* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Spore

Blobrana · L

At its press conference just now, EA announced that over 1.8 million creatures have been created by people using the Spore Creature Creator -- that's more than the number of known species in the world (1.5 million)!

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Blobrana · L

Spore creature creator

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Blobrana · L

Giant publisher Electronic Arts has great expectations for its upcoming innovative title Spore, comparing its long term potential with the ever-popular Sims series.
The DS, PC and Mac title, set for release on Friday September 5th, comes from the man behind The Sims, Will Wright, and gives players a similar level of interaction as the massively successful series that has virtually been a constant presence in the PC ChartTrack listings.

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Blobrana · L

Will Wright is one of the biggest names in gaming: the man behind Sim City and the world's most popular game, The Sims. His next title, Spore, is due out next year. This week Wright was admitted into the fellowship of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Bafta, and we caught up with him in London.

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Blobrana · L

If you are a maxis fan, you probably have heard of their new project Spore. The game which was originally dubbed Sim Everything allows you to do just about anything you could think of, from evolving a single celled creature, to creating advanced space faring societies. Perhaps the coolest thing about this game though, is that no two players creatures, buildings, vehicles, or even planets will be alike, and yet they are all still fully functional. How does this work when the basic building blocks of ANY of these things are just polygons? Well, to see that first we have to examine the game itself.

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Blobrana · L

The latest Game Informer reports that Spore has been "delayed indefinitely", but reached for comment today, Electronic Arts says that "Spore has slipped out of fiscal 08 and into fiscal 09". Either way you cut it, it means that the game we've all been waiting to play on our computers isn't coming anytime soon.

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Blobrana · L

Originally slated for a Autumn '06 release date, when Spore will in fact be release is debatable. There has been strong evidence recently that Spore will not be released until 2007 such as the EA 'financial' statement and GameSpot's newly listed release date. If the new Spore release date information is true, we may not see Spore on store shelves until March '07.

www.xspore.com

Blobrana · L

With "The Sims," Will Wright let people play house on their computers. With "Spore," he is letting them play God. Wright, 46, began working on the game six years ago. His interests in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, physics, chemistry, cosmology and astronomy all came into play.

"I thought it would be cool to have a game cover all of these" - Will Wright .

The game, due next year for PCs, is played in six stages: tide pool, creature, tribal, city, civilization and, finally, space. Powerful character-creation tools - the equivalent of Maya, the 3-D software used by animators and artists - have been simplified so players will find it easy to help their creatures evolve from initial amoeba state to move onto land.

"We want the average 'Sims' player to be able to spend a few minutes and 30 mouse clicks and create something that looks roughly equivalent to what a Pixar character looks like. For land creatures, the type of mouth chosen determines whether your creature is a meat eater or plant eater. Arms, legs and body types can determine strength and speed. I might go for making a creature that is very fast or something very strong that can fight to survive. Some creatures tend to be in packs and herds. Maybe they are weak, but in the end they work together in packs so they can take down larger creatures" - Will Wright.

As the race develops, the player encounters creatures and dwellings created by other players; at the space level, players visit planets created by others.
Even though "Spore" is not technically an online game, players connect to servers to upload and download content, or they can play alone.

"The game in some sense is building a model of the player. This is something new in games. It's observing what the player is doing and creating and getting a sense of a player's style and skill level. Those are things we use to choose what content gets pulled into your machine. We're trying to match creatures and buildings. Are they cutesy or cartoony or very hard, sci-fi (creations)?" - Will Wright.

Wright compares this process of collaborative filtering to Amazon.com's recommendations features.

"When you are encountering content other players have made, you will be able to look and see who made it and flag it and say, 'I'd like to see more of this person's content.' It's like a buddy list. In some sense, we are letting the players create the game. When you get to a high level of the game, you are going to have millions of planets you can fly to. Obviously, we could never do that if we were creating all that content" - Will Wright.

