Aim: to make the environment of species much more dynamic and responsive, encouraging adaptability and making the game feel much less static and boring (also prettier).
Green is Implemented,
Black is Planned,
Blue is In-Progress.
Developments
Biome system (Everything from rainforests to tundra to coral-reefs to lava-plains)
- - - - - Dynamic temperature/humidity map
- - - - Real-time terrain multi-texturing with more than 4 ground textures.
- - - - Moddable Biomes, mapped to temperature/humidity in a format similar to the well known Whittaker Diagram
- - - - Changeable over time: can animate.
- - - - Responsiven to in-game factors, like grazing and tree-eating.
Individual Trees (3-Dimensional and Biome Dependant)
- - - - - Lots more variety (beyond the current 6 tree types)
- - - - Moddable Tree Stats (beyond energy capacity and size), to allow for potential future features like perching, shade, different types of trees (fruit vs leaves), etc.
- - - - Tree Placement, Type and Frequency dependant on what is specified in Biome Stats.
- - - - Tree types on biomes that don't support them die out and regrow as valid types.
- - - - Instanced 3D Models instead of Billboards.
- - - - Alpha maps used to make their foliage and/or fruit disappear and reappear as they are eaten, rather than growing and shrinking as they currently do.
Grazing (New food source, completely changing the selection pressures)
- - - - - Visual - Grass billboards, dependant on biomes
- - - - Replace the Idle behavior with a grazing behavior.
- - - - Change from generic 'Trees' to 'Fruit Trees', making them more appealing to omnivores and even some carnivores.
- - - - Refit the Herbivore/Carnivore range to make full-herbivores the only ones who can graze efficiently.
- - - - Make grazing decrease the fertility (ie. Humidity) of the local area, meaning that excessive grazing will render the ground barren and force creatures to migrate.
- - - - Tweak grazing efficiency and fertility loss to make it invariably inefficient, but still a potential survival strategy in the right climate
Water (oceans are cool)
- - - - - Little more than an impassable barrier for this update, but the water plane will be a great placeholder for later in-game developments.
- - - - -A placeholder system allowing the player to trigger global temperature and fertility changes.
- - - - - RTS Camera
- - - - Music
- - - - Better Tooltips
Fixes
- Everything in 0.4.1 (Hotfix 5)