>> Looking at those first two pictures makes me think it would be fun to create a race whose sex-linked traits were more of a smooth spectrum than standard humans with their almost-a-binary model.
Of course humans are less binary than a lot of us think we are.
...meanwhile I find that I keep thinking that if she was real there'd be good odds my grandma would have dated her. Especially if it would have been a terrible idea. :p
>> A key reason people often judge by looks is that most people use their looks to communicate things about themselves.
True enough. And her gloriously-styled pompadour makes me think she really cares about her presentation, too.
>> I think it's great to have a large dangerous creature that doesn't attack every time it sees a character, but might just be doing about its own business. If a character wants to pick a fight with random wildlife, they can; but if they just mind their own business (or stand still, or make a noise, this should vary by creature) it will leave them alone.
If you want to invest the time and effort you can put some serious AI into creatures too. Rain World has a wholeass ecosystem. I'd love to do a game where I actually simulate a priority system for animals where they might ignore you if something more important is going on right now. ...partly because I'm sick of games where a predator makes a kill and immediately is ready to chase you down when there's fresh meat RIGHT THERE. Yes, sometimes predators make multikills. And sometimes they're just playing. But quite often they don't want to expend more energy than they need to. Being able to wait until the dragon eats a cow and then walking by while it's napping would be clever.
>> Frex, when I built the sea monster ecosystem for Torn World, I gave each species a role in the ecosystem (predator, omnivore, prey) and a reason for conflicting with people. Those reasons included a huge variety of things like: boats look like food, boats look sexy, a boat can be wrecked to make a great nest, territorial as fuck, fishnets are full of food, and likes to lounge on the same kinds of beaches as humans. So the methods for dealing with one were different than another, and water travel was really fucking dangerous -- they had a whole class of characters called warsailors who whole job was watching for and dealing with sea monsters. It's a simplified version of a real ecosystem's complexity, but it makes sense because it is inspired by that.
A good was of modelling a simpler and quicker to understand version of complex animal behaviors yeah.
>> Oh, that reminds me: giant animals actually are the norm.
Eh... *hand wobble* that's going to be a debate where you have to define what "norm" is first. Animal sizes go up and down all through prehistory. And arguably the norm is being a beetle. :p
But a fair point on it not being unrealistic to have lots of large animals in a setting. Though I do agree with people who caution against too many large predators, because there's only going to be so much meat to go around. And if the planet is settled by sapient races they would have cleared out a lot of large animals just like we did. But sometimes you just have to say "fuck it, this is Monster Hunter logic because I want people to be skittering among giants".
>> I stumbled across the number while trying to figure out why there was a gator the size of a fucking bus in Peculiar Obligations that I definitely did not put there on purpose. Took me a while to work out that slightly lowering human aggression meant fewer extinctions.
...okay, this makes it sound like Peculiar Obligations is some kind of game or simulator, but I did a search and I'm getting a lot of "peculiar obligations" and proverbs and stuff. So what's that?
Re: Thoughts
Of course humans are less binary than a lot of us think we are.
...meanwhile I find that I keep thinking that if she was real there'd be good odds my grandma would have dated her. Especially if it would have been a terrible idea. :p
>> A key reason people often judge by looks is that most people use their looks to communicate things about themselves.
True enough. And her gloriously-styled pompadour makes me think she really cares about her presentation, too.
>> I think it's great to have a large dangerous creature that doesn't attack every time it sees a character, but might just be doing about its own business. If a character wants to pick a fight with random wildlife, they can; but if they just mind their own business (or stand still, or make a noise, this should vary by creature) it will leave them alone.
If you want to invest the time and effort you can put some serious AI into creatures too. Rain World has a wholeass ecosystem. I'd love to do a game where I actually simulate a priority system for animals where they might ignore you if something more important is going on right now.
...partly because I'm sick of games where a predator makes a kill and immediately is ready to chase you down when there's fresh meat RIGHT THERE. Yes, sometimes predators make multikills. And sometimes they're just playing. But quite often they don't want to expend more energy than they need to.
Being able to wait until the dragon eats a cow and then walking by while it's napping would be clever.
>> Frex, when I built the sea monster ecosystem for Torn World, I gave each species a role in the ecosystem (predator, omnivore, prey) and a reason for conflicting with people. Those reasons included a huge variety of things like: boats look like food, boats look sexy, a boat can be wrecked to make a great nest, territorial as fuck, fishnets are full of food, and likes to lounge on the same kinds of beaches as humans. So the methods for dealing with one were different than another, and water travel was really fucking dangerous -- they had a whole class of characters called warsailors who whole job was watching for and dealing with sea monsters. It's a simplified version of a real ecosystem's complexity, but it makes sense because it is inspired by that.
A good was of modelling a simpler and quicker to understand version of complex animal behaviors yeah.
>> Oh, that reminds me: giant animals actually are the norm.
Eh... *hand wobble* that's going to be a debate where you have to define what "norm" is first. Animal sizes go up and down all through prehistory. And arguably the norm is being a beetle. :p
But a fair point on it not being unrealistic to have lots of large animals in a setting.
Though I do agree with people who caution against too many large predators, because there's only going to be so much meat to go around. And if the planet is settled by sapient races they would have cleared out a lot of large animals just like we did. But sometimes you just have to say "fuck it, this is Monster Hunter logic because I want people to be skittering among giants".
>> I stumbled across the number while trying to figure out why there was a gator the size of a fucking bus in Peculiar Obligations that I definitely did not put there on purpose. Took me a while to work out that slightly lowering human aggression meant fewer extinctions.
...okay, this makes it sound like Peculiar Obligations is some kind of game or simulator, but I did a search and I'm getting a lot of "peculiar obligations" and proverbs and stuff. So what's that?