New year, new release. Here’s Thrive 0.5.3! For the first time ever Thrive is available in many new languages, all of this is in part thanks to our community, which has helped with several of these new translations.
This version also brings key bindings, improved tooltips, new editor features and much more!
You can download the launcher below to get the newest version, and read on for more information.
Thrive 0.5.3
Without further ado, let’s see what this release brings us. In case you want a summarized version, you can read the patch notes here too.
Translations
Thrive finally supports translations! This has been possible thanks to Weblate and our Community, which has already helped with a lot of translations as you can see in the picture above. We added fallback fonts as well, for languages with special characters and we expect to include new languages in the future as our community and team keep contributing to the game. If you wish to help us in this task, you can join us here.
Key Rebinding
You can customize the game controls now, via the options menu you’ll access the Inputs tab where you can change any key bindings to fit your needs. With this change we modified the input system to make coding anything that needs input handling easier.
Saving System
We made some big changes to the saving system, it’s now more efficient so future development of Thrive will be easier. However, with this change old saves won’t be compatible with this new version, unfortunately you’ll have to say them goodbye.
The saving system has been improved to properly save properties such as reproduction progress, external effects, editor undo history, camera zoom in the editor, what editor tab was open, microbe velocity and more. These parameters are also properly loaded when opening a save file so once you reopen your game you’ll find everything as you left it.
We also fixed several bugs related with quickloading while the game was already loading a save and prevented quicksaving before the game loads. The load menu was improved to prevent loading broken saves even better than before and quickloading saves made in former versions is now prevented so you’ll have to use the loading menu for that.
Editor
There are a couple of new features for the Editor. First off, panning, you can now pan the camera around while editing your cells. Second Making cells with disconnected hexes is now impossible, this also applies to NPC cells. Organelles are now moved around the center of mass of the cell too, with these changes organisms will look a bit more realistic.
Tooltips were improved and now they follow the mouse cursor and are easier to read. Membrane tooltips were changed as well and now the stats they display are relative to the cell’s current membrane.
The labels on the MP bar have new colors and the arrow that showed the direction of your cell was brought back, you may remember this feature from older versions.
Gameplay
Cell walls were changed and now they don’t allow engulfing, while this change will impact the gameplay experience of those of you that liked to use this structures, we hope this change helps balancing the game.
Compounds that your cell doesn’t use won’t be absorbed anymore and compound clouds that have very little quantities of chemicals won’t be shown in the hover panel.
Other gameplay improvements include: collision shapes of floating chunks, music fading, centering the win and loosing screens, fixed the saving message so it allows interacting with the GUI and disabling the editor button when the player dies.
Finally, we included new tips and Easter egg messages.
Auto-evo
With the changes in the saving system auto-evo now only starts after an auto save happens. We also modified auto-evo to load from a JSON file to make it easier to tweak for both programmers and modders and there’s a new option in the menu that allows auto-evo to run only after entering the editor, in case it hinders performance for you.
Misc. changes
- Invalid place sound is no longer played if you click below the patch map
- Extinct species are now mentioned much more clearly in auto-evo results
- Added a new button in the main menu to open our github
- Added a popup warning when playing in GLES2 mode
- Game version is now printed to logs on startup
- Fixed typo in bioluminescent vacuole name
- Devbuild upload script now has more retries on upload failure
- Thermoplast tooltip now mentions that it is unimplemented
- Fixed one patch having incorrect environmental gas amounts
- Fixed help menu mentioning the wrong number of years passing
- Repository improvements (banner image, added code of conduct, updated setup instructions a bit, updated style guide, switched to pre-commit to make it possible to use on Windows)
- ATP damage sound is now not played if a cell is dead
- Health bar now goes to 0 if the player is dead
- Renamed Lux to lx
The Future
As you may have read in the previous progress updates, we’ve worked on binding agents and thermoplasts among other things. These features didn’t make it to the release and there’s no guarantee yet that they will be in the next one, working on something like this takes a lot of time and tweaking from several teams. However we intend to make a small patch soon including some stuff that didn’t make it in time. So who knows, these organelles may be there earlier than you expect.
We are glad that our Patreon has grown so much during its first year. It’s getting near our second Goal of $500. Once it’s reached, hhyyrylainen will be able to work part time on Thrive, assuring continuous development on the game. We also want to give a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to our Project in any form. Whether you are developers, patrons or fans spreading the word, you all made this possible!
As usual, we’ll have a Developer Livestream later today, so tune in to ask us questions, learn about the current development of the game and fall with us towards the downward spiral of silliness that seems to haunt all of our podcasts.
