Achieving Sapience

One of the most prominent yet underdeveloped concepts we have for the game right now is how your species will develop intelligence and eventually enter the Awakening Stage. We know we don't want some sort of simple upgrade system where you simply click "Level Up" on your brain and it advances to the next level, and after a certain amount you become intelligent. On the flip side, our actual understanding of intelligence in ourselves and other animals and how it develops is very primitive. On this thread we'll have to try and strike a balance between something quantifiable and simple enough to be used by the player, but also taking into account the complexities of animal behaviour we see in the real world.

Achieving Sapience

Part 1: How Is Intelligence Quantified?
Part 2.1: Vision
...
More Parts to Come

Part 1: How Is Intelligence Quantified?

The first step to implementing any of this is to find something by which we can measure the intelligence of any given organism. For some, your first instinct might be "Oh, brain size!", but that is not an accurate measure of intelligence. A sperm whale has a brain mass of around 8kg, and yet is not more intelligent than a human with a 1.5kg brain, and is about as intelligent as a crow with a 13g brain! I tested this on a sample of 34 different species (using mass measurements of mature, average members of their species), and from the top five species on this list you can see that this method doesn't work. Humans aren't even on the list.

Animal - Brain Mass
1. Sperm Whale - 8.0 kg
2. Killer Whale -7.2 kg
3. African Elephant - 5.0 kg
4. Manta Ray - 2.0 kg
5. Bottlenose Dolphin - 1.7 kg

With this system, intelligence would develop mostly in large organisms that can support massive brains.

Now what some other people probably thought was a ratio between the mass of the brain and the mass of the body. This is along the right line of thinking, however still does pose a problem. Look at the new top five.

Animal - Brain:Body Ratio*
1. Hummingbird - 3750
2. Crow - 3250
3. Elephant Fish - 3000
4. African Grey Parrot - 2250
5. Mouse - 2250

*I multiplied these values by 10^5 to make them easier to read.

With this system intelligence is suddenly only favoured in small organisms that can support a large brain relative to their small body. Also, humans are again not even in the top five.

Clearly, it is not just a direct proportion between brain to body mass. The Enchephalization Quotient (EQ) is an attempt to address this issue by adding some term or operation to the ratio to make it produce a more accurate result. There are two main ways I have seen EQ be calculated. For the sake of this thread, we will call them EQ1 and EQ2. However, first let's define our variables:

b = mass of the brain (kg)
m = mass of the body (kg)

With EQ1, scientists recognized the importance of the brain's actual mass, as well as the brain to body ratio, towards determining intelligence, so they simply multiplied the two. The following is the top five that EQ1 would yield.

EQ1 = b*(b/m)

Animal - EQ1**
1. Humans - 3000.00
2. Bottlenose Dolphins - 1806.25
3. Killer Whale - 720.00
4. Tegu Lizard - 400.00
5. Chimpanzee - 384.62

**Multiplied by 10^5

Finally a list where we are number one. You can also see a pretty drastic drop from us to the next closest species. The list this produces is generally quite accurate.

With EQ2, scientists decided to take the allometry of the species into account. Since an organ such as a lung, can't simply be scaled up to double the size and have the exact same efficiency and properties, so too must the mass of the brain scale differently from the mass of the body to perform at the same level. The exponent for this ratio is approximated at 0.66 (Partly to do with Kleiber's Law). This is the top five that EQ2 gives us.

EQ2 = b/m^0.66

Animal - EQ2***
1. Humans - 8680.62
2. Bottlenose Dolphins - 5966.64
3. Tegu Lizard- 3505.10
4. Chimpanzee - 3180.15
5. Wolverine- 3097.07

***Multiplied by 10^5

Again, a much more reasonable list than the first two. This time creating less of a gap between human intelligence and our competition.


Implications for Gameplay


How will this quantification of intelligence affect gameplay? First and foremost, this will be the perfect progression for the Aware Stage. Not only will you have to evolve to adapt to the changing environment, you will also have to fit in a bit of brain growth each time. On top of this, brain growth is expensive. The brain is an organ that requires a lot of energy to maintain. It will take many generations of evolution to get your organism designed such that you have both a big brain and a high EQ. If focus too much on evolving your brain and not enough on adapting to your surroundings and your survival, your species won't thrive or could even go extinct, so it's an important balance.

To maintain such a large brain, you would also need a very nutritious diet, which almost necessitates omnivory. A diet of high energy foods would make it much easier to support a large brain and a high EQ.

