It got me thinking. In the sketch, old_Quasar lists the relevant stats of a foot as stamina, speed and damage (one day we'll add swimming speed etc.
) ; what could we find as major stats influenced by other body parts ?About tails : MrKyurem and AnarchCassius noticed that, well, they currently don't do much. They mention equilibrium (of utmost importance !), defense (/offense) and thermic regulation (not sure of this one, since changing the dimensions of the tail should do the trick without needing new design) as factors susceptible do modify a tail's anatomy. I'd add swimming and flying speed (agility if implemented ?), maybe climbing, to this list once these will be in.
Hands, for their parts, can for now almost only be used for damage : other potential roles in non-walking locomotion are currently postponed. Even by adding their potential "prehensility" (dexterity if we want to make it a continuum) that could enable to take food out of reach for the neck, not a lot of variations can be imagined, which I guess is why hands are rare in the BPVCT suggestion topic -as they are in Nature !
Notice how those relevant stats are more or less the same that come back every time. Cassius said about tails : "It could be treated like another limb really." ; and indeed, limbs share most of the same functionality, making the repartition of stats among them a bit contingent.
By the way : I'm for each foot having an immediatly corresponding hand, from where it could begin to specialize free from walking constraints, so as to avoid discontinuity when a quadruped become biped. It is somehow aesthetic : I'd like sudden bipeds to brandish their "hands" like they learned how to make the best of them, not as zombies with feet on their wrists. For example, a hoof would have a subtly different design showing that it is now wielded as a dangerous claw that is only worn out against the skull of foolish rivals, rather than a stupid, out-of-place hoof.
And/or.
Creatures could have limb tips usually used as foot, but of which they can raise one to use as a hand (/claw etc.). Some animals, like bears or gorilla, blend the distinction between hands and feet specifically because they can freely use their front limbs (could be their hind or middle limbs in Species !) as either.
The matter is a lot more complicated when we talk about heads : they are a lot more diverse in Nature, and it's strictly speaking impossible to resume their diversity in a little "stats tree" that makes sense. That being said, I'll try anyway, since it could be an inspiration for the type of heads we'll have to put in vanilla.
What follows will be a bit subjective. ^^'
It looks like a head is mainly a mobile support for the front of the digestive tract (da mouth), with a lot of sensory organs (assume I means something that generic each time I speak of eyes or vision) and a nervous centre. The whole shebang is systematically, when it exists, on the front of the animal.
My guess is that the development of a "front" in the first place results from a specialization in movement : since turning is rather easy, animals can gain a speed advantage by sacrificing the ability to move in any direction and focusing on their favourite axis. Accordingly, fastest animals are bilateral. It's better if the mouth is in the front, because this way it can easily snap at organic matter (as can attest anyone who actually tried to play Spore
) ; sensory organs tend to congregate on the front so that the creatures see where it goes and what it is doing with its frontal mouth. Then, nervous tissue follow the sensory apparatus and ends up close.Why did I expose this theory of mine ? Because there are holes in it ! Nature doesn't care about what is "optimal" in a vacuum, and a lot of animals don't follow this "royal road". Flies have a distributed nervous system and taste with their feet.
The question I wanted you to ask yourself is : "What is a head ?".
I think the answer is "a mouth". Most invertebrates have a more distributed nervous system than us, so this is not a criteria; and sensory organs could very well transfer themselves on prehensile front limbs rather than the mouth (noticed that Quasar ? That means I support the placement of eyes in other places than the head !), the priority being that the animal can perceive what its in front of him (in Species terms, maybe a creature instinctively restricts its moves when its current speed would get it in an unknown zone faster than it can react ; and seeing a food source boost the ability to use it correctly).
Consequently, I'll consider that the reservation of space for eyes and brain in the skull is somewhat contingent, and that the mutation map of the heads should focus on the diversification of the mouths.
The mouth is essentially an extension of the digestive tract specialized in two things : catching food/making it available and beginning digestion.
The first part implies extensions to reach the food sooner when arms can't do that (long and wide jaws, tongue, tentacles) while minimizing the air drag to gain in speed (prevalent in water, where fish create vacuum to suck in their prey or have thin jaws), and often the ability to defeat the food's defences : killing preys, rupturing shells, keeping hold of a slippery thing ; that is, mainly damage. Nuts would need to be cracked to be feasted upon, piercing damages can hold a prey or help suck its blood/sap -more cost effective than licking the blood flowing on the ground ... Living animals could have different resistance according to their type of defence.
On the other hand, predigestion include everything that the stomach (or equivalent) could do without, but that ease its job, such as mastication and tearing the prey item to pieces before swallowing.
And as you can imagine, the differences in prey item -flat leaves, hard nuts, tender meat- means that the solutions developed to catch and "defeat" are quite various. Meat can be hold with pointy teeth and cut with sharp ones ; leaves/grass eaters rake their food inside, and need a mix of sharp and grinding teeth to tame this silicated food ; hard food must be thoroughly ground, filterers have complex dewlaps, suckers have a proboscis ...
Hence, the main stats influencing the evolution of mouths are damage (often a part of obtaining a meal) and "eating rate" (not actually the speed of eating ...
rather the quantity of nutrients extracted with each bite)(reflecting the ability to make nutrients more available for the rest of the digestive system) by diet.Notice how limbs can help in almost all the cases ; actually, that's why the mouth of arthropod is mainly made of limbs pushed toward the throat. The differences in property between mouths and hands are sometime subtle : the limbs can sometime catch the food, tear it apart and bring it to the throat without the "strict mouth" having to specialize in any way.
Finally, can we make a correspondence between the stats of the mouth and its appearance ?
Well, the different natures of diet make it difficult to be general. The tree I propose instead is more focused on morphology ...
The first mouth is a naked throat, à la Primus specium, but with a generous number of attachment sites around it, susceptible to bear flexible (tentacles, tongues) or hard (jaws, mandibles) appendages, on which teeth can then grow : canine-like for piercing damage, molar-like for grinding, baleen-like for filtering etc. The appendages themselves would help with the eating rate (the hard ones sacrifice a bit of it for added bite damages), while each kind of teeth would have a different effect on this rate depending on the diet on which it is used ; and they would often help with damage, in different ways.
A single appendage could support one big tooth, from one to four successive types of teeth, or nothing. Ideally, the position in the mouth could have a role, with the more external tooth being more efficient as weapons but less as masticating help ...
Appendages and their tooth would be more efficient if they have an appendage on the opposite side on which to bear.
At this point we have more or less complex radula around the throat ; maybe two successive appendages could fuse to make a larger surface with a few rows of tooth, so as to make crocodiles possible. The ability to entirely close a mouth eliminating the risk of drooling food, each appendage would boost the eating rate, especially when fused ; this would be of tremendous use for liquivores, whose diet gain no benefit whatsoever from teeth, and which would gain from reducing their mouth to a tube.
Or maybe some appendages could be small limbs, like in insects, whose dexterity could compensate the drooling by snatching pieces of food to throw them back into the mouth or the throat ...
Okay, not all points are clear in my head or in this post, but it's getting late here and I've put the principal ideas :
- considering the stats used by parts could help design/choose new ones ;
- eyes could be put anywhere, but be more useful on the front (whatever the means) ;
- heads development is friggin' difficult to automatize. ^^"
Whatdayathink ?
We learn something new every day ! 