Development Update #02
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the second development update. This is just a small series to keep everyone up-to-date on where the game is headed in the future and how well progress is going along the way there.
In today's update we will cover:
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I'm currently midway through the first major update, which should see more and better information displays and more ways to customize the creatures in the ecosystem. These are steps along the way towards my overall goal of adding more for the player to do and adding more variety and depth to the evolution of creatures over the long term.
Coinciding with this post is a smaller update. This smaller update has a focus on performance fixes, and you should see noted improvement in how the game runs in a variety of situations, though I still expect performance improvements to be an ongoing task as development progresses. There have also been improvements to the minimap, several bugfixes, and some tweaks to the game balance.
The latter involved investigating reports I had seen of inexplicable die-offs of plant life. This can be a reasonable outcome of the simulation if a large forager population drives the plants to extinction and then goes extinct themselves, but it's poor from a gameplay perspective if the die-offs are too frequent or occur out-of-nowhere. One player helpfully provided me with a savegame and a collection of eight subsequent autosaves in which a die-off occurred while running the game overnight. I ran several test cases using the initial save; here is what one looked like:
One reason this issue was difficult to isolate and fix was that this took five hours from start to finish (while running at 2x speed)! Another reason is that collapse is not a guaranteed result of an overpopulation of foragers; instead, it is the outcome of a long chain of events where each responds to the previous state. For example, after an overpopulation of foragers has decreased the plant population, if the lowered food supply decreases the forager population by a large enough amount, this may lessen the pressure on the remaining plants enough to allow them to recover, which may then lead to the recovery of the forager population too! In fact, this happened in one of the test runs:
It's notable that this is almost a literal example of the butterfly effect. The initial conditions in both of the ecosystems depicted above were exactly the same and I didn't intervene at all in either of them. The only differences that could have been introduced were the very small ones that can occur when the physics engine resolves collisions and handles joint constraints on the creatures' limbs, but these differences were enough to lead to the ruin or recovery of the whole ecosystem, five hours later. For this reason, from a game development perspective, it is often best for me to attempt the smallest adjustments possible. In this case, slightly increasing the rate at which the plants seed and age relative to the creatures should not affect the way the plantlife grows in the environment, but should make them a little more capable of bouncing back when heavily fed on by foragers. It is possible that this won't solve all the die-off cases, but it did work in the test cases I had, and the information displays coming in the next major update should help you to diagnose if something like this is in danger of occurring.
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Do fish eat the plankton?
Yes, they do. It pulses a bit when it is eaten, like this:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Plankton is often a little easier for creatures to eat because it is less likely to grow around crags and crannies that creatures can have trouble reaching or get stuck on. However, creatures have a strong tendency to prioritize food that is nearest to them (being the first one to the food can make a big difference) so depending on the location of your populations, it may go for awhile without attracting attention, and it does grow very fast when it isn't eaten due to not competeing so intensely with the plants that are on the soil.
Are different kinds of plants / corals / etc more nutritious than other kinds?
At the moment, everything is equal. The plants do actually have hidden scores for how much of various vitamins and minerals they possess, but for now this isn't used by the simulation. Diet (both in terms of protein/fat/fiber composition and in terms of, for example, magnesium helping to enable bioluminescence) affecting creatures is on my long term list, but there are a few big features that I think will really improve the game that I hope to get in first.
Will you be implementing a population limit setting to help reduce lag in the late game?
Yes, I will. In the next major update, I hope to allow adjusting population caps and endangered species protection measures on both a per-species and ecosystem-wide level. This will be accessible on the same screen as the informational displays that are a big part of the update.
Do you plan on introducing temperature to the simulation at all, through thermal vents or underwater volcanoes?
I'm not sure yet! I am keen to introduce both underwater vent communities and whalefall to deep sea environments, and temperature would certainly make sense to simulate as well, but it may take some time both to simulate it meaningfully and to allow the creatures to adapt to it in interesting ways. Sorry that this is a bit of a nonanswer, but it is something I will keep in mind.
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[h2]CHANGES[/h2]
Prevent unpredictable plant die-offs that were resulting from forager overfeeding by increasing the plant time-scale.
Automatically clean up small floating remnants that can be left after digging.
Minimap: allow toggling terrain, plant and creature display.
Minimap: legend supports 20 species instead of 10.
[h2]PERFORMANCE[/h2]
Improve efficiency of target-seeking AI, which became worse the more creatures there were.
Fix performance degradation when food source placement menu is visible.
Fix poor performance after loading a saved game.
Fix excessive memory usage by procedural materials used for creature skins.
[h2]BUGS[/h2]
Fix issue where saved dna can get its food source set to 'any', which results in it never maturing (included in hotfix to v0.16).
Fix issue where the player can change the timescale while the game is paused.
Fix issue where creatures' current behaviors were not loaded but instead recalculated.
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Thanks for keeping the screenshots coming in - we're glad to see you've all been having a blast being underwater photographers!
Mykk Robo posted this lil fish man monstrosity on Steam!
Lil_Ronin_666 shared this picture which I'm calling "Lost Among The Spires" over on Steam too.
Stobz shared this fish looking fish over on our Discord
Farmer Jenkins over on our Discord shared this submarine long boi
Welcome to the second development update. This is just a small series to keep everyone up-to-date on where the game is headed in the future and how well progress is going along the way there.
