A more stylized representation of sightless 'vision' in organisms

[Seranner]

Okay, so to start off, I want to note that I am EXTREMELY aware of potential design flaws and programming difficulty with my idea. As it stands I know it’s pretty impractical, and maybe people wouldn’t even like it, but I’ve been thinking…
If I’m not mistaken, the top idea for the implementation of sight is that it’ll be like Spore, where you have a small window of vision with a black border until you develop eyes/eyespots.
In my opinion, this looks quite ugly and also just plain unimmersive. After all, your cell is still SEEING, just with a small radius, so is this really developing vision at all? It seems more like you’re just IMPROVING eyesight by getting eyes.

So I was trying to think of a more abstract and aesthetically appealing method of conveying that you’re a blind cell. What if before you can see, your world is visualized as a sort of… void? Not necessarily a black one. I’m not sure what color it would be. But anyways, it’d be a void, and things your cell detects would be visualized as spots of light which are progressively more detailed the better your senses are. When you’re completely blind, it might be something like a blur of light until it touches you, at which point you can make out what kind of cell it exactly is and therefore illuminate its shape. Similarly you would always be able to see your cell in its entirety, but it wouldn’t have visible colors except for whatever color the light is.

Other things will be detected the same way. Things like gas clouds and rocks don’t need a particularly detailed shape to be visualized but they will be visualized better the closer you get and the better your senses get nonetheless. The material they are made of should be displayed through color.

You can improve your ability to detect what type of cell it is through chemoreceptors and eyespots, until eventually you will even be able to see, and the parts you can’t see will be seen through the void still.
The better your cell’s senses, the less blurry the lights it ‘sees’ are until you start gaining proper vision. By the time you’re able to see, probably all cells which you detect without sight will already have a pretty distinct shape in the void.

The better your eyesight gets, the less void will fill the screen until eventually it’s gone. Things like color will also need to be evolved separately.

During macroscopic stage, if you still cannot see, it’ll work more or less the same except with other senses working together to help you understand the world, and things like grounds, walls, and ceilings will illuminate as you get close to them as well.

A sense of smell, if it is good enough, can allow you to visualize objects that you’ve smelled before if you encounter them again, without even needing to get close.

Sound can be used to echolocate and reveal the shape of the world around you without getting close to it. It can also reveal where organisms are due to either them making noise, or you echolocating.

There will be other senses too, goodness knows what else. And they’ll all contribute to either making the void more detailed, or removing the void entirely.

So, I want to specify that again, I do understand this would be extremely hard to program. And it poses problems like… What if people want to be able to properly SEE during the cell stage? Well, I’d just keep it as a setting in that case so they can choose to disable it. But there are other problems too, and I’m aware of it. It would be extremely difficult to play, for one… You’d have to reprogram the AI to act based on this new chemoreceptive ‘vision,’ which would mean a complete overhaul is needed- because if the AI could see and you couldn’t, it would be super unfair.
And I can go on.
This concept isn’t without its flaws, but I think if it’s done right, it could be many things. Immersive. Pleasing to look at. Incentivizes different routes of evolution. More realistic. Better AI. So on and so forth. Here is my concept art.

First, here’s the scenario with full vision. 2 different species of cells. The one with the flagella is the player cell, the others are AI.

Second, this is a visualization of how this cell, with extremely minimal chemoreceptive abilities, would ‘see’ the world.

As you can see, the furthest cell from the player appears as little more than a blur. Even the shape is barely visible. The cell second closest to it has a relatively clear shape, but no detail. No organelles are visible, and precise bends and wrinkles are invisible.
The cell directly touching the player is almost completely visible, only having a bit of blur on some of the organelles.

I might make concepts for more advanced cell senses later, but macroscopic concepts will have to wait for when the stage is properly playable.

[jose (joses luizins)]

interesting, how about the sense of vision (of light lol), the player’s vision without sensory organelles of light would be in shades of gray with darkness around the player, with sensory organelles of light, the vision of the player will have color ,depending on the location, concentration and angle, you can give one or more “vision cones” (which would be a flashlight light cone), and modify the angle, location and distance of the cones. (Example: a group of sensory organelles of light near the front and at a good angle would form a cone near the front and at a good angle.)

[Seranner]

I believe that a lack of color should be reserved specifically for when the player can actually see, because being in a void without color would be tiring to look at. After all, the main reason I decided to make this concept is because having a plain old black border would be quite ugly, and a gray abyss is only a little bit less ugly.
I also think if you made it grayscale, it would end up just seeming like poor vision. Whereas the bright, alien colors make it more clear this isn’t actually sight, but a visualization of compounds in the area- including the ones that organisms are made of.

But once you do develop sight, just seeing the shapes around you would be enough to make the game visually interesting until you develop the ability to see color. That, and developing color sight would honestly be pretty easy. Just a few cones and you’re good. Plus, compounds would still light up in the cell stage even when you do have vision, because you’re still using chemoreception to detect their location- you can just use your limited vision to make out more detail. So, the cell stage would look very appealing even in grayscale, because compounds would be an exception to the grayscale rule. Cells don’t find compounds just by seeing them, they sense them in other ways, similar to my concept of smell illuminating things for you.

