Question About Vision

That's a very good question, and actually something that's still up for debate. It was discussed first way back when, and then we recently brought up the topic again here (http://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t1540p15-achieving-sapience#31995). After the forum transitions I then moved the discussion over to the new developer forum (http://forum.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/organism-intelligence/104), where we'll talk about it as we approach having to implement it. There are several problems because making vision first person puts a lot of restrictions on the player, but making it entirely third person makes a lot of mutations towards vision pointless.

I have read the development forum thread and I think that the solution is simple. I guess that the game will have different difficulty levels. The hability to swich to third person and see everything as a human would should only be available on easy and average difficulty, and in hard you can only see the world as your creature would.

You may say "But gronked up senses are difficult to program, and we shoukd use our limited programming time to features that most people will use" Well, there is a point there, so I would add the gronked up senses once all the other multicellular and aware stage features are developed.

I would positively love working on all sorts of obscure modes of vision, I just don't think most people (even myself) have computers capable of actually running a lot of it. For example, to make it actually useful to have different photoreceptors (for example, to better differentiate, say, the pigmentation of camouflaged prey from the coloration of the background), we would need to make the rendering system d all sorts of extra calculations with multiplying specrta and stuff, and while there are a bunch of optimizations that are possible, this is probably still something that would make a high-end gaming rig work hard to render what look like simple scenes.

There are other things that should be much cheaper though, both on developer time and on the computer:
- Stuff like eye placement or eye number could be done by having a few more cameras in the scene, and stitching together what they see, in the simplest case, just putting one eye's view beside the other.
- FOV would be easy, it's a simple thing to do in Ogre3D
- Compound eyes: Could be easy, could be hard, depending on whether we simply do a fisheye FOV with a hex-grid overlay, or we try something where every ommatidium has its own fisheye distortion of the FOV, or if they even use different cameras for very wide fields of view.
- Focus/blur: Blur, particularly depth blur, is a pretty common trick, so I'm sure we could figure out how to use it without much innovation necessary.

But this is all just spitballing ideas, of course. No promises

#DevilsTuningFork

4 hours after the last post isn't necroposting XD

IMO it comes down to this. Building Gronked up senses is a risk. If we build gronked up senses and they don't work (no one actually wants to play like that etc) that it as huge amount of work that isn't going to pay off. So yeah I think the person who can decide to add them is a programmer who wants to put that work in.