Spoiler:

Of course the development of intelligence will also require effective manipulators, and a social structure to pass down knowledge each generation, but those will be discussed in later parts.

Before we can move on with the discussion, we will have to decide which EQ method to use. Or, suggest another if you feel these are inadequate, but be prepared to come with data and results. For example I think another approach is to take the mass of the brain and subtract the mass of the spine, since the spine scales similarly to m^0.66. Another thing to note, the EQ methods listed are not considered to be very accurate for invertebrate intelligence, which we want to include as well. So to conclude part I:

Which EQ method should we use?

Obviously, these top five lists don't provide the full picture of what results each equation gives, so for a full list of all the 34 species and their data check out the download link to the excel spreadsheet I made this on below.

Download for excel file:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/l5h3j28d9ja4p44/Quantifying_Intelligence.xlsx

Sources:
http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/3.3.htm
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html
http://speculativeevolution.wikia.com/wiki/Intelligence

There are quite a lot of factors which are important to the success of humans, like opposable thumbs and language.

Would it make sense to have a modularly designable brain? The brain would then be a collection of related organs rather than a single one.

For example if you have a limb with a hoof then you need a motor control section. If you want a hand with fine motor control then the motor control section needs to be larger. If you want vision you need a visual cortex. If you have ears and vocal chords then you need an auditory centre but you could add a language processing centre later if you want.

Basically you build the brain you want from lots of different pieces. The bigger it gets the longer gestation / childhood you need and the more power it needs (which requires food). This would mean that you wouldn't need to measure the brain size to determine how intelligent the creature is, you could just look at what functions it has and determine it that way.

It's not realistic to say there is a 1-1 mapping between areas of the brain and different functions but it's not ridiculous either. The final steps that lead to civilisation could be a neocortex with complex pattern recognition, abstract thought and projection in time.

Using a constant exponent won't work too well, as the brain cortices of different species vary in fractal dimension. For example, the human cerebellar cortex has a fractal dimension of about 2.57 (cite), while the fractal dimension of a simpler, smooth-surfaced brain might be just above 2.

Therefore, (b/m) ^ (f/3) would make a better approximation, where f, the fractal dimension of the section/lobe of brain in question, varies between 2 and 3.

tjwhale wrote:

Would it make sense to have a modularly designable brain? The brain would then be a collection of related organs rather than a single one.

I definitely agree that the brain should be modular, but not considered different organs. It will be placed and grown like a single organ, but in the behavior editor the sections and functions of the brain can be edited.

moopli wrote:

Therefore, (b/m) ^ (f/3) would make a better approximation, where f, the fractal dimension of the section/lobe of brain in question, varies between 2 and 3.

Sounds good to me. Do you have any ideas how we would approximate EQ for invertebrates?

Also, do either of you support one EQ method or the other? If we can decide how we want to quantify intelligence, then we can get into the meat of the discussion on behaviour.

Speaking of which, the reason I'm pushing that we quantify intelligence is so that the EQ of the player's organism acts like the complexity cap for their organism's behavior. If their organism has a very high EQ, they can give it a more complex behavioural patterns such as communication, more socialism between species members, offspring care, etc. If they have a low EQ, they will be very limited in what behaviours they can give their organism.

I think, building off tjwhale's modularity idea, that we should limit different types of behaviour based on the parts the brain has, how they're combined, and how "developed" they are (which would probably boil down to the EQ of the specific part). This would either be instead of or in addition to a global EQ-based behavioural complexity cap.

As for which of the EQ methods you listed I support, we can have both discussions ongoing concurrently -- the choice of EQ formula (or even, say, a more complicated function) doesn't have to be made before we can consider how behaviours scale with intelligence.

True, we could move forward assuming that EQ will exist, and we simply need to pick the method to calculate it in the future. I'll try to get the next post up then by tomorrow, unless you guys want to say anything first.

Thinking ahead to the next stage of the game perhaps it would be good if in designing your brain you had to make some tradeoffs.

So for example if you make your species more aggressive they would be better soldiers and they would revolt against their rulers more often and commit more crimes.

If you made them more independent they would be better at inventing new technologies but worse at living in big groups.

If you made them live in very large groups they would be very obedient and easily organised but also not very creative.

That way the next stage would end up less anthropocentric and also it wouldn't be so much a rush to get to the optimum brain so you can move on but more of a chance to lay the groundwork for what kind of species you want to play with later.

