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Tiberium Lifeforms
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Orac
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Joined: 11 Jul 2008
Location: New Zealand

PostPosted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:39 pm    Post subject:  Tiberium Lifeforms
Subject description: In the grim darkness of the far future, there are only dinosaurs with spikes for arms.
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The Problem
There's a severe issue with Tiberium, and that is that it is an inherently unbelievable substance.  Closer consideration of it, its effects, the creatures and flora it produces, garners only the rule of cool, applied phlebotinum, and magic as results.  But that's not actually the problem.

The problem is that its actually pretty well hidden.  By accident or by design, the way in which it functions has been described only in very general terms.  We know it causes mutation at a much greater rate than natural evolution might manage, producing fertile offspring, and that mutants generally have Tiberium growing on them somewhere.  Unless they're blobs of flesh rolling around the map.  Lets not think about them.  The point is, the less we know the easier it is to justify.
So it's fine that its illogical, and its fine that its reasonably well hidden, it's not fine that...  well, that dinosaurs.  There is still a point you get to which breaks immersion, which makes things just a little too strange to find any justification for.  For me, that point is dinosaurs with tyranid  arms.


Why This is an Issue, and How Can We Fix It?
There is this point where you're breaking logic enough to reveal that the workings of the world are stretched thin enough for giant bugs (last seen in the Carboniferous due to a more swampy environment and a much greater level of oxygen in the air.  Bugs do not have lungs), and the return of dinosaurs (who in reality are most likely the ancestors of today's birdlife, and in any case are made of stone now).

It's that point where I stop saying things which are, when you think about them, a little silly "well, the evolution of the muscles to throw spines is one which has been documented already, there's no reason to discount its development in an organism which has been altered by Tiberium",  and I start going "whaaa?"

The key is, I believe, to be interesting without being crazy.  That, or to admit that the world which fans have fought for many years to declare "less cartoony than RA2" is in fact just as mad.  it might have been hidden better, but it was certainly very silly.

The works of Dougal Dixon are, in my opinion, a good example of this.  While they are indeed flights of fancy they do still hold a coherent logic.  His evolutionary concepts are slightly out of date now, but his visual style will never age.
He proposes the futures of a number of creatures, stretching out over millions of years.  Views of an entirely alien earth where ever increasingly large rodents and marsupials have developed the teeth required to be fast moving predators.  The Falanx shown in the first image I have attached is a distant relative of today's stoats.
In Africa, now something of a tropical grassland, the large herbivores have developed features reminiscent of the world long before Sapiens.  Creatures which would be at home in the world of Deinotherium, the Gigantelope and Rundihorn have antler like horns for scraping at the earth or for defence and courtship displays.
In one of his other books he imagines a world in which the great extinction did not occur, and the sauropods remained the dominant form of life on the planet.  While this is now somewhat outdated (created prior to the dinosaur -> bird link had been suggested), the images are nonetheless inspirational.  Monocorn, a huge herbivore with an armoured front and a single horn on the nose uses its horn for defence and in sparring matches for herd leadership.

You see what I'm trying to describe?  it doesn't actually make a great deal of sense, but it looks like it does.  And things that look like they make sense justify themselves.

What I guess I'm trying to say is, could you imagine a trip to the zoo where you saw these creatures?  A genuine in-this-reality trip to the zoo?


It's Just a Game
"It's just a game" is a fine way to end an argument about design, until you think about it.  Much like Tiberium, it doesn't make a lot of sense.  What exactly is a game?  It's everything from the underlying engine all the way up to the frontend code to the graphics and eventually to the story.  Whether or not explicitly, the graphics are telling that story.  And if the visuals are telling me a story about mutant dinosaurs and bugs the size of houses...  Well, this best be the missions of It Came From Red Alert!

It's just a game is a fine explanation for lack of scope, it's not an explanation for the trying to reconcile a dark future with tiberisaurs.



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Aro
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Joined: 10 Sep 2006

PostPosted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 1:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Talk about blowing things out of proportion. #Tongue

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OmegaBolt
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 9:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Well I agree with him, I've never liked those Raptors (not just in TI) and even giant bugs don't make any sense plus not very creative (they're just scaled up beetles afterall). Of course this does rely on getting graphics made but still, you're replacing most of the game.

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Aro
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Joined: 10 Sep 2006

PostPosted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 9:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Just strikes me as a wee bit of an over-exaggeration, and regarding the "giant bugs", I have stated several times it uses a placeholder image.

