Small little aesthetic things with creating your species that I thought of.
Firstly, types of skins/coats your species could have; say you wanna make a species with fur, how would you add in the fur? ‘Painting’ it on (Choosing ‘fur’ in some sort of tab and then you’ll be able to use a paint tool of sorts to cover your creatures model in fur, complete with giving you options on changing the length of the fur)?
Second, colors! Would adding colors in be similar to the concept I had in mind for the skin types, or could it be totally different?
Perhaps these could have practical uses in-game as well? For example if you had fur you could endure colder temperatures better than a species without fur.
3 Likes
Zahyyy
(the one who spent 4 hours writing a single post)
2
I think that using painting tools might be a really good idea not just for fur, but even for skin texture, e.g. smooth or rough, where the rough, hard skin might function as an armour, but would restrict movement of those parts, making the creature less agile. The fur/scales/skin-armour might even be generated with a tiny bit of randomness in order to make your species look not just like exact copies of each other, but a bit more realistic. E.g. there might be a tiny chance of having for example a recessive gene that changes the fur colour just a few shades, barely noticeable, or a gene that makes the armoured area slightly larger/smaller. This might be applied to the overall size of your creature as well, since IRL all crocodiles are not exactly 3.5 meters long, but rather there is a slight variety. Uhh, maybe I should start another topic talking about this. But my point is that I agree.
I no longer think I can call myself the king of necro.
Though isn’t skin color planned on aiding in stealth things? So letting people spray what they want kinda a ruin that (dark skin color then bright skin color stripes). Or would something be monitoring the surface area and take percentages of light and dark skin to the overall surface area and use those percentages to decide how detectable you are. The harder option is AI sight based stealth where it only measures the surface area visible and use those percentages to decide stealth, I’m using a great white as an example, you look up and see the light belly blend in with the light surface and look down on the dark top to the dark depths which makes it good at stealth in the ocean and the side is the easiest to spot due to the color difference (light and dark).
Welp, there was an earlier thread, where the general consensus would be to check the colour of the environment, the size of the creature, and visibility. (I.E. a bush in front of your creature would mean other creatures won’t see it as fast.) My personal idea is that when a creature has another in its FoV, it would check around the silhouette of the creature and compare the immediate area around the creatures with the area within the silhouette, and calculate the difference in colour. If the total difference is big enough, it will register the other creature as “seen” and react accordingly. I was originally planning on adding a illustration, before realizing I have the artistic skills of a pile of rocks and should be studying.
Fur and feathers should not simply reduce the comfortable temperature of the environment for the organism, but instead they should reduce the heat exchange of the organism with the environment, making it undesirable for creatures with a slow metabolism (cold-blooded) and desirable for creatures with a fast metabolism (warm-blooded). Also, fur can only be developed by organisms with glandular skin (like synapsids), and feathers only by organisms with scales (like archosaurs).
2 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
7
Should we count the exoskeleton as a skin type, I have some doubts since if we did, it’d be both a skin and a skeleton at the same time.
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
8
You can have multiple skin types with an exoskeleton. Not like, scales, but fur and various textures. It’s fine if you can’t have scales or anything because such restrictions are honestly fine. It’d make sense if, for example, you can’t have long hair or thick down on a wing used for flight, or you can’t smell/taste without a mucous membrane. It’s okay for some traits to restrict other traits.
2 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
9
Exoskeleton would be limited to small creatures. If you have an internal skeleton, the weight of your bones would be proportional to the lenght of your limbs. If you have an external skeleton, it would instead be proportional to your surface area, so, the second power. Exoskeleton would give a higher hp, and in smaller scales, they would outcompete, whereas in large scales, internal skeletons would become universal. When oxgen levels gets higher, external skeletons would start to fill larger niches, because everyone would have a more energy to move around. Similarly, if the gravity is weaker, external skeletons would predominate. But in that scenerio, they would also have lungs, and a soft region in their body that can expand as they breathe, because in lower atmospheric pressure they would have less oxygen.
Why do insects have fur but don’t use that for wings?
It might be that you can’t make too small feathers. Your skin cells are 0.03 millimeters long. If you were 1 millimeter long, you could probably see your own cells. You would be 33 cells long. Or more realistically, the cells would be smaller. Songbirds have between 1,500 and 3,000 feathers. You can’t have feathers if you don’t have that many cells.
I have decided that chatgpt is very unintelligent. None of the reasons it gives for why insects don’t have feather wings explains why birds do have feather wings.
It could also be that, since air feels more heavy in small scales, or rather, everything else is lighter when compared to air [1] it might be that the air would have more momentum, and it would push the feathers too much. You wouldn’t be able to flap them fast, they would bend too much. So you would need a more rigid surface instead. Sea creatures don’t use wings either, because the water is heavy, even in large scales.
you can’t carry a 1m^3 cube of water, it would be 1 tonne, but ants are very strong, carrying everything ↩︎
1 Like
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
11
Carboniferous arthropods would like to have a say.
1 Like
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
12
50gens mentioned that.
In ideal circumstances yes. Are exoskeletons an equally thick coating over the whole body? No. Additionally, you can often find small animals full of way more bones than they need. Why? Because the scale means the cost is small, so in exchange for some slightly more efficient running or clinging or whatever it’s worth it. If you make an exoskeleton shaped like an efficient set of internal bones on either side of the limb with a thin sheath connecting them. If you do that then the square cube law actually helps you. The sheath makes good armor, and if the square cube law increases it’s surface area slower than it’s volume than you can thin it out when you increase in size and have the same thickness for less relative weight. Additionally, the reason high oxygen environments make large exoskeleton having creatures is due to how insects breathe. If you have them lungs you would have a huge advantages and could evolve larger if it was advantageous. For example, arachnids have simple book lungs. Due to the inefficiency of book lungs and how spider’s throats work (don’t ask, it’s weird) the upper limits are still much lower than for us tetrapods, but Goliath bird-eating spiders get pretty big, and aren’t really hitting any limits other than niche ones.
3 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
13
I can guess that the nature of exoskeletons might make it harder for creatures with them to evolve “proper lungs” than with endoskeletal creatures.
