In this post I will be talking about how we can incorporate senses into the behaviour of horses (and subsequently every other animal) into CoE to help build a thriving ecosystem and make hunting, exploring, even day-to-day working with the animal a much more responsive activity.

I understand that we can’t fully replicate the Sensory package of an animal and some of this is purely to help educate you on senses in general but a lot of it can be incorporated into the game.

I will talk about the senses and how they relate to the horse and it’s behaviour as it is a prey animal.

What are the Senses?

Sight – the sight of an animal is controlled via either a compound or non-compound eye, for the purposes of this thread I will only discuss the non-compound eye as the Horse eye has only one lens (which by definition is the non-compound eye).

Sight refers to the ability to see objects by light entering the eye and the message transmitting through the optical nerve into the brains optical lobe which processes the imagery.

Smell – the smell of an animal is controlled via the nose and its connecting nerves which get processed in the orbitofrontal lobe.

The sense of smell is used to detect molecules in the air (which is what constitutes a smell, volatile molecules in the air) which aids animals in processing the surroundings to help the animal travel, hunt or to detect other animals within its species.

Hearing – the hearing of an animal is controlled through the ear of the animal, sound enters the outer ear and gets processed in the middle and inner ear which is then processed in the auditory cortex of the brain

Hearing enables the animal to hear noises and sounds of the environment; this could involve the animal hearing prey, hearing predators, and hearing mating calls from a large distance away.

Touch – the sense of touch in an animal is processed by a special neuron system called the somatosensory system, the four main ‘types’ of ‘touch receptors’ are;

Mechanoreceptors – responsible for the detection of ‘texture’, ‘pressure’ and ‘vibrations’

Thermoreceptors – responsible for detecting temperature and the resulting changes in temperature.

Pain Receptors – responsible for detecting pain.

Proprioceptors – allows animals to ‘feel themselves’ and as such enable them to interact with their own body.

Sight of the Horse

As the horse is a prey animal it’s eyes are on the side of its head enabling it to have peripheral vision on the sides but not behind the hind quarters or directly in front, this enables the horse to scan its surroundings while it grazes for food watching for predators (such as wolves).

As shown above the horse should not be able to see you if you are behind the horse or directly in front (it can however smell still) so this should be thought about when you are hunting horses or even in battle.

The horse’s field of view is put into perspective showing the 148 degree peripheral vision to the sides and the roughly 38-40 degree binocular vision in front (including the blind spots on the front and back).

These horses most likely saw you coming from miles away, try again rookie hunter!

Sense of Smell of the Horse

A horses’ sense of smell although not as acute as a wolves is still multiple times more potent than a humans and as such can still smell scent trails.

Horses don’t need as acute sense of smell as the wolf due to the horse being a prey animal and the wolf needs a long-distance and long-time olfactory inventory, whereas the horse uses its smell for mostly communicational reasons such as;

>A horse identifying another horse via smelling it’s droppings

>Identifying when a mare is in season

>Identifying if another horse is ill

Horse showing behaviours that could be tied to hormones

The horse uses its peripheral vision more than its smell to detect predators coming near. Interestingly the horse relies more on chemical messages (hormones for example) then smells to socially interact and as such they have specialised receptors within their nasal cavity and muzzle to detect these and for example start to release hormones responsible for arousal in stallions.

This could mean in an in-game sense that horses could give visual indicators when a mare is ready for breeding or if a Stallion smells another stallion

Sense of Hearing in the Horse

The horses hearing is much keener than a manns but it has the same range of a mann, making it muss less effective than a wolves, but the horse can focus its hearing more proficiently than that of a wolf due to a single anatomical difference in the ear enabling it to ‘twist’ and as such can focus it’s hearing while it’s grazing, enabling it to detect predators or other animals coming in the horse’s direction.

This means in an in-game sense that the horse can most likely hear you coming unless you are very, very sneaky.

What does this waffle mean for the game?

Good question, it helps to incorporate behaviours of the horse and animals in general that are believable and help to create an immersive world.

For example having a horse having its actual anatomical vision (as much as is possible to program into the game could help with the training of the horse and ties into my previous threads on tack, blinkers could reduce the vision of the horse and make it concentrate on pretty much what is in front of it to make it less likely to spook.

Or observing how a stallion behaves around certain mares whom could be in season for breeding.

There is a multitude of ways it could help the game and I am just stating my opinion on the matter.