliders for plant body parts, adding ~10FPS in situations with many plants
* Simplified check if a growing plant reached its target size, adding ~2FPS in situations with many plants
* Skip checking for gliding and flying animations if the animal cannot glide or fly, adding ~2FPS in situations with many animals
* Added a low poly variant of the stilt root, with the smaller parts disappearing if the camera moves away, adding ~5FPS in situations with many stilt roots
* Preload the stilt root object instead of building it from scratch for each individual plant, adding ~2FPS in situations with many stilt roots
Simple balancing:
* The 'grasshopper' mouth now gets way less energy out of soft plant tissue
* Plankton spreads twice as fast now, so filter feeders don't immediately exhaust their food source
* Blood can only be eaten from animals larger than the predator
Changes to time jumps:
* Redesigned the time jump view, adding a progress bar
* Added an interrupt button (useful for long jumps)
* Added basic information on the number of species, so you have something to keep an eye on during the jump
* Added 15000 and 20000 (that is, longer) duration options
Added rudimentary support for player generated body parts! See https://thesaplinggame.com/ugc
Fixes for animal sounds:
* Made animal calls audible from much further away
* In the instinct editor, disabled the option to 'call' if available mouth cannot make a sound
Improvements for lighting and post processing effects:
* Decreased bottom lighting in the sandbox (mainly used for lighting to rock part of scenario maps), removing a weird nighttime glow on brighter plants and animals
* Removed sun shaft effect at night, also removing a weird glow on brighter plants and animals
* Decreased bloom effect slightly
Misc:
* Fixed sitting in trees
I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or thesaplinggame@gmail.com.
The Sapling is a short simulation game where you design your own plants and animals, and put them in a world together. Or you turn on random mutations, and see what evolution does to your ecosystem!
Features
Design plants and animals.
Fast-forward time to and watch the ecosystem work like a charm or slowly fall apart (probably the latter :) ).
A sandbox mode where you can skip time and turn on random mutation, allowing true evolution.
An instinct system where you can specify what an animal should do when it hears or sees something.
A procedural animation system so any animal can perform any animation.
Procedural music mixed on the fly.
Everything set up to be easily extended by players.
This looks just like Spore!
Wessel Stoop has wanted to play a simulation game where you can build your own plants and animals, put them in a world, and see what happens since 2002. You can imagine his excitement when Will Wright, the father of simulation games, demoed his latest game Spore to an enthusiastic crowd. When Spore turned out to be all game genres except simulation, Wessel decided he wanted to try to make the game by himself. The Sapling is the result of that attempt.
MINIMAL SETUP
OS: Ubuntu 16 or newer
Processor: A processor with SSE2 instruction set supportMemory: 4 GB RAM
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Graphics card with DX10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities.