What are the limits going to be like for example could i make a diplodocus sized behemoth?
I think these types of questions belong in the quick questions thread
also pretty sure the only limit would be the square-cube law and the gravity of your planet, though you might be able to overcome those
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What about the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere?
how does that influence size?
It does, if there isn’t enough oxygen to support a large organism then you will die if you become too big. (and you would also reach a size where lungs will not be able to flow enough oxygen to support the body)
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Size and oxygen are related in that diffusion of oxygen scales with surface, not volume. Thus larger creatures require more efficient ways of breathing. This is why insects, for instance are so small. Insects lack lungs, instead breathing by passively letting are stream into holes in its body. This works for a small creature, but if you were to scale insects up the air would never reach the inside of their bodies in time, asphyxiating them from the inside-out.
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Not only does oxygen affect (for the most part), but also the biomechanics of the creature,
Why do mammals not reach the size of dinosaurs?
3 reasons:
1.Type of birth: An elephant takes almost two years to give birth compared to dinosaurs from which eggs are laid, imagine how long it will take a mammal the size of a dinosaur to be pregnant
2. Metabolism: Mammals are endothermic (generate heat with the help of metabolism) compared to dinosaurs that are thought to be Mesothermic (something between endothermic and pleothermic (“сold blood”)), and the larger the body, the volume is 100 times greater than the surface area. Release the heat it produces and it is actually cooks from the inside out.
3. Mass: Dinosaurs bypassed the problem with the help of hollow bones (like that of birds). no just that, it raises energy and mass moves.
All this is approximate and still does not understand all the reasons, but should also be considered other reasons besides oxygen: Whale is huge because in water the laws are a little different from land, but what limits them from growing is the amount of food that can hold such a large body (million calories per day)
It’s just the tip of the iceberg, but it might be possible to address it somehow in the future
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So th limit will be what you can design. If you evolved into a diplodocus you could be that big. You could be bigger with a insanely effective bone structure. Say, carbon nanotubes.
I remember reading on the old Community Wiki that the player would have a scale (fly as smallest and Diplo as largest) or they could input a value of size. This was a good year or so ago, so it might be outdated.
Well that sounds like a somewhat thorough plan for measuring how large you are. I do think that it could use more size categories. On the small end tick and water bear sizes and on the large one whale and space whale sizes. (Space whale is all sizes notably larger then blue whales and might use a ranked system like space whale 1 for a 1.5 times larger then a blue whale monster and space whale 10 for a 200 times larger living continent.)
That sounds like an overly simple idea. That would mean the game completly disregards that calculations for a scale that is actually possible in such a situation and is just scaling the creature. I think that the size of the creature should just be based on the size of the parts in the editor. For example in the cell stage, a hex should just be a defined size and the more you add, the bigger your cell gets. Simple, yet continues regular calculation since it measures all the hex qualities.
That would make making giantic organism nearly impossible, It is better to be able to input the size you want your organism to be (not a scale, a number)
I think you are getting from what I said that I am talking about adding a hex one by one for your organism but that is not what I mean at all. I mean a depicted size in the editor that is keeping in mind the unit size of a hex, yet the bigger you get, the hex will just become more negligable as a part and more of a unit of size.
I dont understand, could you explain yourself better?
I might be able to help out. Let’s just say that a hex is one millimeter (i know it’s much smaller) as you creature gets bigger, instead of increasing you creatures size by one h
Millimeter, you would increase it by thousands of millimeters, but the base unit would stay the same. Does that make sense @fralegend015, and is that what you meant @The_Void?
Now we’re talking about how we would measure how big something is, which is fine. I’d say you should be given basic mesurments, volume, external surface area, internal surface area (I separated them to exclude respiratory systems, which can have comically large surface areas), longest dimension, etc., given in real world measurements. If we want some scale rating, that’s fine so long as we can tell how large our critter is in real would measurements.
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Yeah, pretty much. Both nunz’s membrane system or convolution surfaces would go with this design.
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Yes, that makes sense
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So in reference to increasing the size of your creatures, there are actually (at least) two different sizes, that the game needs to worry about.
There is the total size of the adult organism, and then there is the “birth” size, which would need to be universally applicable to each reproductive type (egg size, spore/seed size, budding size, etc).
Finally, there would be the size of each other life stage that you may give to the creature, assuming we allow separate larval forms. (Either full on butterfly nonsense or something less dramatic)
Then multiply all that for each caste you have, but that would likely be separated into each of the caste editors.
All of this leads to several different ways of increasing (or decreasing) the size of the animal:
- Increasing the maximum adult size, but leaving the size of the other stages exactly as they are.
This has the advantage of keeping the resource requirement for reproduction the same, even though the total amount of resources your body is dealing with goes up.
It also lengthens total lifespan, and potentially allows larger adults to produce more children at a time than smaller adults, depending on the size and function of reproductive organs.
- Increasing the size of ALL the stages, at the same time and by the same amount.
The resources needed to reproduce stay proportional to your total requirements, but your offspring reap the benefits of being born larger as well.
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Addition of a new life stage, at the end of your life cycle, and making it bigger. This essentially replaces your old “adult” form with an entirely new one.
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Increasing the size of a penultimate life stage, and allowing that to affect the adult size. Bigger chrysalis = bigger butterfly.
(As an aside, this implies the ability to NOT allow this to affect the adult size. Bigger chrysalis = less growth needed afterwards. I know butterflies don’t grow afterwards, shush.)
In order to facilitate all these methods, (or most) I suggest using a segmented sliding scale, that looks something like this:
o——o——o
…with each “o” representing the start, or end, of a life stage, and the ability to choose which one and how many you are moving at a time.
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