Here's the player's character at (almost) full size.

The control scheme is like Asteroids with a cursor. The direction you move the cursor is the direction your character faces. The cursor's distance from the player determines the character's speed, and where you looking. You could previously zoom with the mouse wheel, but now the cursor distance controls that, too. The camera will zoom out when you move the cursor away, and will slowly zoom back in when the cursor is close to the character.

I'm going to include two sensory systems to help avoid detection, and find prey. The first is already in the demo: its the series of dark blobs around the edge of the screen. I call them "vision blobs" or "extended vision". They let you "see" what's off-screen in the form of dark blobs. The size and opacity of the blob indicate the size of the object and distance from you. The second sensory device in still in the works, I call it "particle smell". The particles are mostly white, but if you're observant you'll see that some of them have a different color. This color could represent a kind of "visual smell" and tell you what's nearby. You could smell food, predators, friends... I wanted this to be a subtle clue that only the keen would notice, but I can't keep secrets from my journal :) Your character's sense of smell could become more sensitive as you grow, too.

I've almost fixed the bonitis problem, but it can still happen if a creature's tail whips around too hard and the collision shapes tunnel. This happens because a half-grown fish's tail spasms like a freak when it moves. It's just a matter of tuning to make everything copasetic. I could remove the joint motors at the end of the tail to calm down the tail swing.

I don't have Vista to test things out, but in the VC++ Linker/Manifest File options I disabled the UAC and bypassed the UI protection. So hopefully, you won't have to run it as an administrator.

Those brown things aren't poops, they're seeds! If you grab one and let it touch a rock, it instantly sprouts a single giant leaf. Rocks are the only static objects I have at the moment, so that's why plants can grow out of them. All the bodies and joints necessary for leaves are very expensive and bring the game to a crawl in any large amount. I'm trying to find a way to do inexpensive plants...