Ecosystem News

PATCH NOTES
v0.17

CHANGES

• 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.
  

PERFORMANCE

• 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.
  

BUGS

• 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.
  

Hello, Dan from Slug Disco here, the publishers of Ecosystem! We have quite a hefty blog post to get to here so I won't keep you too long - here is what to expect in today's development log:

• A dev update from Tom
  
• Patch notes for v0.16
  
• Your FAQs answered
  
• Community screenshot roundup
  
• Where to keep in touch
  

But first, we have created a new Gameplay Trailer to show off more of the game's interface and how exactly you will be interacting with your Ecosystem. Of course, there's a lot more to Ecosystem than this trailer can convey, but hopefully it gives a high level overview of the tools at your disposal for creating the perfect ecosystem.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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Hello everyone,

Thank you for supporting Ecosystem and following its development. I just wanted to write a brief update regarding my plans for future development. I appreciate all the feedback everyone has given; I wasn't able to respond to people as much as I would like, but I have read everything that was written and I think I learned a great deal from it.

My two major focuses for the long-term future development of the game are to add more for the player to do, and to add more variety and depth to the evolution of creatures over the long term. This is in addition, of course, to continuing to fix bugs, optimize performance, and add polish to places that need it, such as the creature editor.

For the first major update, which I hope to complete in roughly two months, I hope to add substantially to the information displays in the game, adding clade diagrams, population statistics, and more, to display what's going on in the ecosystem and how it has evolved since the start of the game. I hope to also allow adjusting things like population caps or protections for endangered species.

Another feature I intend to add is a kind of 'constrained evolution' where the player can specify an archetype such a large herbivore (akin to a whale) or something with tentacles (akin to a squid or octopus) and the spawned creature will evolve as normal, but its genetic code will be kept within the requested parameters. My hope is that this will allow a greater amount of customization over the ecosystem.

There are also a few targets for optimization that I intend to aim for in the first update or as minor updates along the way, including reducing the amount of memory used when creatures are spawned in, and addressing an inefficiency in the target-seeking AI that becomes more severe as the population grows.

I'll continue to provide these updates as development continues.

All the best,
Tom

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PATCH NOTES
Today's patch brings the game up to v0.16

CHANGES

• Forward button now moves where the camera is facing instead of keeping the same depth.
  
• Add some mouse options to controls menu.
  
• Replace on/off sliders with buttons in options menu.
  
• Update demo to match current version of full game.
  

BUGS

• Fixed issue where off-screen pointer could stay on after you deselected a creature.
  
• You can no longer click and drag the loading screen progress bar.
  
• Fix issue where the follow camera in the neural display can start very far away from the creature.
  
• Fix issue where when you exit neural display, you warp back to where you were before instead of staying in the same place.
  
• Fix bug where graphics settings were not saved if you exited with escape instead of clicking the button.
  
• Fix bug where, when you click the 'Reset' button, the target framerate is set to infinity instead of the monitor's refresh rate.
  
• Fix potential crash in rare case when loading saves.
  

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For each development update we will be rounding up the most frequent questions and putting them to Tom to get the definitive answers from him!

If you would like to have your question answered in the next newsletter, comment down below and we will answer as many as we can!

Will we get creatures with legs that use the sea floor?

I do hope to implement this! It may be a little while in the future though, and I can't be 100% certain of future plans in the event that an unforeseen difficulty makes it impossible to work them into the game. I've run some tests to verify that the evolution simulation can produce creatures that crawl around. One such example is here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There are some substantial additional difficulties that need to be addressed when it comes to uneven terrain and target-seeking behavior, and they will need a slightly different procedural mesh generation system. For this reason, it may take a fair amount of time to implement, and so I would like to focus first on adding more for the player to do and adding more variety and depth to the evolution of the swimming creatures already in the game.

• How does the game determine when a species should be created?
  
• Can species only emerge from "misc" creatures or can extant species split off to form a new one?
  
• It looks like there's a limit on how many species are displayed - do "hidden" species exist in the "misc" group?

When you spawn in a batch of creatures, each creature that is spawned in that initial batch is considered to be the progenitor of a new species. However, they are all grouped together in misc until there are at least four currently living creatures in that family tree, at which point they get their own entry in the legend under the map, so long as there is space there. If the species display runs out of room, it does end up staying in the misc section; it would be nice to improve the UI here or give better options for what is collapsed and what is shown. Species can definitely evolve distinct subpopulations and if they are geographically separated enough they kind of function as distinct species, but the displays don't yet recognize this and they could still mate with each other if they are nearby. This is because the displays and mating decision use a simpler progenitor-based approximation of species instead of calculating the genetic distance between individuals. There is a lot of data in the DNA in Ecosystem so this is a more computationally expensive calculation than in some other evolution simulations, but it is something I am interested in attempting.

How often do plants seed?

The plants live through about fifteen lifecycles, where each cycle they have a chance to reproduce (a low chance, about 5%) and their age ticks up by one. When they do reproduce, the amount of seeds they release is scaled by their adaptability percent, so a low adaptability can be a slow death for the plant population as they pass away from age and do not produce enough offspring to replenish their numbers. For performance reasons, only one plant is allowed to release seeds at a time, so the cycles take longer the more plants there are (as opposed to the creatures, whose lifecycles are always a fixed amount of time).

• What does the "survival/energy" stat mean?
  
• How often do creatures need to eat / how does starvation work?
  
