OE current concept

Organism editor current concept, pulled fro the bomb shelter. This was written and created by sciocont (~sciocont) and revised by him and the community.

DO NOT POST HERE

Controls
point&click based
adding parts will be click and drag
tap s for asymmetry on a selected part
hold s for special symmetry options
in symmetry options and sizing board there will be a few number input fields for size and radial symmetry
you can click off of the creature and drag a box to select multiple objects


General Optionsthere is a general tool for stiffening or softening up bones, tentacles, and plant parts. this allows you to create stiffened raptor tails or prehensile monkey tails.
There is a tool for setting vertebrae as a tail section, and you can define in what ways a tail will move.
you can save, name, and start a new creature
you can edit the behaviors using the behavior editor. Behavior "maps" made in that editor can be shared between organisms.

The "Caste" option will allow you to differentiate your creature between sexes and types of your creature (think:ants). Once you have created a creature, you can click "add caste" and your creature will be copied into another caste slot where you can edit it. You can edit what castes are needed for reproduction, individual AI for each caste, and the proportions of castes in the species.


Creature Construction Systems
These separate construction systems in blue will be handled in different tabs of an organ panel.
Some tabs will have sub tabs such as the organ systems.

Skeletal
All of these categories can be used on one creature, and they can all be used in any one of the specific skeletal parts For example, a hand could be a tentacle with three fingers and leaves.
Vertebrate
Spine
You can create a spinal cord by making a bezier curve on the center axis of your creature. The curve shows where the spine is. You can stiffen the spine by selecting a section and using the stiffen tool. Ribs are automatically generated along the spinal cord. Each rib generated in skeletal view represents three ribs on the actual creature. You can scroll up or down on them to make them wrap around,or recede back into the spinal cord. The ribs' shapes are controlled by handles at the top, bottom and side, so you can make a circular, elliptcal, or egg shaped cross section. You can also split the spine, leading into two or three spines coming out of one.

Limbs
Limbs are made of joints and bones. You drag a joint onto the existing skeleton to create a new limb, and then put a bone on it, stretch that bone or bulk it up using the scroll wheel, then put on the next joint and the next bone and manipulate that until you have the desired shape.

Feet/Hands
Feet&Hands are done here using the same parts as the limbs, but when you want to add one, you drag the hand/foot creation bubble to the end of an existing limb, and the camera zooms in and the rest of the skeleton becomes translucent so that you can focus on that area. You build them just like legs, but you can add claws, nails, hooves, and a few other ends. If you want it to be exclusively a foot, then go back to full skeletal view and the game will ask you if you want it to be a foot, hand, or a walking grasper, a hand that you also use to walk (think gorillas).

Skull
The skull is made of separate blocks, which you mold into the desired shape. You can twist, angle and morph them until you are happy with the look. If you want to create a jaw, you can add a jaw attachment point and build off of that. You can create one piece jaws like a human's two piece jaws where they are split down the middle, or many jaws. You can place teeth and get them into shape with handles or have them procedurally generated. You can also add a beak, etc.
The skull brick construction will be used to create special bones as well, such as pelvic girdles and shoulder blades.

Invertebrate
Wormacle
This tool is used like the limb and spine parts in the vertebrate category. You draw a bezier curve on the screen, slide the points around, and you have your path for a tentacle or worm body. You can modify the shape of the wormacle by rings that are generated procedurally along it. You can edit the shape in much the same way as ribs, with top, bottom, and side handles. You can split wormacles just like the spine.

Feet/Hands
You can use the wormacle tool to make tentacle hands or blend it with other parts to make a very unique hand. You can add suction cup ends.

Head
Wormacle really does work for everything. You can use it to shape a tentacle-mop head for your creature, or stiffen it to make eye stalks.

Arthropod Parts
There will be about 25 or 36 arthropod parts. they are arranged in a square and are grouped around others with the closest shape. You use them like limb bones in vertebrates, Except they have a cube of lines around them. When parts come out, they are in their cubic form, so idf you make ti twice as long, it will be the same length as any other arthropod part that is twice as long as its original cube. This simple numeric system allows you to swap a part for another and keep the same dimensions.

