How will sight work in the future games?
I think you’ll be able to modify how your creature sees in the Editor
There has been some discussion regarding how we can show different senses to the player. Vision and sound is obviously easy, but how do we represent smell? That might also be represented visually.
More specifically how far away you can see or some other aspect of vision will be controlled by the traits of your species so you can see the impact of the choices you make in the editor in gameplay.
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Would color vision be included in the evolution system, or just for the sake of gameplay would all creatures be able to see in color?
I don’t think any sense existing on Earth is going to be specifically excluded. The difficult part is showing that information to the player.
While magnetic vision is probably not possible unless the planet has a really high metal content and the species on it follow that, having an inbuilt compass is a fairly standard fare. Both real-life biology wise and video game wise.
and a magnetic vision could just be shown with a little animated compass in the UI which vibrates/rings when the normal magnetic alignment is disturbed.
actually you could “display” smell to the player https://onotes.com/, only for him/her to locate the direction where the scent of ammonia comes from would be a little difficult. also shoudln’t it be a requirement to have one of those “scent speakers”.
otherwise smell could be represented with colored clouds just like the chemical clouds are now. as it is mostly used and needed in the microbial stage. and later on you could have a toggleable “odor sight”
and a colored cloud on your “inner” UI-compass to direct you to the source of the smell when you already noticed a smell but want to follow it whil still using normal sight to navigate through your surroundings.
maybe you could also link the ability to more detailed “odor sight” instead of compass-scent-clouds to evolutionary traits such as big nasal mucosa.
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I remember this one game where the player could use something like ecolocation, but then everything would fade back to black until the player uses their ability again. Maybe this could work for blind creatures.
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Yah yup yap, agrees
I see your point, it would be nice but think the consequences this would have on the gameplay, just imagine looking at a black screen and getting a glimpse of the world around you every, Let’s Say, 10 seconds. That doesnt sound very fun does it ? 
yeah thats why you would probably go with evolving eyesight.
but people do like challenges and thrive is also about freedom of choice.
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Echolocation doesn’t have to be all that ugly. Quite a few, often puzzle-based, games use echolocation as their main mechanic.
All of these games give us a high-contrast, yet flat look. Further upgrades to echolocation could allow different frequencies to be represented by different colors, giving us a quite interesting visual.
In addition, unless you are in space and are not using sensor technology, there will be some ambient sounds which you could hear and therefore see. Trees rustling. Fish splashing. Disturbances pounding.
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If smell is represented visually I recommend not making the colors to bright at night. In a game called saurian I realized hunting at night would be way easier because the color just pop even though I don’t believe the dinosaur I was is thought to have been nocturnal.
Maybe smell shouldn’t come from the object or creature directly but rather be more based on arrows generalizing direction.
Kind of like a path the leads to the creature? Or previous locations it was at, like scenting territory?
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Another thing to think about regarding vision is different frequencies of light. It would be cool if you could evolve the ability to see UV light, or infrared. In fact, I think it would be cool if the entire system for vision revolves around what frequencies you can see.
It would be cool if all sensory information is somehow integrated into what you see on screen (except sound). So if your species can smell something, you can see it on screen. The challenge here would be making it so that one sense doesn’t interfere with another, but instead complements it.
Say you have very weak eyesight and echolocation. You can vaguely see a tree, along with its colors. When you let out a burst of sound, you can see its shape much more clearly, but the colors remain vague. If you also have a strong sense of smell, you can see the blossoms on the tree very clearly, along with a cloud of color drifting from them.
But how do you deal with odors that are out of your line of sight? Is this where some sort of compass would come in? Or on-screen arrows?
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I wasn’t thinking a path but rather like color coded arrows on the HUD like what they have in some games when characters detect you. It takes away from the panache of a air styles scent path but I believe that or, how you mentioned, a series of scent tracks like a path to the animal or object would be cool.
For the 2 comments above this how about a misty color of sorts at the edge of the screen from it’s designated direction?
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Yes, That sounds perfect! Exactly what I was talking about