Completely overhauled how species are detected
So far, species classification was based on the features of an organism. Simply put, if a plant evolved a new type of leaf, or an animal evolved a new type of fin, the game decided this was a new species, without giving it further thought. For longer simulations, this resulted in hundreds of thousands of species (99% of which only had 1 organism before going extinct), eating up RAM and disk space.
Now, instead, the game only considers a subpopulation of a species a new separate species if it's large enough. This solves many of the tech problems and seems to be more intuitive to players, but also brings new challenges. Most notably, large species might have one or more subspecies that are different from the main species in one way or another, but not large enough to justify branching it off; think of a single stemmed plant having a grass subspecies, or a herbivore species with a subspecies that also eats meat.
Optimization
- Fixed huge memory leak in the planet editor, causing the game to crash during longer sessions (thanks TheSpaceCore69, Feather!)
- Fixed huge memory leak when drawing statistics, causing the game to crash during longer sessions (thanks Deven Lobua!)
- Moving the secondary color sliders in the animal editor now updates the colors in real-time
- Removed a very frequent log message when (auto)saving which made it very slow
Fixes for sessile and/or upright animals
- Making upright bodies longer now makes it longer on top (instead of at the bottom)
- Newly extended torso position is now closer to the cursor
- Extending the torso position after adding sessile foot no longer results in illegal animals (thanks theGreyHanded, Flyer24!)
- Animals with a sessile foot are now always sessile, even if it also has fins (thanks igloo!)
Improving behavior of keyboard controls
- 'Escape' can now also be used to leave animal placement mode
- The main button to skip the intro is now space (but x also still works)
- Fixed UI glitch after doing escape + click in the species list view
Discovered and fixed two causes of corrupt save files
- The mechanism that moves sessile feet to the side of the animal if mutated into something else sometimes also triggered when it shouldn't, resulting in illegal animals (thanks MarcoDBAA, Ed Balls!)
- When loading scenarios, the climate zone information was not provided, preventing loading scenarios at all (thanks Bird!)
Misc
- Mutated body parts no longer retain the descriptive label (when hovering them in the editor) of their ancestors (thanks TaterTot!)
- 'Montane' climate zone boundary now depends on ocean height (thanks Slurp, Chared!)
- Fixed maximum population size statistics for species
- Fixed wrong volcano texture after eruption