• Does the "any" diet mean omnivorous?

Creatures eat once per lifecycle, which is about five minutes for a mature creature. Creatures gain energy from eating, though foragers need to eat more than predators to get the same amount. The survival and children stats are determined by the energy the creature acquired during its feeding phase: survival is the creature's chance of surviving at the very end of the cycle and children is the amount of eggs it can produce during the mating phase (when it says something like 1.3 children, that means the creature will definitely have one child and has a 30% chance of having two). A creature that didn't manage to get any food is guaranteed to die at the end of the lifecycle and cannot lay any eggs, though it can still fertilize the eggs of others. The total energy also kind of shows the influence the creature's DNA will have on the next generation - if it is more than one, the creature's traits will become more prevalent in the next generation and otherwise, less. The 'Any' diet isn't actually meant to be displayed yet! Sorry, that's a bug.

Is genetic disease random?

It's not quite random but the answer is a little complex. Game physics engines sometimes have stability issues with particularly contorted ragdolls, where they blow up and generate extremely large forces trying to resolve the joint constraints and collisions. Ecosystem detects when this happens to a creature and removes it from the population, calling it 'Genetic Disease'. For creatures affected by this, there usually is something in their DNA that specifies a movement style or body shape prone to physics explosions, so in some ways it actually is like a genetic disease.

Are there plans to make differences between larger and smaller creatures, like a health difference / attack strength?

There are, but they are tentative at the moment. One of my major aims for future development is to widen the variety of niches that are available to creatures and to give them more ways to differentiate themselves, and I think that traits like this may be the core way to make that happen. Because of the way the evolution simulation works, it's necessary for me to experiment, and small changes can have very large effects on what kind of creatures evolve, so I haven't discussed these plans in detail because I don't want to promise something that it turns out I can't deliver. But it is very much something I have in mind.

Thanks for the questions, everyone!

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We've been loving seeing the screenshots roll in so below I have collated the ones that stood out to me the most! Massive thanks to Steam user Crispygoat for sharing the image that made its way onto the thumbnail for this very post!



Steam user Lil_Ronin_666 made this lil urchin field and put the terraforming tools to use to create these pleasing columns!



PaintDragon on our Discord server shared this wonderful house they created for their creatures!



"From death comes life", so say Dinoman again on our Discord server who created what appears to be a megalodon skull overgrown with new life!



And here is one final screenshot from Rahvynn again on Discord, who shared this happy boi bopping along who was actually a predator they just spawned in...I wonder if it grew into the feracious boi it was destined to be?



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That's all for this development update, I hope you enjoyed it! If you'd like to keep up to date on smaller updates on Ecosystem you can stay in touch on Twitter, Reddit or Discord.

See you in the next one!

Hi all

Thanks again for the wonderful reception to Ecosystem so far! As a one man dev team Tom is hard at work filtering through all the feedback from everyone.

As a priority we are pushing out a small patch which includes the following features and changes.

Features

• UI is now adaptive and should be easier to read on 1440p and 4K monitors.
  

Changes

• Rename 'Refraction' to 'Water Effect' - this should allow players to more easily identify the setting that turns off the water effect.
  
• Defaulted water effect value to 0.5 instead of 1.0 for new players - hitting reset still defaults to 100, this will be changed in the next patch.
  
• Improve visibility of plant buttons.
  

Thank you everyone who has been waiting patiently for this - this hotfix brings the game to version 0.14, and it fixes the spawning issue that was appearing intermittently on launch. Formal patch notes are as follows:

• Fixed an issue where it sometimes became impossible to place new creatures despite having met the preconditions & having enough life points
  

We've tested this internally but please let us know if there are still issues. You can do so on our Steam forum, official forum or Discord.

Well, what can I say?

Thanks for all the excellent response Ecosystem has had for launch day! We think it went swimmingly if you'll pardon the pun; plenty of feedback to chew through and lots of fantastic suggestions and thoughtful points have already been posted by you lovely people.

Tom is aware of the forager placement issue that sometimes appears early in the game - that bug is number 1 priority and he hopes to get the first patch out to fix that specific problem very soon. After that, there's always a ways to go with early access with regards to optimisation and features, and these things will be constantly improved upon as the development continues.

Once the chaos of the game launch is over with and the initial feedback and issues have been worked through, we'll be publishing our first post-release newsletter which will include the first road map for the game going ahead. It's important to note that everything is subject to change during the early access period, and the game may evolve as much as its creatures do!

One of the points responding to initial feedback that needs to be reiterated, I feel, is that it's important to note that the simulation does not have any preordained animation in it, so creatures will usually only become very efficient swimmers, foragers and hunters after many generations. They start with entirely random brains and body sizes, go through an initial few generations of brain organisation to try to get some limbs moving, and then only after that does the evolution begin properly. They will naturally respond to pressures by process of natural selection, and an Ecosystem in which very little creature change occurs over a long time is probably stable one with few evolutionary pressures. Of course as development continues, new pressures will be introduced and existing ones will change.

It is likely that one of the major focuses of early updates will be better informational displays and allowing the player to put more constraints on the evolution of creatures, and it is possible that both of those may help if people feel like nothing is happening.

That's all for now - once again, thanks so much for your kind enthusiasm and with helping us get the word out about Ecosystem. Keep a weather eye out for that newsletter in a few weeks, and Tom expects to start getting updates out very shortly.

Thanks to Dreadwolff for the vivacious screenshot used in the artwork for this post!