Build of the day for 5.1.2023

And we are back to your regularly scheduled DevBuilds after a break for Christmas. I'm now working fulltime on Thrive so hopefully I'll be able to make much faster progress going forward. I put out a poll earlier this week asking how often you patrons would like to see DevBuilds going forward. I was a bit surprised to see that most people would prefer weekly (or at most twice a week) updates. I'm of course fine with just making a weekly build going forward, and maybe the occasional second build on some weeks, but don't hold me to that even if that ends up never happening. I think I should clarify that thanks to our automatic build system making a DevBuild is just a matter for me to look over the last few commits and rephare them as changes suitable for reading by a general audience, and then just hitting one button to promote an automatic build to BOTD status. In fact this writing of a Patreon post is the most time consuming part (and obviously I can't do this unless I've first looked over what was done so that I can talk about it).

With that out of the way, I'll quickly talk about this build. People were truly (me included) taking time off from Thrive the past few weeks so even though the interval between this build and the previous one is long, there isn't that much to cover. There was of course some activity but not that much over the two weeks I was gone as I was fearing initially based on the "first" weekend of my break. Anyway we got some crash fixes and small improvements. I also fixed the process panel freezing in certain situations (most reliable were being ready to reproduce and dying), so now players can monitor the process speeds much better while light levels change.

As to what's next I've started on a slightly bigger task of making the GUI at least basically controller (and keyboard) navigable. I already got the main menu mostly done and moved onto making a generic tab control that shows the controller buttons for switching between tabs. For that I grabbed a pack of controller buttons for various PlayStation and Xbox controllers as I plan to make the game automatically detect which controller icons should be shown. That shouldn't take more than a couple of days next week to finish. After which I might still continue a bit on the controller line and make the controller buttons show up in the key rebinding menu (and also check that the button prompts correctly show controller buttons as I already did some work for the game to detect if a controller or keyboard was most recently used).

On the longer term horizon there's some bug fixing I need to do and then I'd like to finish the upgrade system and get the cilia pulling PR completed. After that it might be time for prototypes again (I'll hopefully ask before that the VIP patrons to not completely neglect the fact that there should be development priority polls with some regularity).

Edit: forgot to mention that being a salaried employee I get the first benefit already tomorrow as it is a national holiday. That's why this update was made on a Thursday. In the future the updates may get posted on Fridays.

In this build:

- Process panel now keeps working even when the player is ready

  to enter the editor

- Auto-evo exploring tool now shows the total simulation run time

- Invalid fossil files are now skipped instead of crashing the game

- World seed is now logged when map generation fails

- Fixed a bug in world generation where it failed due to not keeping

  track of a created tidepool patch

- Fixed a crash when an entity with attached fossilisation button was

  destroyed

- Light level updates are now no longer applied each frame to save

  slightly on performance

- Unified codebase by removing use of Godot meta in one place

- Updated translations

- hhyyrylainen