I think winged carnivores diving for anything would be cool ;P. (As always, no promises)

You stole my idea!

thief!

@@majkatrebaticka2957 No that's my idea!

@@majkatrebaticka2957 You're a thief!

Maybe with thought the same idea the same time

chances are nobody will see this, but this guy is doing the lord's work here

@@maxdude7957 YES

Hey Jack, thanks for the suggestion, I was thinking the same thing!

Hey, thanks for your ideas, much appreciated! Making notes :) .

Can u get the seed on end thing

Els

You are absolutely right, and I learned that the hard way: carnivores hunting all the time meant the prey animals went extinct all the time. I solved this by only making them hunt when hungry, and only reproduce when population numbers are low.

@@TheSapling haha, dang if only i had come a little sooner

I like your way of thinking! At the moment, to keep things simple, speed is only related the chosen legs. However, because small animals need a lot more footsteps to reach the same speed, it looks like they are walking faster ;) .

Hey Erlina, thanks a lot for these ideas! Any real life example of sap drinkers or root eaters you had in mind?

@@TheSapling sap-drinkers: nuthatches, some bat species and most species of woodpeckers, especially sapsuckers. For root-eaters: burrowing tuber specialists like groundhogs, voles, and gophers extinct species like the burrowing cynodont Diictodon; general opportunists or herbivores like squirrels, rabbits, and wild pigs which eat roots only occasionally when present.

Haha thanks, I never noticed that one until now ;)

Yes

agreed

Yes

And plants, maybe all the plants n animals would have to start there then evolve to fit land

@@itsjustalf7747 yes

Hey Greef, thanks a lot for your feedback, much appreciated! I'm making notes here! Edit: there is the option to sort by population size, by your comment tells me this is not super clear.

also i lost twitter

Hey EverLootion, yeah I am always thinking about 2 updates ahead (currently thinking about the update after the one after this one). Still, it is really helpful to read the things you come up with, as it gives me insight in which ideas other people think are cool to put in, so it helps me prioritize.

@@TheSapling the next update looks like its going to be dope though, thanks for making and working on this game even though you dont have to

Yes, all of the six devlogs are showcasing part of the same update!

Hey Talon, you will like devlog 5 :).

Ok thx I will look forward to it

There is so much to do.

All good ideas but dont forget that hes only ONE person

@@bruhman109 i know

By remake i mean rename . My keyboard is broken

Hey Majka, thanks for your ideas, player suggestions are always very welcome and very inspiring to me! Also, the update indeed already has a name, will actually be revealed next episode :).

Aiming for June 15!

@@TheSapling Cool!

@@TheSapling Will you do video of running a sim for 7 days when this update is out?

@@jorgenieto9703 Was planning to yes, not sure exactly when though.

Hey Moop, thanks for your suggestion, much appreciated! Without making any promises, agreed that the current system only allows for very 'broad' stuff, while sometimes I could be interesting/useful if the 'trigger stimulus' was much more specific. The challenge, I think, is how to translate that into a UI that is fun to use for people who have never heard of (and are not interested in learning about) IF, AND and OR statements :)

Hey Talon, that's actually on purpose, this is were a library of 3D models is stored. The actual problem is being able to look 'under the map' ;).

Oh ok

Hi Wet, sorry to hear the game hasn't been running smoothly for you! I'd say this is above all a software problem; all of the updates and patches so far included optimizations to make some part of the game run better, and so will the next one (which will improve situations with a lot of animals, but there's no date yet). If you really want to look at it from a hardware perspective: RAM problems will mostly result in crashes (OutOfMemory errors), less so in low FPS. In my experience, you get lowest FPS when when you're zoomed in a bit, and the game needs to show a lot of animated objects... which gets 'better' with a more powerful GPU.

@@TheSapling That's interesting! My CPU and GPU are not being utilized that much at all. Maybe it is a software thing. To be more specific in my "report", it is around the 12th millennium that things really start slowing down, and it then slowly goes down from 60fps to 1fps.

​@@wetstoffels3198 Interesting indeed... so the animated objects are not what is slowing you down, the simulation is. Does saving and loading make a difference?

@@TheSapling Very short term or not at all. When it saves it will stutter for a second and then continue as it did before. If you mean reloading the level, then that has a short-term effect of increasing performance by 5-10fps before it goes back to the baseline experienced before the reload. My GPU(GTX 1660) is being utilized at an extremely low level - like below 5%. My CPU(i5-9600k) is at ~42%. The most noticeable for me is that the game will gobble up my RAM until practically 95%. I noticed that it gets worse after turning on random mutations; if I'm allowed to speculate, it might have to do with the game not handling the sheer amount of species models that exist.

@@wetstoffels3198 Thanks again, this is incredibly useful information! You are absolutely right about the RAM usage: because building new models is so expensive, the game stores a cache of prebuilt organisms. While this cache cleans itself regularly, this is not yet perfect and as a result the game with a lot species (like thousands, if you turn on random mutations) will slowly eat RAM if you leave it running for more than a few hours. Reloading is the workaround solution for this; as long as I reload every few hours, I can leave the simulation running for many days (did that last month actually ;) ). As far as I can tell, though, this should be unrelated to the FPS. This morning I compared the current Steam version with the upcoming patch, and discovered that the improvement is much larger than I thought: in situations with a lot of animals, or in situations with a lot of (plants with a lot of) fruits, I really go from 1FPS to 30FPS. I aim to release these optimizations this or next week, so you can try to see if that makes difference (if you're not tired of it yet :) )... I'll notify you here. If so, that still doesn't explain why your CPU and GPU usage are so low, but we'll see.

Definitely yes!

Yeah I get this question more often. Graphics wise it should work, but the simulation is quite heavy, so only very small levels would be possible.

@@TheSapling oh.....

Hahaha I get this suggestion on a daily basis but the way you put it my favorite :)

Hey Shannon, thanks for the feedback! I hear this more often, but I can't really pinpoint what it is exactly that annoys people. Any pointers?

To me its mostly due to the navigation. Maybe you could do something similar to the Totally Accurate Battle Simulator camera.

@@TheSaplingThe main problem with the camera is when you try to use the WASD controls and turn the camera at the same time. The camera works fine if you do one or the other independently, but when you do both, the turning becomes really confusing and hard to control. It only fixes after you enter into and exit the plant/animal creator.

@@shannonsmith3818 Just tried it, and wow this is indeed annoying! Never knew this, thanks a lot!

Hey Ultra Dinosaur, me too, but as it stands right now I don't think that would work; there is so much going on in the simulation as it is that I'm having trouble to get it to run reliably on powerful gaming PCs, let alone a phone ;)

Haha would indeed be cool... or sexes to begin with ;) . It won't be in this update unfortunately.