Will Wright's New Game: Spore

[DrSpike]

I find Vovan's points interesting. Maybe this one will be worth a look when it's ready. Maybe.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
And wasnt Simville intended to be an intermediate step linking down to the Sims and up to Simcity? That didnt pan out? Wrights clearly been interested in the scale up - scale down things for some time - there must have been reasons it didnt work before.

There was a Sim Town, but it was Sim City for Kids™.

[Kuciwalker]

I take it back; this looks like it could work and not be stupid. It just doesn't attempt a quite *serious* imitation of each level.

[vovan]

Originally posted by Sn00py
Oh I thought it was the blue dot.

Is that a black hole or something?

Nope. That's the cursor, and it looks ugly, because it was a photo of the screen. You can actually see it on all screenies. On the solar system it's just to the right of the second planet from the star, on the UFO shot, it's just above the UFO, on the city shot it's at the bottom of the tallest building in the centre.

[vovan]

Originally posted by Sn00py
I wonder how long and how much you can do in each stage? It would be a really bad game if you zoomed past each stage.

Originally posted by Sn00py
In the City stage, do you advance slowly like in Civilization? Can you build more than one city?

Well, I don't really know for sure, because in the demo, Wright put the whole progression of the game in about half an hour or so, but he did "skip" a lot of things, so I don't really know like how fast you can advance from stage to stage. It seems to me though like you can pretty much pace the game as you want. Like, if you want to just zoom through the levels, I think you can do that, but if you want to micromanage and take your time, then you can do that too.

For example, once you reach a certain level of development, you can have multiple cities, I think, and then you can pretty much choose your level of micromanagement. For example, suppose you wanted to build a temple in a city. You could either be zoomed out on the planetary level, where you see iconic representations of your cities and units. Then, you can simply click the city icon and say, hey I want a temple there, and the temple would be built. Or you could be zoomed in to the terrain level, and actually plop down the building in the city yourself and draw roads and such things to connect it with the rest of the city.

[vovan]

Originally posted by General Ludd
Anything else known about the design / cultural theme?

Well, I am not entirely sure what you mean there, but all the buildings and things are fully customizable. You can change their shape and texturing and everything, and apparently there is really potential for a lot of stylistic and architectureal diversity in the buildings. Also, when you need to plop down a building, you could "roll your own" or build an already existing building. If you want a prebuilt model, then the game will look at what kinds of buildings you already have in your cities and populate the list of available buildings from the database (of player-created content) with what it thinks are similar styles. Like, if all your buildings are blocky and utilitarian and sort of metallic-textured, then it will give you the same industrial-looking buildings. If, on the other hand, your buildings are all brightly colored and puffy, then it will give you similar buildings. Like I said though, if you don't find anything to your liking, you can always make your own building from scratch or by modifying an existing one to your liking.

[vovan]

Originally posted by nostromo
I'm not sure I understand procedural programming. Surely, an artist drew those objets? Procedural programming sounds like a form of compression. An artist drew the objets, designed the overall look of the game, then someone made a mathematical model of all this, so you don't need the characters models or the texture files anymore. Reminds me of a form of sound synthesis called physical modeling. Instead of trying to imitate, for example, a piano with basic soundwaves, or with piano samples, a mathematical equation models the piano sound.

Well, that is certainly one way to do it, but in this particular case its not what is going on. Everything you see there is made in-game. The creature models for example were not made in Maya or 3DSMax or anything. It is all in-game content. For example, you go to the creature editor, and you can make the creature look anything you want there. You can modify the body shape by messing with the skeleton, you can add and remove appendages, you can add and remove mouths or beaks or what-not, etc. Anything from a care-bear to an alien-looking spider thingey can be modelled in game with an easy interface. Of course, that's not procedurally-generated per se, that's player-made. What is procedurally-generated is animations, for example. Say you make a creature with a billion legs. How will it walk around? Well, that's not pre-defined, but the animations are all procedurally generated.

Originally posted by nostromo
Spore is an intriguing concept, I don't know about the game, though. Is there an ETA?

I think I read somewhere Christmas 2005, but I don't know how reliable that is...

EDIT: Eek, sorry for multiple posts... It's just easier to answer multiple unrelated questions that way.

[Nostromo]

Well, that is certainly one way to do it, but in this particular case its not what is going on. Everything you see there is made in-game. The creature models for example were not made in Maya or 3DSMax or anything. It is all in-game content. For example, you go to the creature editor, and you can make the creature look anything you want there. You can modify the body shape by messing with the skeleton, you can add and remove appendages, you can add and remove mouths or beaks or what-not, etc. Anything from a care-bear to an alien-looking spider thingey can be modelled in game with an easy interface. Of course, that's not procedurally-generated per se, that's player-made. What is procedurally-generated is animations, for example. Say you make a creature with a billion legs. How will it walk around? Well, that's not pre-defined, but the animations are all procedurally generated.

I see... So it's basically a super design workshop, à la SMAC but much more flexible.

[Nostromo]

EDIT: Eek, sorry for multiple posts... It's just easier to answer multiple unrelated questions that way.

Yeah, right! I'm just about to hit the 500 post mark. Two to go...

[Nikolai]

vovan's right.

[Nostromo]

About what?

[FrostyBoy]

On GameSpy's Forums, a guy mentioned that anyone could create a Civilization of penis's; now, while this would be hiliarious to come across while playing your game, I'm starting to see that this game could create a lot of issues.

How do you rate a game that can potentially create images that are unsuitable for children?

Would Will Wright have to set up a team that checks each and every civilization that gets loaded up onto the server? A momental task if you have 100,000 people playing.

[DaShi]

They're not penises, they are rocket ships.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Sn00py
I assume it does get stored, as it is only a few KB's in size.

High resolution bitmap images are staggeringly large.

Originally posted by Sn00py
But UR, why you are arguing that this game might fail is falling flat, because Spore is not necessarily a game; Will Wright is just trying to find new ways to make games for the future, because he knows that in 5-10 years time, it's going to take an army and 5 years to make a standard game.

I don't think it's the eye candy part that is difficult. There are enough sophisticated programs out there to create photorealistic images and animations. With the progress in storage facilities, that should not be a problem. The big one has always been the game design itself.

Originally posted by Sn00py
Animating and making models interact with each other correctly requires a lot of work and most of the time too much work, so why not just get the computer to do the job instead?

I am not sure what you are getting at. The computer has always been doing all the interacting bit - e.g. who gets shot when - all along, from the very crude Pong days.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Well thats where Wrights in a different boat - "look im a star, i get as much time as i need" "we need cash flow" "ok, release another Sims2 Xpack"

Yeah, Wil Wright struck gold with that. I can't tell whether he got lucky or he figured out the causal gamer. I am more inclined toward the former