In today's update we will cover:
- A message from Tom about what he's been up to.
- Answers to some community FAQs
- v0.17 Patch Notes
- Some of our favourite screenshots from the community!
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What have you been up to Tom?
I'm currently midway through the first major update, which should see more and better information displays and more ways to customize the creatures in the ecosystem. These are steps along the way towards my overall goal of adding more for the player to do and adding more variety and depth to the evolution of creatures over the long term.
Coinciding with this post is a smaller update. This smaller update has a focus on performance fixes, and you should see noted improvement in how the game runs in a variety of situations, though I still expect performance improvements to be an ongoing task as development progresses. There have also been improvements to the minimap, several bugfixes, and some tweaks to the game balance.
The latter involved investigating reports I had seen of inexplicable die-offs of plant life. This can be a reasonable outcome of the simulation if a large forager population drives the plants to extinction and then goes extinct themselves, but it's poor from a gameplay perspective if the die-offs are too frequent or occur out-of-nowhere. One player helpfully provided me with a savegame and a collection of eight subsequent autosaves in which a die-off occurred while running the game overnight. I ran several test cases using the initial save; here is what one looked like:
One reason this issue was difficult to isolate and fix was that this took five hours from start to finish (while running at 2x speed)! Another reason is that collapse is not a guaranteed result of an overpopulation of foragers; instead, it is the outcome of a long chain of events where each responds to the previous state. For example, after an overpopulation of foragers has decreased the plant population, if the lowered food supply decreases the forager population by a large enough amount, this may lessen the pressure on the remaining plants enough to allow them to recover, which may then lead to the recovery of the forager population too! In fact, this happened in one of the test runs:
It's notable that this is almost a literal example of the butterfly effect. The initial conditions in both of the ecosystems depicted above were exactly the same and I didn't intervene at all in either of them. The only differences that could have been introduced were the very small ones that can occur when the physics engine resolves collisions and handles joint constraints on the creatures' limbs, but these differences were enough to lead to the ruin or recovery of the whole ecosystem, five hours later. For this reason, from a game development perspective, it is often best for me to attempt the smallest adjustments possible. In this case, slightly increasing the rate at which the plants seed and age relative to the creatures should not affect the way the plantlife grows in the environment, but should make them a little more capable of bouncing back when heavily fed on by foragers. It is possible that this won't solve all the die-off cases, but it did work in the test cases I had, and the information displays coming in the next major update should help you to diagnose if something like this is in danger of occurring.
-----
Your questions answered!
Do fish eat the plankton?
Yes, they do. It pulses a bit when it is eaten, like this:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Plankton is often a little easier for creatures to eat because it is less likely to grow around crags and crannies that creatures can have trouble reaching or get stuck on. However, creatures have a strong tendency to prioritize food that is nearest to them (being the first one to the food can make a big difference) so depending on the location of your populations, it may go for awhile without attracting attention, and it does grow very fast when it isn't eaten due to not competeing so intensely with the plants that are on the soil.
Are different kinds of plants / corals / etc more nutritious than other kinds?
At the moment, everything is equal. The plants do actually have hidden scores for how much of various vitamins and minerals they possess, but for now this isn't used by the simulation. Diet (both in terms of protein/fat/fiber composition and in terms of, for example, magnesium helping to enable bioluminescence) affecting creatures is on my long term list, but there are a few big features that I think will really improve the game that I hope to get in first.
Will you be implementing a population limit setting to help reduce lag in the late game?
Yes, I will. In the next major update, I hope to allow adjusting population caps and endangered species protection measures on both a per-species and ecosystem-wide level. This will be accessible on the same screen as the informational displays that are a big part of the update.
Do you plan on introducing temperature to the simulation at all, through thermal vents or underwater volcanoes?
I'm not sure yet! I am keen to introduce both underwater vent communities and whalefall to deep sea environments, and temperature would certainly make sense to simulate as well, but it may take some time both to simulate it meaningfully and to allow the creatures to adapt to it in interesting ways. Sorry that this is a bit of a nonanswer, but it is something I will keep in mind.
-----
v0.17 Patch Notes
[h2]CHANGES[/h2]
Prevent unpredictable plant die-offs that were resulting from forager overfeeding by increasing the plant time-scale.
Automatically clean up small floating remnants that can be left after digging.
Minimap: allow toggling terrain, plant and creature display.
Minimap: legend supports 20 species instead of 10.
[h2]PERFORMANCE[/h2]
Improve efficiency of target-seeking AI, which became worse the more creatures there were.
Fix performance degradation when food source placement menu is visible.
Fix poor performance after loading a saved game.
Fix excessive memory usage by procedural materials used for creature skins.
[h2]BUGS[/h2]
Fix issue where saved dna can get its food source set to 'any', which results in it never maturing (included in hotfix to v0.16).
Fix issue where the player can change the timescale while the game is paused.
Fix issue where creatures' current behaviors were not loaded but instead recalculated.
-----
Community Screenshot Roundup
Thanks for keeping the screenshots coming in - we're glad to see you've all been having a blast being underwater photographers!
Mykk Robo posted this lil fish man monstrosity on Steam!
Lil_Ronin_666 shared this picture which I'm calling "Lost Among The Spires" over on Steam too.
Stobz shared this fish looking fish over on our Discord
Farmer Jenkins over on our Discord shared this submarine long boi