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Crimsonum
Seth


Joined: 14 Jul 2005
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 10:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Our resources are limited, and so is our staff. There are some hinders we just have to accept. I agree the giant beetles are silly, and so are dinosaurs, but until we have a person with the required 3D modeling capabilities and enough free time to change things, those will stay as placeholders. While it's cool and all to think of Tiberium, its features and effects from an utterly realistic perspective, at the very end it's still a game like you said. Some compromises must be made for the sake of fluid and entertaining gameplay.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fascinated by evolution myself (especially when it comes to extinct mammals of the paleogene or fictional creatures of the future), but look what happened with Tiberium Wars: a MIT was involved to explain Tiberium from a scientific perspective, and it ended up as a simplified crystal that just turns everything into more crystals. Sounds boring, huh?

Needless to say, you could've cropped your message into a small post in the Tib. Lifeforms topic.

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Orac
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Joined: 11 Jul 2008
Location: New Zealand

PostPosted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 11:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

It seemed more pleasant to post the images in a topic of their own, where it doesn't clog up a discussion of existant assets.
And since I was creating a topic, I decided to back it up with at least a bit of background.

If you like, I have a number of Tiberium Creature meshes which TI could share, although I lack the comprehension of 3D Max to rig and animate them.

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Aro
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Joined: 10 Sep 2006

PostPosted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 11:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

That would be appreciated. Smile

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daviperdragon
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 2:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

The matis and giant bugs are from starshiptroopers... so of coarse they are placeholders, yet they are the most fun to kill.

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Quadhelix
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Joined: 31 Aug 2007

PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2012 10:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

OmegaBolt wrote:
Well I agree with him, I've never liked those Raptors (not just in TI) and even giant bugs don't make any sense plus not very creative (they're just scaled up beetles afterall). Of course this does rely on getting graphics made but still, you're replacing most of the game.
Alright, I'm a bit late to the party, but here's my position:

It's not inconceivable that Tiberium, which is known to cause some rather extreme mutations (e.g., they don't even know know what Tiberium Fiends were before they were mutated), might cause certain birds to lose their feather and grow larger. In that case, the "claw" is just a sharpened, featherless wing. Most birds already have a stubby tail, so that could potentially get longer, forming the Tiberium Raptor's tail.

The only issue I can't resolve is the teeth - if I recall correctly, birds have lost their gene for teeth, so no amount of fiddling with the existing genes is going to make teeth and new genes for a complex structure is likely to appear overnight. I suppose, from looking at the image, that the jaw might just be a fleshy beak or something.

So, yeah, the "Tiberium Raptor" isn't entirely unsalvageable in term of quasi-realism.

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SMIFFGIG
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Joined: 03 Mar 2003
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2012 1:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

@Orac

What book(s) are those scans from?

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OmegaBolt
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Joined: 21 Mar 2005
Location: York, England

PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2012 4:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Quadhelix wrote:
the "Tiberium Raptor" isn't entirely unsalvageable in term of quasi-realism.
Well then it should walk more birdlike and without having its "wings" in front. Currently they're more like arms with claws. Some kind of mutated grounded bird creature would be cool it just needs to represented properly if that is the case.

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Machine
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Joined: 01 Feb 2007
Location: National Reference Laboratory for IPNV

PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2012 4:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

The TW explanation that it transmutes normal elements into more tiberium was ridicolous they even admit that they can't explain tiberian mutations with it. Meanwhile previous games basically went: "it's alien stuff I don't have to explain anything"

So as a biochemist, I had decided to make tiberium more believable for rise of omnius. So I wrote some documents, actually notes in a copybook that sometimes I discussed with other forum members, but mostly with sane.

I started with:
-Tiberium self replicates
so that statement leaves me with several options, tiberium is a lifeform, which fits with previous lore. However it doesn't explain why it mutates stuff, it does explain why extra strains of tiberium have appeared since the original arrival of it.

-Tiberium crystals are valuable
That’s explained ingame since it's meant to leech the ground and deposit valuable materials in the crystals. So the crystals are there to act as a reservoir of material that's easily collectable, so far so good. This implies that the pod is the lifeform and that tiberium itself is some kind of biological refinery, and fits with aliens wanting to mine Earth for some weird unexplained reason, yet it still doesn’t explain mutations.