Plant
Trunks/Stems
You can basically drag a type out (trunk or stem), and decide where you want to put it, then edit the basic shape of it (width/height and shape of the trunk in cross section). All plants will be differently shaped because they will have their parts' shapes generated by number strings. Trunks and stems can be created on their own or be attached to animal parts. Roots will be generated procedurally as well, but you can influence their depth and spread, and if roots can sprout up into another pant. Roots will not be needed if the plant is on an animal base.

Branches
There will be a few different types of branches and layouts of branches to choose from. You could have many grass-stalk like branches all around the plant, a few woody branches at the bottom, or clumps of different branches in different places. Branches will be populated either by placing them onto the trunk or defining areas for branches to fill using procedurals. Each branch will procedurally grow out smaller sections and twigs, and leaves, also flowers, cones, and other reproductive parts.

Fungi
Fungi parts are still under discussion. They may be incorporated into plant parts.


Muscles/Organs

Muscle
Muscles will wrap around any bones i a procedural way. Larger muscles will attach to larger bones. You can make muscles larger/smaller, but you can't delete procedurally generated muscle. You can add muscle, but remember that larger muscles consume more energy, and smaller ones pose the risk of snapping. Muscles will not wrap around arthropod, plant, or fungi parts. Wormacle invertebrate parts will be filled in by muscle.

Fat
You can also give your animal fat stores. You brush on where fat is stored, and if your creature eats enough, these places will start to expand.

Organs
Our organ systems will rely on a tube and node system. Tubes will be, of course, the tubes going through the body. Nodes will be organs, and the tubes will connect them.
There will be a few different tabs of organs, organized by organ systems. The systems will be-

Circulatory- Includes blood pump(s), type of blood plus any other specialized circulatory organs/systems. You can specify whether you want closed circulation (like in vertebrates) or open circulation (like in most invertebrates)Closed blood conduits will be automatically drawn in to all organs and extremities if you have evolved a closed circulatory system. If you do not have a closed circulatory system, you need only a pump and a few open blood conduits.
This system will include blood filters

Sexual- The sexual system will rely on the basic organs of
-genetic storage (male&female, can be separate or the same)
*the organ for this will be a gland for both male and female types (sperm and egg)
-internal fertilization (optional, female)
*the organ for this will be a sac that inflates with eggs/young
-Genetic transfer (male&female, can be separate or the same, but must match in transmission type)
*the organs for this will vary with transmission type
Transmission types
-expelled as a solid/liquid for pickup later
-spread by a pollen-like substance
-spread by spores
-spread by physical contact with a certian organ
-spread by any physical contact (probably wouldn't happen, but might)
-expelled onto an organ without contact
-internally self-fertilizing

Respiratory- The respiratory system will consist of the gas-collecting organs
there will be:
Gills (a few different types, upgrading in efficiency)
Lungs (from book lungs to very advanced lungs, even better than those of birds)
Tubes for respiration

Nervous- the nervous system is primarilt your creature's brain/gangleon. It will be constructed by molding balls of nervous tissue together to obtin the general shape of the brain/gangleon. You can have as many of these as you like, nerves will be invisible.

Digestive- this will cover both digestive and waste systems. It will consist of:
tubes connecting organs (an intestine here is not considered a tube, it will be treated as an organ)
stomach (upgraded in efficiency through different chambers/ acid levels)
intestine (upgraded in efficiency by bacteria)
*the intestine will be seen as a clump of tubes that you can shape to your specifications
filtering organs (upgraded by efficiency)
excretion organs (many different types, can be liquid/solid/gas specific or deposit one or more types of waste)
*excretion organs must be placed on the outside of a creature and connect with tubes to the digestive system


Leaves are the metabolic, circulatory, and respiratory system for plants. Leaves will be populated in the same way as branches, but there will be a leaf editor as well. It pops up and lets you basically draw the leaf in a box. You can save that leaf and the drawn part will become the 2d part and a model will be made procedurally for the 3d part. The 3d part is basically a cutout of the outline of your leaf on a slightly folded plane. Flowers and fruit will be procedurally populated wherever, or where you specify. There will be many, many different types of flowers, and each will grow into one of a few types of fruit possible for that flower.