Moreover in human history there was the time when there were several hominids (neaderthals, homo-sapiens, denisovians etc) battling for control and choices you make in the aware stage could play into that.

That definitely sounds like a good idea. There was some earlier discussion on how the morphology of your species should affect your race's physical stats when you get into the strategy mode, and having your brain affect their mental/behavioural stats would work well with that.

If we are to take the modular brain approach, I think the first step is to decide what the possible sections of the brain are and what they do. Here is a list of behaviours that I drafted earlier that would need to be assigned to different parts of the brain:

Spoiler:

This is a pretty good paragraph from Wikipedia on the Human brain

Spoiler:

Basically they identify 3 parts.

1) Primary Sensory Areas
2) Primary Motor Cortex
3) Association Areas.

So for every sense you have you'll need a receiver in the sensory areas, so for humans this would be things like eyes, ears, smell / taste, touch / pain, balance, proprioception etc. I don't know if these need to be modular, there could just be one blob that processes all sense input and it gets bigger each time you add a sense organ, like an eye for instance. If you wanted to upgrade (hawk eyes for example) the upgrade could be in the eye and that would just add a little more to the mass of the sensory area of the brain.

I.e. Hawkeye, gives zoom and high def vision, requires 30 ml of brain mass.
Human eye gives normal and low light vision, requires 15 ml of brain mass etc.

Same with motor cortex, basically everything that needs controlling (muscles / limbs, heart and lungs, digestive organs etc etc) adds a little mass to the motor cortex. Again advanced limbs (like hands with fine motor control) would just add more mass.

Pretty much everything you mention could go in the Associated areas (which sounds a bit like a catchall for "everything else") and could all be modular additions which would only change behaviour.

It kind of makes sense as a split I guess, input processing, decision making and output processing being the 3 areas.

Other things to add to the list (really good list btw) would be more emotional things like theory of mind, mirror neurons, emotions in general (love and grief) etc. All these help a lot with complex social interaction.

One way to test the list would be to design the brain of several different creatures (human, dolphin, dog, lizard, cow, ant etc) and see if we can get a convincing set of pieces for each one.

That sounds like a good method of division for the brain. Growing the whole brain would grow all parts equally, or you could choose to just enlarge one specific part. Also, I think you should be able to enlarge the sensory and motor parts without adding new sense organs or new muscles. Adding new parts would automatically add the necessary brain mass, but adding more brain mass would increase the effectiveness of all parts tied to that section.

Anyways, I think we can divide the discussion into addressing each of those sections one at a time. So firstly, we'll plan out the Primary Sensory Areas. These are what I can think of as the different possible senses that can be tied to the Primary Sensory Areas of the brain.

Exteroceptive
Sight/Vision - What your organism can see (Literally what appears on the screen)
Hearing/Audition - What your organism hears (Again, literally what your player hears)
Touch/Tactition/Somatosensation (TBD) - Touch notification in UI?
Smell/Olfaction - Coloured highlights on objects?
Taste/Gustation - Coloured highlights on objects?/Taste notification in UI?
Pain/Nociception - (TBD) Gives notification for pain if a certain part of the body with pain receptors gets hit
Thermoception - Heat meter on UI
Echolocation - Coloured highlights on objects?
Electroreception
Magnetoreception - Minimap?
Pressure Detection

NOTE: As we plan out these senses, put the final material into the Google Doc.

EDIT: For the sake of simplicity, should we name the three sections the Sensory Cortex, the Motor Cortex, and the Associated Areas (Maybe change that last one it's a very vague term)?

I think echolocation should be displayed by a minimap. It just seems to make sense to me since the sound bounces back off the surroundings showing what's there. Kinda like a radar.

Electroreception could also be displayed in a minimap.

Maybe magnetoreception could be displayed with a compass.

Interesting, I've got it in mind that you only see what you have senses for so if you can only see in black and white then the whole screen is in black and white, you only get sound if you have ears etc.

Is that what the rest of you are thinking?

I think it'll make it really awesome to get out of the murky shadows of touch and smell and into the sunshine of eyes for the first time.

So these things wouldn't be on a mini map they would be more like overlays for the main screen.

tjwhale wrote:

Interesting, I've got it in mind that you only see what you have senses for so if you can only see in black and white then the whole screen is in black and white, you only get sound if you have ears etc.

Is that what the rest of you are thinking?

