Ah, my favorite topic of the starting size of the macroscopic stage! As some may know, I‘m partial to starting at 1mm, but I believe the vague consensus is currently that it‘s easier to start at 1cm. But you raise a great point, if the adult size of the starting organism is 1cm, then you‘d likely start at 1mm anyways as you‘ll presumably be playing as a juvenile at the beginning. Feel free to further discuss this in Handling Scale.
Then maybe we need a general seperate discussion about how to handle flatness in macroscopic. It‘s an extremely common adaption for a myriad of different reasons (absorbition/gas exchange in e.g. flatworms, camouflage against the ground in e.g. flounders, navigation and locomotion benefits in inummerable fish species e.g. yellow tang (verical flatness) or stingrays (horizontal flatness)…)
Also, if I‘m not mistaken, I‘ve seen design documents in other threads which presumed that eventually metaballs could be made stretchable/flatenable. I can‘t find these mentions, but does anyone else remember reading or writing about this?
Right now, such shapes can only be achieved rather cumbersomely by placing many tiny metaballs next to each other to eventually form a flat disc. Could there be any other solution? I have a very limited understanding of the technical side of this. I‘m guessing to animate the organisms, we‘ll eventually have to look into things like blend shapes anyways. (Like e.g. the game Abzu animates its underwater animals). Maybe there could be another, more permanent „layer of blend shapes“ implemented „below“ these temporary movement blend shapes so to speak, in order to account for the shapes/sculpting of the organisms which can‘t be accounted for by metaballs alone? I know these are incredibly complicated things to implement, but as Deus says:
So all of this graphics programming part of the macroscopic editor is out of the scope of this thread, I‘m just highlighting this as important discussions to be had elsewhere.