This week we have been focusing on preparing the 0.5.6.1 patch update which has now been released. This update drastically improves auto-evo’s performance, so players should no longer be playing a waiting game instead of a cell game. The update also includes some improvements to auto-evo’s behavior, which should make it much more sensible and lenient to the player. We hope that this, alongside a host of other bug fixes and improvements, should make for a much better experience for our players.

If you continue to experience long loading times, game crashes, unwarranted assassination via auto-evo, or other general issues; Please let us know and we will try to investigate the problem and solve it.

If you haven’t already, check out Thrive on Steam and Itch.io!

Programming

• 0.5.6.1 patch notes:
  • Added a panel showing auto-evo prediction raw numbers to help players understand how auto-evo sees their species
  • Various changes hoping to improve auto-evo experience: fixed iron not being taken into account, fixed marine snow density not being taken into account, added extinction if too many species present in a patch, greatly improved auto-evo speed (about 20x faster now)
  • Pili in colony members now function correctly
  • Reduced max game entities to 300 to reduce late game lag
  • Excess compounds from engulfed chunks are now released as clouds
  • Removed the X close button in the undo button tutorial as people were too happily skipping it
  • Updated to Godot 3.4
  • Fixed flagella pointing direction being sometimes broken, especially when at 0,0 coordinates
  • Fixed auto-evo using energy balance instead of total consumption in a few calculations
  • Empty saves list now shows a text saying no saves exist
  • Tweaked engulfing sound, it now fades in and out
  • Fixed binding agents organelle duplicating when preparing for reproduction, now the code uses the organelle unique property to detect which ones should not be duplicated to be future-proof
  • Changing maximum FPS is now possible in the options
  • Fixed a disposed microbe bind by running the attach callback on the next frame, like it was supposed to run as per old code comments
  • Detached colony cells now keep their rotation that they had in the colony
  • Changed the auto-evo prediction tutorial to mention the new prediction panel that can be opened to show all the numbers for it
  • Added validation to save names (and stricter species name validation) to ensure saving doesn’t fail due to file writing issues when filenames contain invalid characters
  • Added a global lock around save image resizing when loading for display, this seems to help around a Godot multithreading issue that caused / causes crashes when opening the load menu
  • Fixed bugs regarding the binding agent sometimes being the wrong colour
  • Fixed problems with colour picker texts being able to be too wide
  • Fixed old Godot version being mentioned in our documentation
  • New mod form now requires internal name to start with a capital letter
  • Added documentation regarding profiling the game
  • Updated our styleguide and git usage guide
  • Auto-evo results now react to language change
  • Fixed auto-evo prediction texts not updating on language change
  • Warning popup on trying to open a non-existent directory should now work on Windows
  • Dehydrated builds now ignore some file types, which should result in less dehydrated downloads per devbuild, thanks to a new godotpcktool version that supports name filtering
  • Full mod info now includes internal name
  • Various modding improvements: forgetting uploaded Workshop mod details, manually entering an existing ID, mods can specify if they require a restart, mod uploader now allows entering change notes and it now warns if preview image is too large, the uploader also now remembers the details that were last used to send an update, tweaked mod manager layout
  • Mod manager scene can now directly be launched from Godot for debugging
  • Enabled autowrap on mod load caveat text to ensure it doesn’t go offscreen in some languages
  • Switched to using NetAnalyzers package instead of the deprecated one we used before
  • Updated translations

Graphics

• Nothing Substantial

Gameplay

• Nothing Substantial

Sound

• Nothing Substantial

Theory

• Nothing Substantial

Outreach

• Nothing Substantial

Other

• Please welcome Batian and RacerBG to our development team!