for smell, what if we have small buttons of different colors that you can click to smell for certain things. For example we can click on a certain colored button (possibly in the shape of a shard) and then a cloud trail will appear matching the color of the button, leading the player to what you are looking for. Think of it like this: All the player sees is blackness, but then if you want to look only for food you click a green shard (or whatever color will be for food) located somewhere on the screen and then cloud trails leading to possible food sources appear, they will become thicker as you get closer to the source. What do you guys think?

for smell, what if we have small buttons of different colors that you can click to smell for certain things. For example we can click on a certain colored button (possibly in the shape of a shard) and then a cloud trail will appear matching the color of the button, leading the player to what you are looking for. Think of it like this: All the player sees is blackness, but then if you want to look only for food you click a green shard (or whatever color will be for food) located somewhere on the screen and then cloud trails leading to possible food sources appear, they will become thicker as you get closer to the source. What do you guys think?

for smell, what if we have small buttons of different colors that you can click to smell for certain things. For example we can click on a certain colored button (possibly in the shape of a shard) and then a cloud trail will appear matching the color of the button, leading the player to what you are looking for. Think of it like this: All the player sees is blackness, but then if you want to look only for food you click a green shard (or whatever color will be for food) located somewhere on the screen and then cloud trails leading to possible food sources appear, they will become thicker as you get closer to the source. What do you guys think?

Is this assuming that the organism has no other senses?

_________________Look at how far we've come when people thought we'd get nowhere. Imagine how far we can go if we try to get somewhere.

Sorry if it's been thought of already, but this seemed the right place to ask/suggest this; as far as organs go, is this "brain" just a single part or have we yet thought of segmenting it, where you can add brain sections that have different attributes, or, for example, a slider that changes the size of brain parts to make them more or less prominent? For example, scaling up the part to do with fighting and aggression makes the creature more prone to that behavior, or adding a portion that deals with emotion makes it more empathetic, and so on.

To bring up something else, maybe an electrical sense, like a shark, could be some kind of motion detector, since the sense depends on movement of muscles and other electrical fields produced by living things.

Sorry if it's been thought of already, but this seemed the right place to ask/suggest this; as far as organs go, is this "brain" just a single part or have we yet thought of segmenting it, where you can add brain sections that have different attributes, or, for example, a slider that changes the size of brain parts to make them more or less prominent? For example, scaling up the part to do with fighting and aggression makes the creature more prone to that behavior, or adding a portion that deals with emotion makes it more empathetic, and so on.

A-lot of this discussion should be happening on the organ design thread.The brain as far as we have so far will be editable, but posts about ORGANS like the brain should be in the organ design thread, this is about how we will integrate sense, for example different eyes should have different effects on the screen a filter of sorts.

But i agree that its kind of hard to tell whether things are organ design or senses.

To bring up something else, maybe an electrical sense, like a shark, could be some kind of motion detector, since the sense depends on movement of muscles and other electrical fields produced by living things.

That sounds interesting, sounds like it would be a challenge as well. On the note of other species and how they see/get around, we can look at bats, or how certain species of snake uses infrared sensing, granted this would make gameplay a lot of fun, especially if you have the option to play without eyes and rely on on screen wave vibrations, like a very small differential to the left right forward or back, depending on how your sensing organs are set up. Granted this would make technological gameplay an interesting challenge, unlike spore, in spore if you play without eyes you can somehow still see everything, which made no sense, granted it did make cell stage on hard a lot of fun, but thats about it. Infrared or thermal site could be done like how AvP pulled it off for the predator, granted you could switch between sight modes. And for the electrical sense as Immortal stated, could be done like sonar, a small on screen detection waves or if a creature is within a specific range and is making any form of movement you will see a pocket of a shaped electrical field. Smell would be a aspect to, lit up by trails that have color codes that would mean anything from, prey to don't belgium with that thing.

(Sorry if this may have been suggested already) I understand that the plan for senses is to be able to go from first-person to third-person on a whim, and in first-person you see the world how the organism sees it. Would this first-person mode change your view based on the position and number of eyes? Like, if a creature has eyes on the side of its head, your view would be of what each eye is seeing, and there would be very little overlap and poor depth perception. If the eyes were forward-facing, such as on a predatory animal, the view might be more human-friendly. And then of course you could have crazier view with rear-facing eyes and stuff like that.