I think it'll make it really awesome to get out of the murky shadows of touch and smell and into the sunshine of eyes for the first time.

So these things wouldn't be on a mini map they would be more like overlays for the main screen.

Yeah that's the idea, although in the past there was also consensus that you could play in third person mode if you wanted and it would just be a regular view with no filters. I think there should be an option when starting a new game for third person organism mode to be available.

Also I still think magnetoreception will need a minimap because it's basically the ability to locate yourself on the planet using the world's magnatic field, and it doesn't necessarily replace vision, as seen (no pun intended) in birds.

EDIT: I found the thread that discussed this earlier (https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t11-senses-integration). Unfortunately the image displaying the different types of vision is broken, but they have some interesting ideas. For example, I like the idea of having a compass for magnetoreception.

I’d like to suggest a few things about the senses:

Firstly, I think that smell should be a visible trail, but also when you interact with an object, there is text that says “smells rotten etc.”

I think that the taste should just be text when you interact with an object. I think too many colours on the screen would be distracting for the player. Especially, if you have smell and taste creating coloured highlights.

Also, I feel that echolocation should be used as a minimap. It’s basically a form of sonar which would provide us with a narrow minimap in the direction of the emitter. Therefore, echolocation should be similar. But it should also blink every second or so like a sonar. Everything on the minimap would be stationary. E.g one moment, there would be a large shape to your front, and when the minimap “blinks” the shape has moved closer.

If echolocation is shown through coloured highlights, what would that even add to the view? How would it add any information?

But if you say that it would not be realistic to have a minimap, neither is a heat meter nor having coloured highlights on everything.

Yeah I agree with taste being a text notification, and thus having smell being a visual indication.

Echolocation wouldn't work as a minimap because it would only give a small, two-dimensional view of your surroundings, whereas if it uses visual markers you could see it full sized and in all three dimensions around you.

The reason so many things will be visually represented is because vision will not necessarily be the dominant sense in many species. You could have an organism with a weak sense of vision, but a strong sense of smell, and so that player would rely heavily on the coloured markers to find food, escape threats, etc. It would be the same with echolocation, a species with strong echolocation will likely have weaker other senses, including sight, so again it would depend on the visual cues of the echolocation to track things. Thus there won't be too much overlap of the visually represented senses.

I apologize for the absence. First I was waiting for replies, and then I got sick.

Since no one has yet responded, I'll take the chance to go over my approach to simulating vision in the game.

Part 2.1: Vision

This sense will be the most important to the player, simply because we mostly play games based off of what we see on the monitor. In Thrive, the player can play either in first person, where they sense everything as their organism senses it, or in third person, where they sense everything like a human, while still controlling their organism. I can imagine there would be a lot of problems with a third person mode to the organism mode, but for now we won't throw away the idea. We will stick to talking about first person for now.

The organ that will allow any form of sight for an organism is an eye. In Thrive's context, an eye is a collection of photoreceptive cells that translate electromagnetic waves into visual images, i.e. they see light. Any organism can evolve this primitive, first step towards vision. In the past there have been suggestions that there be many different eye organs, each with a different role and specialization and focus, but I think it will be both simpler and more elegant if we kept it all as one organ, an eye, and then allowed that organ to have its properties and limitations altered through evolution. The properties I can think of right off the bat for an eye on an organism would be:

Physical Properties
Size: Pretty self explanatory. Eyes will start as just a small patch on the skin, but can be shaped in the Organism Editor each generation. I'm not too sure how the shape of the eye should affect its cognitive properties, however.
Shape: Same as above.
Texture/Colour: Similar deal. Again, I don't know whether we plan to have the colour or texture of the eye affect its cognitive properties.
Energy Cost: It will cost a certain amount of nutrients to sustain, mostly dependent on its size.

Cognitive Properties
Clarity: Some sort of range over which the eye gives effectively clear vision, or if we want to keep it simpler, an overall clarity in the resolution of what you see.
"Zoom": Sort of like a hawk-eye adaptation, the ability to focus your vision on something far away, simulated in-game by zooming in your vision. We could also use zoom to focus on things really small.
Light range: A certain range of wavelengths you can see. Humans of course can't see ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, or many other light wavelengths, and so too will your organism be limited in what it can see. The light range of your eyes could drastically change the appearance of the game.
Water Adaptability: How much or little being underwater impedes vision



As seen in this picture, the visuals of the game will literally change based on the light wavelength range of your organism's eyes.