-Tiberium mutates stuff (sometimes)
we have seen tiberium mutants like the forgotten, fiends, floaters, visceroids and the varied tiberium "flora". If we compare them the forgotten and fiends are basically normal individuals/critters with tiberium crystals, but floaters and visceroids are different they have no crystals and don’t really resemble anything. This is weird because sometimes tiberium makes extremely different mutations like visceroids, only does small "cosmetic" changes or most commonly simply kills stuff.

And there is the big unanswered how?. I tried to explain this by making tiberium crystals act like proteins, keeping the pod as a lifeform that synthesizes said "protein". Proteins do in fact bind metals and even store them, like ferritin. This might explain the soil leeching part, as the pod would secrete some kind of acid to the ground solubilize whatever it wants to leech and then via capillarity transport them the growing crystals where it's stored. Considering that proteins usually bind metals in structures that absorbs light, like hemo groups, this might also explain why tiberium is green, it might also explain why it's sometimes blue, by either saying that a small difference in the protein structure (a mutation in tiberium itself changes) the bond leghts and thus the absorbance length, alternatively it could be attributed to a different metal taking place in the center of the metal binding hemo-like group of the "tiberium protein". Then the tiberium crystal could be extracted and solubilized, probably just by submerging it in a acid or basic solution (BTW dry proteins form crystals too).
If the crystal is made of protein like structures each would have an specific weight which means we could separate the different components by centrifugation, which is not an expensive process at all. We could have then several fractions with proteins that binded different elements of interest. The final step in the refining of the contents of tiberium would be to separate the binded metals from the protein structure, again it could be done by denaturizing it, usually another pH shift or changing the temperature would do it, add a centrifugation and you'll have the remains of the protein and a highly pure metal/element of interest.
So far this explains why it's valuable, since it would be way cheaper than mining and refining the stuff chemically, there's a reason why bioleaching is an interesting prospect in mining since it cheaper, and also environmentally friendly (of course the last part doesn't apply to tiberium though).
However I still don't explain why it mutates stuff. What kind of thing could mutate something, well radiation could, but not at the level we've seen in the games, it would result in the most likely scenario of dying, which does fit, but it also doesn't fit with it being a lifeform. A virus could do it, yet it doesn’t make too much sense.
A protein could do it, indeed that's a possibility, prionic diseases, like mad cow disease, are disease where an abnormal protein (prion) transforms normal proteins into more prions. If this was the case, the most likely scenario of a tiberium infection would be death, since the immune system wouldn't be able to recognize the abnormal proteins and the effect would be exponential, and you would die likely as a meat blob (just being exaggerated, it could be less graphical) after a couple of weeks or less. If the organism did fight the infection it might be able to stop the formation of new prions, yet if we give crystals the ability to contain small cell/spore-like structures, you could perfectly have the start of a tiberium pod in a living organism, so the organism would start developing crystals internally and externally, very likely it would be fatal, but at least way slower than exponential growth, especially if the organism is able to isolate the growths.
Well with this I've explained visceroids and forgotten/fiends, but not floaters. There's another possibility, both organisms working symbiotically, this gives some problems though, it would likely mean that only not very complex organism could mutate this way, and that the mutation shouldn't be very radical.
Explaining mutations this way also means that they are not heritable, at least not in the genetic sense, they could be transferred horizontally (between individuals) and vertically (from mother to son) by contact.
This also means that most mutations are temporal, because they are lethal, and tiberium healing becomes a retarded concept for most mutations. And that cool creatures are mostly unlikely unless you consider a gigantic sea sponge cool.
I should mention that I left out the "flora", why? because if tiberium was made as a biological entity to harvest Earth, it was likely made specifically for Earth's lifeforms, we know tiberium transforms trees into blossom trees, so for Rise of Omnius, I said that was the specific target for the attack of the "tiberium prions", the ability to change animal proteins was only a side effect of structural similarity of some proteins between animals and plants. The rest of the tiberium flora, the non-blossom trees could be just incompatible flora that suffers the same fate as animals, but instead of dying it stays barely functional, probably they could die anyway, but unlike animals, plants are functionally simpler in that they don't have squishy organs.

Well I tried to make my ideas on the issue clearer; after all, they were only some annotations on how this stuff could work, not perfectly though and it likely falls short just like official explanations but it's what I had planned for Rise of Omnius, and honestly who cares if it does fall short (besides me of course) after all it's just scifi. Anyway I still want my tiberian sandworms.
Wow according to word this is a 3 pages worth wall of text Confused.

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Orac
President


Joined: 11 Jul 2008
Location: New Zealand

PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2012 8:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I wrote the floater off as a Cabal experiment, since he's sort of good at batshit insane ideas.

