Overhauled optimization mechanism that decides which 3D models to show
Building procedural 3D models on the fly is expensive; on most modern hardware, showing an accurate model for each plant and animal in realtime is not feasbile. Therefore, as an optimization mechanic, until now only populous species got their own models, which was an acceptable approximation for some time. However, ever since I made a change to how speciation works a few years back, causing many more species, a lot of players noticed this optimization mechanism partly ruined the gameplay experience for them. The revised speciation patch two weeks ago, which significantly decreases the number of species, was already a first phase to fix this problem. This week, I take it a step further and introduce a revision to the mechanism itself.
In this new approach, the game will still prebuild the most populous species; the main difference is what happens if the species model is NOT available. Before, it would default to the most used species. Now, instead, it will use a so-called 'library profile', which is a summary of the most important bodyparts. For animals, this entails which eyes, mouth and limb the animal has. If an animal with a similar profile is available, it will be used. Otherwise, the game will quickly create it from scratch and store it for later.
Changes to animal mutation
- Made the threshold for animal speciation more dynamic, so it happens earlier when there are fewer species (thank you, Flyer24, SethMMX, CommonRaccoon, AntRuler13, Ewumd68, Liam, QuaLITyCli!)
- Fixed a problem where in some cases animal mutations happened so often that subspecies never got populous enough to form a new species
Made it easier to keep your species alive
- Lowered the energy cost for animal babies for larger species
- Lowered the energy buffer size when giving birth (extra required energy, so the mother does not immediately starve afterwards), in particular for older animals
Started a project aimed at making the simulation easier to understand
- Revised the tooltips for the sandbox panel buttons and made them show up earlier (from 2 seconds to 3/4 second)
- Added various new and more detailed tooltips to the planet editor
- Added various new and more detailed tooltips to the plant editor
Misc
- Limited the egg laying animation to walking animals
- Fixed an animal editor bug that occurred when adding a sessile foot to upright juveniles (thanks, DJ_999!)
