Ecosystem News

Hey everyone!

We're happy to announce that the beta for the Behaviour Update is now live on the OpenBeta branch on Steam. As always, if you'd like to participate, be sure to back up your saves!

BACK UP YOUR SAVES - Before taking part in the beta, if you have some ecosystems you love and want to test out the combat, please back them up. You can find the save files in your "My Documents/Ecosystem" folder.

ACCESSING THE BETA - Right-click the game in your library, choose "Properties", choose "Betas", and select openbeta from the list.

WHAT'S CHANGED - Check out the patch notes below:

PATCH NOTES

FEATURES
Increased creature autonomy: after learning first to swim and then to seek out targets, creatures enter a life stage in which they are more autonomous in their decision-making, attempting to fulfill their individual needs.

The following new behaviors are now available to creatures:

• Finding shelter and resting
  
• Building nests
  
• Feeding on insects on the water surface
  
• Gathering food to bring to their offspring
  
• Playing and socializing, chasing each other or knocking stones around
  
• Swimming in schools
  
• Bioluminescence
  
• Song
  

• Pitch and volume envelopes for each note in a song are specified in the genetic code, so songs will evolve as the species does.
  
• Reworked creature fertility and energy so that the odds of survival and number of offspring is less influenced by random factors.
  
• Creatures now remember the locations of food seen while exploring.
  

FIXES

• Improved line-of-sight checks before creatures resort to pathfinding to prevent cases where creatures swim far up because their target is behind a small bump.
  
• Fixed some errors with line of sight checks that could result in creatures not seeing food/mates that actually should have been visible.
  
• Fixed error where color comparisons could be incorrect when checking how well a creature blends in with its environment.
  
• Fixed error where bilateria spawn preset had incorrect 4x lifecycle count by default.
  

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to the March development update! My work on the next major update, the Behavior Update, is coming to a close and should be ready for a March release date. With the new batch of features, I hope to give creatures more autonomy, more to do with their lives, and more ways to differentiate themselves from other species.

Creatures now need to find shelter and rest, can build nests to lay eggs in, can feed on insects on the water surface, can gather food to bring to their offspring, and can play and socialize.

They can also adapt to swim in schools or communicate with bioluminescence:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Bioluminescence

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Schooling

They can also evolve vocalizations, the development of which involved making a simplified 'fish synthesizer' and specifying pitch and volume envelopes in each creature's genetic code, subject to mutation along with everything else:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Vocalisation 1 - Best heard between 10-50s

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Vocalisation 2

I'm hoping that all of this will add further depth and variety to the gameplay and make your species and ecosystems feel even more unique. Thank you for reading!

Tom Johnson

Hello! Dan here, community manager for Ecosystem, with a couple of updates to share about Ecosystem. We'll hear from Tom further down about what he's been working on and what he will work on next, but first we have some big news!

[h2]IndieCade[/h2]

We're super excited to announce that Ecosystem is part of of the 2023 IndieCade Nominees!

As well as being eligible for the following general awards:

• Grand Jury Award
  
• Jury Prix Award
  
• Innovation in Interaction Design Award
  
• Innovation in Experience Design Award
  
• Developers Choice Award
  

We've also been nominated specifically in the "Mike Sellers Systemic Design Spotlight Award".

The full list of nominees for the award as follows (some amazing company here!)

• Against the Storm
  
• Ecosystem
  
• Price of Flight
  
• The Signal State
  
• Unknown Number: A First Person Talker
  
• Viewfinder
  

You can watch the awards right here on Steam on Saturday November 4 from 10am PDT.

Tom will also be taking part in a Show and Tell session, again hosted here on Steam, tonight (Friday 3 November) between 10am and 12pm PDT!

To celebrate our inclusion in IndieCade we are currently on sale for 20% off!

With all that said let's hear from developer Tom as to what he's been up to recently - take it away!

[h2]Next Steps for Ecosystem[/h2]

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to the November development update!

I just finished work on a minor update aimed at improving performance, mostly via reworking the level-of-detail meshes for Coral and some Misc food sources, as well as changing the minimap to be more efficient when there are large numbers of plants in an environment. Many thanks to volunteer community / mod-development liaison Stobz for noticing this latter issue and isolating its cause. Whether or not you see an improvement will depend on what kind of environment you have created and whether, in your specific scenario, your computer is bottlenecked by rendering foliage rather than processing creature physics. However, in stress-tests featuring very dense coral reefs, performance improved by 6ms per frame (the difference between 45 frames-per-second and 60) and in those with dense plankton growth, it improved even more, by 8ms, so hopefully this will make for a notable improvement for some.



With that complete, I'm now moving on to the next major update, which I think of as the Behavior Update. The goal with this next batch of features is to give the creatures a little more to do with their lives and more ways to differentiate themselves from other species. Since Ecosystem doesn't fit into a standard game genre, new features require experimentation and may not always work, so I can't promise any specific behaviors just yet, but I am looking at things like swimming in a school, communicating via biolumenescence, or building nests to lay eggs in. Ideally, many of these behaviors will not be a simple on/off switch, a single trait that a species simply has or doesn't, but instead will include room for variation, such as the specific colorations and patterns a species uses in biolumenescence, as well as what they are most inclined to actually communicate about. I hope to have a few more details soon as the update progresses.

Thank you for reading!

Tom Johnson

Hey folks!

We've just released a small Open Beta which brings some performance improvements to the game. As always. please be sure to back up your saves before swapping to the beta!


Patch Notes

Performance improvements due to reworking all Coral and some Misc food source level-of-detail meshes.

Performance improvements due to reworking the minimap to be more efficient when there are large numbers of plants in an environment.

Fix: Changing the diet on the evolutionary parameters menu prior to spawning a stored or online creature does not actually change the diet.

Fix: Editor-made creatures could display an incorrect diet in the evolutionary parameters panel if their food type was changed in the editor.

Fix: Some text overlaps in graphics menu in English and German.

Just a very small post to let you know that the games demo now supports our newly added Japanese language following it's addition when we took the game to Tokyo Game Show.

The new update for the demo should be ready to download now :)