Also, as tjwhale mentioned earlier, the eye would require a certain portion of the brain to be dedicated to it. Increasing its size or cognitive ability would require the available brainspace be present first. And not just any brainspace, specifically space in the Sensory Cortex of the brain (the part dedicated to sensation).

I feel like I'm missing something with this part, so make sure to point out anything I should add. Otherwise, other suggestions for how to simulate vision, or ideas for physical and cognitive properties of the eye are welcome (and kind of necessary, I can't keep responding to myself on this thread).

Nice, this is largely what I was imagining too, which is a good feeling when it happens.

To add to this some good things to have would be

1) Field of vision - maybe you look through a little hole (or a set of little holes) rather than see the whole screen

2) Depth perception - we could mess around with the rendering to get a flatter image when you only have 1 eye - this would need some testing

3) Photo-sensitivity - having an iris that can dynamically alter the amount of light that comes in should be an option - if you don't have it you will be blinded by bright lights easily

4) in terms of processing it would be cool if you could add some features onto your eye - like automatic symbol recognition where it would tag animal tracks for you. Or motion sensing where anything moving would be highlighted really brightly.

5) I think in terms of eye size, from a physics perspective, the only problem would be if he aperture of the eye were of a similar size to the photon wave packet, then you would get scattering. Basically very small eyes would work fine.

It seems (from some naive googling) that eyes generally scale with body mass but vary from that with function. So nocturnal animals and birds have disproportionally big eyes for their mass, while reptiles tend to have small eyes.

6) Interestingly the sclera (the white of the eye) is hypothesized to be important in communication. Basically it makes people feel comfortable around you if they can see where you are looking. That could be an option we could offer, you could choose to have whites but that would mean you are at a disadvantage when fighting, but you gain an advantage when fraternising.

7) Changing the amount of rods and cones would be interesting too. Rods function better in low light but only do black and white. Cones can do colour and work better in strong light. It would be a prety cool moment in the game when you got your first cones.

I feel like this may have been talked about before bug this seems like a good place to confirm it. What happens if you have eyes that face in different directions? Would it be like a split-screen although perhaps without a solid line in the middle so it looks smoother and more realistic?

Oh also, depending on the level of detail, the eye would need to be connected to the brain via optic nerves. Therefore, you can't for example have an eye at the end of a tail, unless you wanna draw a connection all the way from there to the brain.

@tjwhale
I can't see a way to change the numbers of rods and cones unless you click on the eye and use sliders.

I've written at length on this before -- on reddit, and in some other threads here. In essence, the question of color depends on your photoreceptors -- how many do you have, and what are their excitation spectra?

We humans have 4 photoreceptors -- 1 rod, and 3 cones:
(source)

For comparison, here are the photoreceptors of some other species:
(source)

Anyway, what are these useful for? Well, mathematically, here's what happens when we look at non-luminous objects:

1. Light hits an object. The incident light has a specific spectrum, which we can't assume is flat. We can sample the spectrum with a vector of size n over [0, inf)^n.
   
2. The object has a specific transmission spectrum (defining the light it would reflect/transmit if it were hit by a flat spectral source). This would be an n-vector over [0, 1]^n.
   
3. A certain amount of light reflects off the object. Its spectrum would be the pairwise (or hadamard) product of the two spectra given above.
   
4. That light (which is another vector over [0, inf)^n, as it's a light spectrum) then hits the eye in question.
   
5. The eye contains k types of photoreceptor (where k < n). Each type of receptor has an excitation spectrum (another vector [0, 1]^n) which we dot with the incident light, giving us a k-vector representing the color which the organism sees.
   
6. To account for the wide ranges of environments an organism might encounter, we can do a flat across-the-board scaling of image brightness here (think irises).
   
7. To account for vastly differing levels of brightness within a single field of view, we can introduce a per-pixel intensity scale factor to simulate photoreceptor saturation. When a particular color value is overexcited, the scale factor drops proportionally to the overexcitation; and similarly, if the light hitting that photoreceptor dims, the reverse happens. Not only does this fix issues with vast differences in light intensity, but it also gives us realistic afterimages for free (since the saturation factor decays over time, quickly changing fields of view will lead to saturation factors that don't keep up), which is pretty cool.
   
8. Finally, once scaled, we can convert the field of colors the organism perceives into a field of colors the computer can display. If the organism has 3 photoreceptors, the conversion is easy -- arbitrarily assign red to one, blue to another, and green to another. If the organism has more, we have to do a projection.
   