In the macroscopic stage, though, you will probably want to evolve the ability to see at least a few colors to make the world look more visually interesting, but of course it’s optional and a player can choose to stay blind or see in grayscale. Macroscopic organisms have less abstract senses than microbes so I doubt there’d be any exceptions to the grayscale rule. Things are colorless unless you allow yourself to see their true colors, or choose to be blind. In which case, the world will still be visualized with bright lights, but the colors of the lights would be determined by scent. Otherwise everything will be the same color. Not gray, probably a blue like in my concept.

[Lanata (Lana)]

I love this idea! I’m not sure how well this specific implementation could work, but I love the general idea of, not only changing how a player interacts with the world, but also how they experience the world.

This specific implementation could be tested as a proof-of-concept through reshade, right? Does reshade work in Thrive?

[50gens]

@Seranner

this is a visualization of how this cell, with extremely minimal chemoreceptive abilities, would ‘see’ the world.

@Seranner

No organelles are visible

Why does the chemoreceptor see the chemicals emanating from a cell but not recognise to which species those chemicals belong to? Why is there a distance where the chemicals become anonymous?

[Seranner]

The explanation for why a cell might ‘see’ the world like this is that the further an organism is, the less chemicals the chemoreceptors are receiving from it. The less chemicals, the more ‘generic’ of a trace the cell gets, so it doesn’t know the precise species but instead just has a general idea of what it is. It senses chemicals a cell would have, so it knows it’s some sort of cell and a little bit of details about it, but not much.
This may not be entirely realistic, but mostly I had this idea to incentivize the player to evolve better senses. The more precise, the more detailed the picture. The more sensitive, the further distances you can get a full picture.

Without limiting the senses in some way, the player will not be as incentivized to evolve them as they should be. At the same time, limiting too much would make the game very unfun to play. Therefore, giving the player limited signatures of the things around them based on various different senses and stats within said senses is a good way to make the game fun and visually interesting, while also encouraging the evolution and refinement of senses.

It’s also a good way to incorporate memory, because a cell that remembers things it has sensed before is going to be more able to identify another cell based purely on a small signature. In other words, if your memory is good enough, you could visualize cells that are too far to actually get a good picture of, based only on memory. The con to this, though, is that the picture may not be entirely accurate, as it is just your cell’s guess on how it would ‘look.’ You could tell you’re smelling primum thrivium, but you couldn’t tell if it’s injured or not or exactly how big it is, until it gets close enough for your senses to complete the picture on their own.

[Z_Lizard (JamboLambo)]

this is such a cool idea! it makes so much sense too, because when the game develops into a later stage, what’s the point in developing eyes if the player can see anyway? also, the concept you made looks so cool, it reminds me of that one loading screen titled “membranes” or something, except it’s blue.

I also noticed that there was an unfinished organelle that supposedly would make your cell luminescent. if this concept were to make it into the game, I’m not sure how that organelle would be of use if there was a different way to see your surroundings. I know that there are bioluminescent plankton in some oceans, but I’m not sure what the evolutionary advantage of it is. is there a post in these forums talking about this specific organelle?

[Lanata (Lana)]

@Lanata

This specific implementation could be tested as a proof-of-concept through reshade, right? Does reshade work in Thrive?

For anyone wondering, I tried out reshade in Thrive. Reshade itself works, but the normal and depth buffers are really scuffed (at least in the microbe/early-multicellular stages).
Also, as far as I know, there’s nobody that’s shared any shaders that do blurring effects using masks (other than buffer/normal); you’d have to make your own shader to try it out. Just getting blurring with a radial mask + some feathering/smoothing in the transition from black to white in the mask, shouldn’t be too hard to do (especially since there’s hundreds of reshade blur shaders that’ve been shared online) ― if one were wanting to try out the OP’s example implementation.

[50gens]

@Z_Lizard

what’s the point in developing eyes if the player can see anyway?

Seeing light and seeing chemicals can have different advantages. Sight can have a longer range but it would work better during daylight. Smell depends on the direction of the wind but you would be able to see stuff that is not directly visible such as an animal in the bushes or a forest fire behind a mountain.

[Seranner]

I’m amazed to find out that implementation of this isn’t as hard as I thought! There’s hope that a system like this may be able to be implemented someday, then. Huge thanks to you for starting testing on a system for it!

[Lanata (Lana)]

Something like this? Just as like a show of the concept.

don't mind the compression

This is basically just some filters and a blur that increases in strength by radius. An in-engine implementation or concept would have more options.

In terms of gameplay, the game was still really playable, I think. The blur isn’t like a hindrance in any major way. When zoomed out, I think it actually kind of makes the game better: being zoomed out makes navigation easier, but the blur makes it harder to identify cells past a certain distance.

In this concept, it can be really hard to tell the difference between different gases and differentiating those from backgrounds/particles. I think one could make an argument for gases being hard to tell apart by default, with their appearances changing depending on an organism’s parts/config ― as a reflection of like the organism’s senses.

Also I feel like I’ve bumped into more toxin clouds in the time of testing this, than I have during the rest of my playtime.

[willow (they/her or yours are was/were)]

with that i’d probably use the cell chemoreceptors a lot more often
not only does it look nice, but it restricts your ability to perceive your environment by just enough to make a part more useful!

[Chiori]

I love this idea and how it could work , i second willow that it looks cool and makes chemoreception a lot more useful. I feel like its also realistic and as you said you bumped into more toxin wich a organism without chemoreception would do as they cant tell whats before them.

[Seranner]

Yesss! 100% like that!! It looks AMAZING!