Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution News

Changelog:

* Fixed map reverting to 0 fertility after a few minutes when using "sediment" fertility type (this happened in development builds, and was re-introduced as a result of the performance fix in 0.13.0.1).
* Fixed sediment map reverting to default when you use height brushes in map editor
* Fixed fertility brushes not working in map editor
* Fixed Save/Load removing brushed temperature/fertility changes and reverting the temp/fert target map to base settings
* Fixed temp/fert variety defaulting to (0.5, 0.5) instead of (0.7, 1.0) when using quickstart without visiting the Map Editor
* Fixed options not being selectable in the Options page.
* Fixed Resolution/Full Screen not prompting a restart when changes were made
* New games should once again automatically select the font size appropriate to your resolution.
* Tweaked the fertility cycle (Wet/Dry season) to be less harsh by default
* Tweaked the sediment map to provide more average fertility by default

You can opt in to the experimental branch by right clicking on "Species", selecting "Properties" and going to the "Betas" tab.

Changelog:

* Dropdown menu's now display on top of all other controls except ToolTips
* Dropdown menu's now hold focus when you click them, so that they don't interact with controls behind them
* Fixed issue with terrain-height brushes sometimes raising/lowering/flattening terrain to the left or right of the brush location, instead of under the brush.
* Water height is now set correctly when adjusted in Map Editor and Quickstart
* Fixed some incorrectly positioned UI controls
* Improved menu performance when eroding/generating sediment map

The 0.13.0.0 (New World Update) Pre-release is now available. You can access it by right-clicking on “Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution” in steam, selecting “Properties”, selecting “Betas” and opting in to the Experimental Branch.



As always, a word of caution: things on the experimental branch may be unstable! Also, be warned, the default season settings will probably need some tweaking. They can be quite harsh.

Final note, 0.13.0 does not have backwards compatibility with old saves or exported creatures. Sorry about that, here, have an apology shoggoth:

Geez, the SeasonalCycleEditor UI control has well and truly gone through a it’s fair share of iterations now.



The goal here is to provide an intuitive interface for customizing the duration, magnitude and offset of seasonal temperature/fertility cycles, which themselves follow a straightforward sine curve.



The first version of this control utilized a straightforward 2D texture of a sine curve, which I figured I could stretch, tile and crop to create the cycle graph. As mentioned in a previous post, that attempt failed because frickin’ arithmetic, how does it even work, science can’t explain that.



So I scrapped the sprite-based control and made this shader-based control instead:




Technically, this is two controls: the temperature and fertility curves are rendered separately on top of one another. It’s a somewhat prettier result, but it lacks polish and isn’t exactly intuitive: 6 handles on a single surface is way too many, and if it wasn’t labelled “seasonal cycle” it’d be quite difficult to guess at it’s purpose.



Not good enough. Try again:




Better. Separating the curves was a good call. Their units (Celsius and percentage respectively) are unrelated, so sharing graph space only makes it more difficult to label the Y-axis.

Labeling the seasons was also a good call. I originally considered “Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter”, but “Wet/Hot/Dry/Cold” are more descriptive and less tied to real-world seasons.

Also, they’re shorter. Easier to fit on the UI.

The result is still non-optimal, however. I don’t like that the hot and cold season bars overlap with the wet and dry seasons, a) because that’s not accurate (“hot” shouldn’t start as soon as “cold” ends!) and b) because it’s not how we *think* about seasons. Sure, we’re aware that in reality one fades into the other, but in our minds, the concept of spring is distinct and separate from the concept of summer.

To be maximally intuitive, a graph like this should reflect the mental model the player has of the thing being graphed.



One more try:



Much better. Still could use some tweaks, labels, and a brighter season description bar (my laptop has a very bright screen, which makes it hard to see how dark some parts of the game are until I export the screenshots to a different machine), but it’s very much getting there. I’m happy to leave it here for the moment and make progressive tweaks to the design as I push forward to 0.13.

Cheers,
Quasar

Cross-posted from: https://speciesdevblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/tis-the-seasons/

Sorry for the radio silence everyone, I’ve been submerged in some refactoring work that, while vital to keep a codebase the size of Species workable going forward, doesn’t make for great screenshots and/or interesting blog material.

Here's what I've been up to:

https://speciesdevblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/04/keepin-on/

https://speciesdevblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/16/more-multithreading-also-terrain-brushes/