The Bibites 0.6 Alpha 16 : Balance, Preview, And Stomach Acid

Ironing out the last release and all the new introductions in systems, this alpha should be a lot more balanced! With the help of Aaron, a new member of the dev team, we put extra effort in doing extensive testing and fine-tuning.
And no need to worry, we also have a load of new features and other things to get very excited about.
This also marks the final significant alpha, aside from small adjustments and fixes, before the official 0.6 public release! So even non-Patrons have a lot to be excited about!  


We also have the first introduction of the new dynamic internals previews right there in the Biology panel, alongside the old preview while we finish moving the stomach and egg organ content to it!
It will allow you to see the realistic proportion of each of your bibites organs according to their organ's apportionment gene.
Like this bibite here, has huge throat and jaw muscles!

P.S.: There might be slight deviations in proportions compared to the exact area of an organ, so don't start counting the pixels if exactly 14.5% of them make up the womb, but it's not my fault, math is HARD and after 3 days of scribbles and endless desmos pages I figured I arrived at good enough approximations (btw, fun trivia, did you know some mathematical equations are algebraically impossible to solve? And especially with trigonometric function? Like I had to use a lot for area formulas... fun :D )

New Metabolism Speed System

Normalization of metabolism speed!
Now, pretty much every bibite system is scaled with the metabolism speed gene.
It used to be very chaotic and hard to follow what components of the bibites were scaled by the metabolism gene and how, but now it's simple!
Everything is, linearly!
From muscle force, growth, fat production, baby production, healing, etc.
With the only notable exception of the brain update rate and the stomach digestion rate (which has also been balanced, but more on that later)

This is an enormous buff to metabolism and we are planning on a value of 1.0 being the new default. As most bibites previously had a pretty low metabolism, this will throw the balance of existing sims in jeopardy, but it was very necessary.

We then had to think of a good way of giving a penalty to a higher metabolism, so we settled on adding a new Metabolism Efficiency setting (75% by default). This scales between individuals by the power of their metabolism speed gene, meaning a gene of 1.0 would give a metabolic efficiency of 75%, but a gene of 2.0 would lead to a metabolic efficiency of 75% ^2.0 = 56%
This metabolic efficiency is gonna be a very important number because it will be applied to EVERY energy expenditure of that bibite. Meaning that a faster bibite will have to use more energy for the same output compared to a slower bibite.

The default metabolism costs and movement costs have been lowered to give previous older bibites a chance.

Balance to Size

Just in the same way, people were complaining of whales being too prevalent in the meta, so we invested a lot of energy and time in figuring out how to adjust the setting's default and change some systems in order to give some chance to the smaller folks.

• The chemistry system (just digestion for now) has been overhauled and is now proportional to the matter's surface area. This means chewing and taking more, smaller, bites of your food now helps digest it faster!

• The reactivity settings of the different materials have been adjusted and are now expressed in units u/s to reflect the new chemical system

• Digestion potential no longer scales with size. The actual energy gained from digestion by bigger bibites might still be higher, as they have bigger stomachs that allow them to digest more food in parallel, but it's not as straightforward as it used to

• Increase to the default damages output of bites (jaw muscles default strength)

• Equations for the bite periods have changed

• Aging threshold was lowered and aging penalties increased

• Healing has been severely nerfed and will now take place a lot slower. Injuries are not going to be so insignificant anymore!
  Bigger bibites will also have a harder time healing (proportionally) (+ 2 new settings to tune that behavior)

• Added new info (metabolism efficiency, heal rate, etc.) to the Biology Panel

Other Changes

• Bibites will now register the closest seen point of an entity instead of the center point, fixing an issue where giant pellets were invisible

• Bibites can now vomit!

• want2Eat Node changed to tanh function (negative activation will cause expulsion of the stomach's content)

• Adjustments to the basic bibite template to better fit the new defaults

• Increased fat energy density

• Lowered energy density of armor (less costly to grow)

• Increased Armor's cohesiveness (strength) to 500 N/u from 250

• Meat decay has been slowed, to increase the opportunity for scavenging to evolve

• Increased the default background mutation rate

• Added setting for minimum pellet size to help performances

• Fat production/consumption affinity (efficiency) now scales with the Sqrt of activation

• Added two new settings to control the curves for diet affinity

• Small adjustment to other default parameters

Fixes

• Fix to pheromones spot placement, with improvement to performance

• Fixed formula for wrapping world outside shade

• Exact formula for wrapping the world outside of the shade

• Fixed default virgin spawner parameter

• fixed bibite spawn setting minimum not overriding cap

• Fixed timekeeper method to more accurately display FPS TPS and STPS

• Fixed color selector panel

• Fixed zone previewer not to scale

• Fixed acid level stomach animation not updating when empty

• Fixed duplication of decay components on load (increase in performance)

• Fixed endless saving display bug when in the template menu

• Changed sprite benchmarks for mouth and armor

• Fix to bloodsucking ignoring armor

• The immune nodes should no longer mutate

• Connections from a node to itself are no longer counted and possible

• Fixes to brain sorting algorithm

• Fixed bug that would allow floating hidden neurons to appear (they will also be automatically removed)