With the release of 0.6.1 we were pleasantly surprised that there were no reported issues from the get go, and didn’t have to release a single hotfix. having gone smoothly as ever, we’re back on the tracks of development in preparation for the next update!

0.6.2 is set to be a release focused on performance, with the majority of our efforts going into streamlining the game’s processes and calculations so it isn’t so resource-intensive to run. Also planned is the continued construction of our later game’s prototypes!

Unfortunately this means we may not have much in the way of new features for the microbe stage this coming release, but we hope that a much smoother game more than makes up for that!

Programming

• New DevBuild for our patrons:
  • Added HUD messages that show to report various things to the player, for example if the player can’t engulf something the reason is now shown with this kind of message
  • Colony members that can engulf can now enter engulf mode even if the player cell cannot engulf
  • Work on the multicellular prototype has now resumed with 2 new placeholder organelles for future use: axon and myofibril, these will be used for creating specialized cell types later
  • Patch map display now starts off centered on the current patch instead of always panning to it when opening
  • The spawn algorithm for filling the area around the player now only spawns up to 80% of the entity limit to allow the sector spawning logic more chances to work
  • When the player now reproduces the game will try to keep the entity count under control by despawning existing entities if there are too many (player daughter cells are prioritized if they make up a large fraction of the total entity limit)
  • Cells in colonies are now counted in entity limit (except the player colony as the player is not part of the entity limit)
  • Fixed bug introduced in previous release where organelle tooltip process numbers did not react to patch change (photosynthetic organelles were the visible place where the issue was visible)
  • Fixed temperature “compound” being incorrectly shown in the patch compound statistics graph
  • Fixed uneven main menu buttons with long translation texts, all buttons now stretch to the same width when one translation doesn’t fit
  • Added a new debug panel showing player current coordinates and mouse cursor world position
  • Our input system now throws an exception when registering a duplicate listener object, this will help in developing the game by catching that mistake much sooner
  • Microbe digestion code now only runs 30 times per second to use a bit less performance
  • Removed saving of usefulCompounds in a compound bag as that data can be regenerated very easily and it increased save sizes unnecessarily
  • Refactored the species details panel and fossilization dialog internally to be more reusable
  • Updated our used compression library SharpZipLib to 1.4.2, this required switching our GZip handling to use the C# standard version to avoid a bug that broke saves with the new library version
  • Updated translations

Graphics

• Nothing Substantial

Gameplay

• Nothing Substantial

Sound

• Nothing Substantial

Theory

• Nothing Substantial

Outreach

• Nothing Substantial

Other

• If you missed our latest Thrivestream, you can watch it here!