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Crimsonum
Seth


Joined: 14 Jul 2005
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 14, 2012 9:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

There's a rare cutscene which depicts a hostile, amoeba-like "Tiberium" cell invading both plant and animal cells, practically converting them into more Tiberium cells. This video was apparently cut from TD, as it appeared in one of the game designers' YouTube portfolio (he confirmed it was canon). Either the cell is the Tiberium organism itself or a symbiote.

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DeathlyRose
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Joined: 24 Oct 2008

PostPosted: Mon Aug 12, 2013 1:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Don't complain please for me necroing this as there is a topic for this matter already i'll just use  this.

Tiberium in a sense is a lifeform in a sense that opposes of how life and evolution works. Since life and evolution works by preserving what genetic data memory it can in either the host itself or the environment. The environment allows for an unlimited amount of memory storage of the genetic data but needs too be properly converted too a state where storage is possible but during the process what depending on the amount currently being converted the ratio is askewered too an aspect of the less the amount the greater the loss the more the amount the less the loss.
 One would ask why is that the reason being the living creature that the genetic data comes from determines that amount.The more intelligent they are the more memory they are capable of using and storing on a both short and long term scale. Thus is why we humans in reality is having a much greater effect on scale nowadays. It is because our current capacity surpasses in every degree of past human and earth history.

As too how tiberium works it works in a sense too how adaption works but too a much more frightening degree.It leeches off any host it can find energy, organic, inorganic and of course metallic in a more raw form. But one aspect of metallic that is different from the rest is the atomic structure in and of itself doesn't provide any real depth for storage capacity. thus is why cement and such is and went mostly unchanged.
Too continue on how tiberium works it converts whatever resource it can take from its host and changes it too a more stable one for itself. Previous planets were different, they didn't have the needed components for it too truly thrive, Earth itself does. So continuing on as it becomes a parasite of the host. It drains and takes any capacity it's former host now has and converts and adapts it too a more suitable state for itself.
The reason for such unusual change in the creatures that dwell, Is mostly because of the way it drains, converts and adapts the resources it has taken. You can say its more akin too brute force methods. Just simply taking things. So as it strays away from more stable environment the more unstable and unlikely the chances get. Meaning The more complex the creature the more likelyhood it would fail due too complexity of the living creature. The reason for such bizzare forms it current has is due too absorbing all sorts of genetic data. Being the genetic data tiberium has managed too extract from the ground is of more primitive form.
Getting back too why there only tend too be visceroids is because the chances of converting humans was less then 10% closer too 1%. Of course there were successes as too Floaters are your success and visceroids are your failures. As too why it has it's form you just need too look at why it's failure has its form. Due too massive complexity of humans the genetic data for most just collapsed. Eventually which in this case meaning real fast changed into a blob of sort which is visceroids. So as a success It converted too a more stable state retaining too a varying degree its original hosts genetic data. So remember this its just it's first stage. Which meaning the evolution has just started it will eventually gain a more refined less primitive form so too speak. I don't feel like explaining veinholes so sue me :p.

Also i'm not trying downplay you machine but in order too understand how tiberium works you must be able too understand the full aspect of the theory that formed the underlines of this world.Meaning both physical and metaphysical, So humans know far less then they think they do. I won't go any further as too why I know what I know.

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Krow
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Joined: 30 Jan 2010
Location: Malaysia

PostPosted: Mon Aug 12, 2013 5:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

You're fine. You are under the protection of our unholy leader of Twisted Insurrection, Aro! I like the little story you whipped up. Some little blips here and there, but still nice. Good job.

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Volgin
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 12, 2013 6:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Smiffgig - I'm pretty sure the book is Dougal Dixon's  Man After Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_After_Man:_An_Anthropology_of_the_Future) and other sci-fi things.

art: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mutantskeleton/sets/72157625504925356/

I kind of disagree with Orac, but I kind of agree. By the way, the creatures you show are from another Dixon book... and they are dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are neat, and their descendents (birds) shit on our automobiles daily, and fill our air with song. Why isn't it impossible for some to revert to a dinosaur-like look? Some present day birds such as the cassowary are exremely dinosaur-like in terms of design.  That said, it is just a game... and a game without very large assets for tiberium monsters.

However, why can't people look to present day myths and legends when designing tiberium monsters as well? What would happen to a tiberium mutated Bigfoot? A group of living dinosaurs in the congo exposed to tiberium?

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