Obviously, this whole process is very expensive. A simplifying option I just came up with is to store only the peaks of each spectrum, and use some funky mathematical proofs to derive a cheaper way to multiply spectra.

Another simpler thing is the whole idea you brought up above with the "spectral range" stuff -- thing is, I'm not sure how this one works. What math is done in this case to convert light in the game to the light you see?

I guess the broader question is, do we try to model photoreceptors, or do we simplify drastically?

1) I guess one way to make it cheaper might be to filter the light by your receptors first and then take it's product with all the objects in the environment.

So if you can only see 500 - 510 nm then only that light is calculated and all other light is discarded from the start.

2) When representing it we could take the visible spectrum (which we know how to display on the monitor), Violet - Blue - Cyan - Green - Yellow - Red and map that to whatever spectrum you can see.

So if you can see 500 - 510 nm then 500 is violet and 510 is red and everything else is in between.

This is a bit unexciting (as if you have 16 colour receptors you still just see RGB). Also if you can see 500-510 and 600-610 but nothing in between then your world is going to be violet and red and nothing in between, but maybe that's cool.

Another problem with this approach is if you add a new colour receptor then the colours of all the old objects you could see will change.

3) I guess when it comes to modelling each photoreceptor it depends how many you have. If you have 3 then we could model each on but if you have 3 million it's best not to.

This ties into gameplay, can you make a convincing game out of 3 photoreceptors? Will it be fun? I think there is an issue here that if your screen is just shades of red all over people will not want to play.

Should we make sure that somehow you always get a half-decent picture of the world so the game is definitely playable or should we be as accurate as possible?

The problem with having 2 modes, 1st person with filters and 3rd person with normal view is you will be highly incentivised to play in 3rd person all the time. Imagine having to hunt or fight with 3 pixels, you wouldn't bother unless you were forced to.

Though that is probably a testing issue. (and moreover an issue of why people are going to play the game in the first place, is it fun or a chance to see the world from a new perspective?)

4) Apologies for my ignorance but how is this stuff handled normally by the graphics card? So if I make a 3d scene with a light in it how are the colours displayed on the screen calculated? Can we piggy back on some of that machinery? If we can use the chipset it's going to speed things up a lot.

A friend of mine was making a lighting system and once he switched from python to opengl he got like a 1000x speed increase.

Is there a texture file which shades each polygon and then the lighting is applied to that and then the whole thing is stored in a depthbuffer? If so we might save a lot of maths by letting the chip do it.

1) That's a possibility, but I'm not sure whether cropping the spectra and resizing would be cheaper or more expensive than always doing the same number of floating-point multiplications. There's also a bunch of precomputation we could do, trading space for time. it would be premature optimization until I try to program this, of course.

2) I don't like the idea of simply shifting the spectrum -- that's boring, more like being a human with night-vision goggles than another creature which sees colors completely differently. The same scene, under the same light, looking completely different, because pigments that look similar to one creature's eyes look very different to another. IMO, it's immensely cool, and could let us model, for example, organisms that look camouflaged to their natural predators, but stick out like a sore thumb to an organism with substantially different eyes.

Of course, it would be much simpler than coloring the world based on the actual light spectra. I think the massive drop in realism (and the associated ease of modeling it evolutionarily) would be too much of a loss though.

3) I think my meaning w.r.t. "3 photoreceptors" got lost in translation somewhere -- I was talking about the number of types of photoreceptor, ie, the dimensionality of the color space. Our eyes, and therefore our monitors and graphics cards and graphics libraries and image formats etc, have 3 dimensions in their color space (the 4th, due to rod cells, is ignored at high light levels).

I think it's reasonable that people would want to play in 3rd person if their organism has eyes too simple for a human to put up with. Of course, if you only have 3 photoreceptors, then you'd be almost necessarily a very small organism, using them for sensing light levels, and not for seeing images, so it's a moot point to try and see what they see. It would be kinda like first-person bacterial chemotaxis.

However, while it's reasonable, it seems like a bit of a cheat -- switching into 3rd-person essentially gives your organism a free human-like eye floating above its body, letting you take a step back in realism for the sake of playability, and making you think your species has better senses than it actually does. That could be the entire point of 3rd-person mode, actually -- until we have playable (fast, etc) first-person vision, and for people who don't want to use their organism's very strange eyesight, we have third-person mode.