Skinning/Details
Once you are done muscling your animal, you skin it and add all of the details. A detailed description of how the game could handle skin tightness and the appearance of feathers, quills, skin tags, and hair can be found at the following link.
viewtopic.php?f=60&t=741

There will be a skin connecting tool which can connect two parts with skin. In this way, you can create bat wings. A certain surface area to weight ratio of feathers or skin gives your creature the ability to fly. There will also be a flight feather tool. You select a limb to be the wing part, and then the tool will add flight feathers to the limb that are large enough to let the creature fly. Once this is done, the wing will try to animate itself by folding up against the body and stretching itself out all the way. It will then try a few different flaps.

There will also be a skin removal tool for beaks and bone plates that you don't want to be covered by skin.

Detail parts are just like the ones in spore, there are larger feathers, camouflage, odd lumps, etc. Put them wherever you want.


Colors/Textures
Coloring&texturing can be done procedurally or by the player using brushes construced of a skin constructed of a skin texture plus a few colors.

Fur and feathers will be 1 dimensional billboards or 2 dimensional static parts populated onto your creature with a brush or procedurally.


Sizing Board
This is where you decide how big your creature is. Basically, you start out as a silhouette that is human-sized, next to a silhouette of a human, elephant, and mouse. You can get up to about 300 ft long or down to fly-size, all by scrolling up or down on your silhouette. Underneath the silhouette is your dimensions and mass, which will change depending on your silhouette's size. Also, if you set up one dimension or your mass, the entire thing will snap to comply with that. So if my creature is 1m by 1m by 1m and five kilos and i want it to be 2m long, i set in 2m as the length, and then the silhouette,height, width and mass change accordingly.



Editor/Test Drive Environment
The basic environment is a 900m wide volcanic crater. A player decides whether the entire thing is in the deep sea, under a little water, or some water/some land, with a 300m island in the middle. Different plants, cliffs, caves, and hills let you test out your creature in its natural environment. If your creature can fly, it will have plenty of airspace to drift or flap around. The editor ceiling is about 900m high, and the player can select what sorts of gases and density the air is.

Four types of joints will be needed for the OE, they represent all possible types of movement around a point. For reference, I have some axes to look at.



Joint Rules

Any time two bones re placed together, they can be connected with a joint or fused. Fusing allows no movement, while joints allow movement to a certain degree, specified by the OE.

Joint Classes

A) This joint allows one axis movement around a point, where the two bones connected lie on the same plane. An example would be a bone on the y axis, connected with a joint to another bone on the x axis, this bone could move within the YX plane. This functions in much the same way as an elbow or knee. The range of movement can be adjusted from 0 to 180 degrees.

B) This joint allows one axis movement around a point, where the two bones connected lie on different planes. An example would be a bone on the y axis, connected with a joint to another bone on the x axis, this bone could move within the ZX plane. This functions in much the same way as a hip. The range of movement can be adjusted from 0 to 180 degrees.

C) This joint allows total movement in two planes, such as a shoulder joint. An example would be a bone on the y axis, connected with a joint to another bone on the x axis, this bone could move within the 3d space. The extent to which this bone can move can be adjusted from 1 to 180 degrees in two planes.

D) This joint Is essentially the same as joint C, but has the added capability of being able to rotate a bone around its own axis. All three rotations can be customized.

E) This is not a joint, but a joint system. In an E-system, all of the joints are hooked together in a chain and have the same properties. this is how a spinal column works. E systems are created as a whole and individual joints can be tweaked after it has been created. In a spinal column, the system would be ED, comprised of a system of bones that can rotate forward and backward, left to right, and around their own access. this will probably be the most common E system, second would be EA, which works like a fish's spine. When editing an E system a s a whole, customization of movement happens for all bones simultaneously.

Implementation

Joints A, B, C, and D don't have to all be placed as separate entities. Rather, when a joint is placed, it can be determined to what extent it can move in each direction. Assuming each bone has its own axes, and the origin of these axes is the joint, and that the Y axis of the bone is the one pointing outwards from the joint, joints can be set up using bone-axis rotation. Therefore, we can set up joints according to their own individual orientation. Each joint can now be defined by how it is allowed to move around what axis.

Remember, the y axis is the axis along the bone, the x axis is on the plane between the bone and the bone the joint connects it to, and the x axis is off to the side. To clarify, here's a picture.



A)
X=0
Y=0
Z>0

B)
X>0
Y=0
Z=0

C)
X>0
Y=0
Z>0

D)
X>0
Y>0
Z>0

Now each of the four basic joints are mathematically defined.