Progress Update 12/23/2023

It's winter time again, and many of our developers have been dropping off one by one for a much deserved rest and break from Thrive's development, including our lead programmer who is now officially on christmas break. Unfortunately this means there likely won't be any substantial news or progress made in the next two weeks, but certainly for good reason!

We hope everyone has a good one, and happy holidays!

Programming

• New DevBuild for our patrons:

  • Implemented fog of war for the patch map, you now need to explore the map to find all the patches that exist

  • Added multiple new microbe stage tutorials and reworked many existing ones as well as changed the tutorial flow in the editor

  • Removed protoplasm from the game, it was an old buff for AI bacteria cells

  • Reimplemented pilus damage stab cooldown when dealing large amounts of damage at once, hopefully to prevent ejected cells from very quickly killing their engulfer

  • Reduced bacteria swarm spawn counts for larger bacteria to try to balance large swarms of killer bacteria that clear out all smaller species

  • Made the move and delete hotkeys work for macroscopic editor

  • Fixed mouse click not working regression in signaling agent command wheel

  • Added .mo files to gitignore to stop people accidentally sending those in PRs

  • Added some safety code to ensure ejected cells will despawn in a few seconds if they are dead

  • Added safety code against entities being stuck in dead engulfers, instead the engulfing state is now properly cleared

  • Updated code style rules and checking tools

  • Removed unused code constants

  • Setup dependabot to automatically update our git submodules

  • Some native side code build options improvements

  • Updated translations

• The fog of war feature has been implemented in thev latest devbuild. A new veil of mystery awaits you in the world! This is the first major feature to be implemented for our next release, 0.6.5.

Graphics

• Nothing Substantial

Gameplay

• Developer thoughts on limitations of the Macroscopic Editor

• Discussion on necessity of RuBisCo

Sound

• Nothing Substantial

Theory

• Nothing Substantial

Outreach

• Nothing Substantial

Other

• Please welcome our newest member of the testing team, Captain Colon!