4) It's complicated. The trick to getting this idea off the ground at all is to do as much as possible using shaders, precompute what we can, etc. Before that, though, a working prototype is needed.

Can I ask a couple of clarification questions?

1) Are you thinking that the geometry of the scene will still be the same but the shaders will be different or are you thinking of something more complex?

Like if I am looking at a teapot with eye A then I see a red teapot and if I look with eye B then I see a blue teapot but I always see a teapot.

Or are you thinking of some sort of ray-tracing scheme where eye A sees a shadow which lets them know it's a teapot but eye B sees no shadow and thinks it's a lump with a handle?

2 ) What about light sources? Will there just be the sun(s) (and at night moons) to work with or will there be other things? Will there be dynamic shadows or is that too complex? (Like can you hide in the shadow of a tree and is that shadow calculated dynamically or always in the same place?)

Will there be reflected light as well and how many times?

-

This whole idea is really interesting. It's exciting to think how unique this system could be if we could wrangle it into something reasonable.

I guess what's a bit worrying is that it all has to be done at speed (at the refresh rate of the monitor to look convincing (though update speed of your eyes could be a variable for gameplay purposes)).

-

This is just an idle thought, nothing serious.

moopli wrote:

It would be kinda like first-person bacterial chemotaxis.

I actually really like the idea of "you see what your organism sees" for the microbe stage, so you just get given a list of proteins in your locality and you can spam proteins out. You can move (by powering one or some of your organelles) and touch stuff but you just get a touch notification and you can't see. It'll just give you some genetic information about what you interacted with, nothing more.

I know it's crazy. Just really fits with building up the moment when you first open your eyes being a powerful spiritual experience.

I've been thinking about this for the past couple days and I realized that we have struck a pretty major problem with the game's design.

The Microbe Stage is in third person, because no one wants to play from the perspective of the cell (maybe a few people, we'll leave that to mods). The Strategy Mode is in third person. The transition from 2D to 3D during the Multicellular Stage is in third person. Yet somehow, we have to fit in the fact that the 3D part of the Multicellular Stage and the Aware Stage are in first person. I see many problems with this.

First off, being forced into first person after having played a whole stage and a half in third person is not very seamless at all, and probably a bit frustrating. Obviously your initial 3D organism would have sharp eyesight, and so as the player you will actually be losing the ability to see through the 2D-3D transition. Additionally, there is a large incentive to not evolve unique forms of sight or sensation that are significantly different from what humans perceive, because then you'll be stuck seeing everything in red or having eyes on the side of your head which will mess up your field of view or what have you. I know these issues were mentioned before, but I didn't realize how significant they were until thinking about them holistically. Although having the organism mode in third person takes away some of the immersion, and takes away the purpose of many of the ways you could evolve your perception, I think it's necessary given the consequences and inconsistencies of having it be first person. We could still fit in features like an ability to zoom with stronger eyes, or improving clarity, or maybe some indicators for things you can see outside of the visible light range.

I'm interested on hearing what you guys think about the issue. If the discussion becomes big enough, we could branch this off to its own thread and continue this thread with the next part.

NickTheNick wrote:

First off, being forced into first person after having played a whole stage and a half in third person is not very seamless at all, and probably a bit frustrating. Obviously your initial 3D organism would have sharp eyesight, and so as the player you will actually be losing the ability to see through the 2D-3D transition. Additionally, there is a large incentive to not evolve unique forms of sight or sensation that are significantly different from what humans perceive, because then you'll be stuck seeing everything in red or having eyes on the side of your head which will mess up your field of view or what have you. I know these issues were mentioned before, but I didn't realize how significant they were until thinking about them holistically. Although having the organism mode in third person takes away some of the immersion, and takes away the purpose of many of the ways you could evolve your perception, I think it's necessary given the consequences and inconsistencies of having it be first person. We could still fit in features like an ability to zoom with stronger eyes, or improving clarity, or maybe some indicators for things you can see outside of the visible light range.

Hold on, the late Multicellular Stage and Aware Stage are primarily meant to be in 1st person? All the time I've been here, I gathered that 3rd person would be implemented by default, and 1st person would be an added feature or gimmick put in if possible, accessed by the press of a button when desired.

Then again, I've always based some assumptions of Thrive on the earlier versions of Spore, which always showed a 3rd person Creature Stage. Then again, the majority of the fanbase probably has, too; they want Thrive because they want Spore 2005 (it even rhymes), and there's no other game in the works like it out there.