Will Wright's New Game: Spore

[vovan]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Oh wait, there is probably nothing no basis for MP.

Why do you think that?

[DrSpike]

I'd be happy if you corrected me.

[DarkCloud]

Also, to address DC's question... What graphics can he use... That was actually the topic of a lot of speeches I heard today and yesterday, and the concise answer is he won't use any graphics. All visuals in the game - including meshes, textures and animations (well, excluding the UI, I'm gussing ) is generated on the fly. Actually, one of the talks today was by a finnish dude from Demoscene, as linked by ADG above, and these guys are really working closely with Maxis on this. The idea here is that procedural generation of content reduces the amount of storage needed for it by a factor of about 100. That is, basically, with 50 megs of binary code, you can generate 5 gigs of content, which is roughly equivalent to 5 full-length movies

Sounds interesting from a technical point of view.

I still don't know if gameplay will be good, though.

This sounds a lot like Sim Life..

Thanks for your answers, vovan.

[vovan]

Originally posted by DrSpike
I'd be happy if you corrected me.

Well, to be fair, I don't think there will be MP in the game either.

However, I don't agree that there is no potential for MP. When your creatures reach a certain level of development, you gain the ability to make your cities pretty large and also build new cities. At some point, you move on to a higher level of abstraction, where you essentially zoom out of the planet, and the cities are displayed on the globe in form of icons, and you don't have to micromanage them any longer. You can simply click the icon and say, ok, I want building such and such in this city, and minor details that you used to take care of before, like choosing a location for the building in the city, or drawing roads to connect it to the main network, etc, these details are all taken care for you. But at this level, you also have other civilizations competing with you. There's unit and resource management, battles, etc. So at that level, the game becomes much like an RTS, which I think does have a certain potential for MP.

[vovan]

Originally posted by DarkCloud
Sounds interesting from a technical point of view.

Very much so indeed! I think I am far more interested in seeing how the game works than actually playing it.

Originally posted by DarkCloud
I still don't know if gameplay will be good, though.

Well, the thing that sort of bothers me about the game is the large variety of game styles Spore is trying to cover. There is the simple arcade-like gameplay at the cellular level, there is the hack'n'slash style at the non-sentient multicellular level, there is the citybuilding style at the lower levels of sentiency, and the epic, almost AoE-like style at higher levels of sentiency, and then there is this whole different game at the stellar travel level, which I don't even know what to compare it to. Each of these is hard to get right alone... Combining them all into one game is scarier still. It seems like in an attempt to please everyone, you might end up with something that pisses everyone off, because your arcade players won't like the strategic game, your strategy players won't like hack'n'slash game, etc.

But I am still rather optimistic about this.

[FrostyBoy]

It's not the beginning part that is big, it's the galatic part. Imagine if you had 10,000 players, each one of those players will have a different creature, each one fighting for another planet or what ever.


That brings me to another question, how big is this universe? How many planets, etc?

[St Leo]

The way I understand it is that Spore is not multiplayer. Rather, the species you design are sent to a centralized server where they are distributed out to other players as NPCs.

[FrostyBoy]

Oh, hm.. well if thats the intention, I don't see how this is going to be the "biggest game ever".

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Darkstar
So, why are you so down on Will and his games? Were you disappointed with TheSims and couldn't return it to the store?

Nothing against Will Wright personally. It's just these sort of games have a tendency to fail. By "fail" I mean the game could not live up to all the hype. Two examples are Outpost and MoO 3. Black and White is bad, too.

[General Ludd]

The problem with Outpost (as I understand) and MoO3 was not that they couldn't live up to the hype, it was that they where crapy games.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by vovan
Ah, that's actually a good point. When he was booting his computer, I saw it was a 3GHz Pentium IV, though I didn't catch how much RAM he had.

3GHz P4 is a bit stiff...

I am sure you are well award of the speed vs space tradeoffs. You either do the rendering on the fly, which requires a lot of computing power, or you do the rendering beforehand and store the results, which requires a lot of storage space. I reckon game companies opt for the latter, because they wouldn't want to unnecessarily limit the potential buyers base.

Originally posted by vovan
Once the textures and things are generated, it's not like there is any more processing drain after that.

Hmm... does all that stuff get stored on the HDD for later use?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by General Ludd
The problem with Outpost (as I understand) and MoO3 was not that they couldn't live up to the hype, it was that they where crapy games.

MoO 3 was extremely hyped in the beginning. Then the design was gutted when the development team couldn't meet the goals. Being rushed into the market also played a part, of course.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


MoO 3 was extremely hyped in the beginning. Then the design was gutted when the development team couldn't meet the goals. Being rushed into the market also played a part, of course.

It was hyped, yes, but that wasn't any part of it's downfall. It just sucked to the core and it wouldn't of mattered if people where not hyped about it, it'd be just as horrible.

[vovan]

Originally posted by Sn00py
That brings me to another question, how big is this universe? How many planets, etc?

It's pretty damn huge. The system that the demo started out on was like five planets, I think, and he visited two other systems, one had one planet, and one had three, IIRC. So I don't know what is the maximum number of planets a system would have, though.

Then, from the star system view you can zoom out to your section of the galaxy, which I think had something like twenty to thirty star systems in it. My impression was actually of much more, but I think I always tend to exagerrate numbers, so I'd say twenty is reasonable. Okay, then you zoom out of your galaxy sector to the whole galaxy, and you see that your sector is like about one percent of the whole galaxy.

So yeah, there is a lot of stars in the game.

Actually, when you are in the galaxy sector view, and you can see individual stars actually, your cursor is something of a seti-listening kind of thing, so when you mouse over a star, you either hear static, or this kind of radio chatter. The latter means there are sentient life forms in the star system somewhere. If there is no chatter, I don't really know what it means: are there no life forms there? or only non-sentient ones? or maybe sentient ones that have not yet developed much technologically? The last thing would make sense, but I don't know how it actually works.

[vovan]

Originally posted by Sn00py
Oh, hm.. well if thats the intention, I don't see how this is going to be the "biggest game ever".

Well, I don't know about you, but the scale of the game totally blows my mind away. From a single cell up to a whole galaxy? It's pretty damn impressive, IMO.