Source

Blobrana · L

For many years, Will Wright has been hailed as one of the greatest creative minds in the game industry.
Starting with Sim City, Wright has enjoyed hit after hit. The Sims, with its many expansion packs, is the best-selling PC game franchise in history.
Next year, Electronic Arts will release Wright's next attempted masterpiece, Spore, a game some are calling "Sim Everything."
Spore will give players the chance to control life -- from the ground up.
Starting with single-cell organisms, players work on designing life with ever more complexity. As the game progresses, players must figure out how to take creatures from individual animals to small tribes and then to cities, whole planets, solar systems and galaxies.
Wright and his team of about 30 claims to have broken new ground with Spore.
While it's a single-player game, everything players create, from huts to spaceships, can make its way into a giant database, which will be used to populate planets in the online Spore universe.
It's what they call a massively single-player game.
At E3, the video-game industry's mammoth annual convention, Wright showed off Spore for the crowds. And though he wasn't supposed to be giving interviews, he spilled the beans on the new game, its design philosophy and how it may change the way people play games.

“One of my goals for this whole thing has been to give somebody an awe-inspiring global view of reality, almost like a drug-induced epiphany with a computer. The kind of, "Oh, man, what if we were a molecule inside of a galaxy?" type thing. Can we transfer that experience -- that, I don't want to say drug-induced, but I guess it is, or almost theological meaning-of-life-type experience -- into an interactive computer game? “

Can a computer game bring you to theological discussions, or philosophy, but at the same time remain eminently whimsical and playful and approachable? That's an interesting balance to strike. I like the idea of an extremely whimsical toy that has deep philosophical implications.

“We're looking at what we called Cultural as one of the ways a civilization on your planet can then acquire another civilization, and we're roughly thinking of that as possibly pseudo-religious. And I'm not quite sure how specific we're going to get.
It's almost better to be a little more abstract and let the player read into it.... So that distinction, let's say, between religion and art, I'd almost rather leave to the player.... They can design little churches or minarets if they want to. In the game, they can use the tools to instantiate a very specific instance of what they think Cultural means. “

“I thought I would call it Sim Everything, but we needed a secret name for the project, and our lead artist, Ocean Quigley, said, "How about Spore?"
The more we thought about it, the more we liked it. It just felt right. It works on different levels: You start as a little spore-like thing, but also you're seeding life in the world, and you're spreading it like a spore. Also, the content you're creating, that's very much what Spore is: the compressed representation of something that you send around and which propagates.
Also, not putting "Sim" in front of it was very refreshing to me. It feels like it wants to be breaking out into a completely different thing than what Sim was.
Part of it was what I saw with The Sims, with people sharing content. Part of it was the Eames (Office) thing, Powers of 10, and a lot of my favourite science-fiction things, like 2001.
I got very interested in the SETI project, and astrobiology. The whole idea originally was an astrobiology game. But as you look at astrobiology and SETI, all the factors you're dealing with resolve all the way down to the chemical level. So that spans the Powers of 10 very nicely. So basically, it was a matter of moulding all these things into one consistent, coherent concept. “

The animation:
I knew right off the bat that that was going to be really hard to do. And it was the very first thing we started on.
The whole concept was dependent upon this technology that did not exist, what I'm calling procedural animation. The fact that the player can create any creature, and then we figure out how it would walk and move and behave.
We went through all the research work in that field that we could find, and we ended up having to go several years beyond it to get to where we are, to where we felt confident that we could solve this problem to the level to where we can base a product on it.
So knowing what I know about computers, and algorithms, that's what blows me away the most, the fact that we can take any arbitrary creature the player's made and then bring it to life like that. “
“User-created content has two extraordinary benefits.
No. 1 is that when somebody makes a piece of content, they are so much more emotionally attached to it. It doesn't even matter if it's good or bad. If they made it, it's really cool, and they're totally interested in what happens to it.
No. 2, players love trading and sharing and spreading this stuff around and having it come to them, and building up their worlds.
So it has a tremendous potential benefit to other players. For the few people that make really good content, if we can distribute that to all the other players, then the players in some sense become part of the game-design team. They are helping us to build the game. I'm trying to figure out, how do we take that cool dynamic and burn it into the game to where it's part of the game's DNA, as opposed to something we taped on later? “
Keeping the development costs down:
“That's not a side benefit. That's a primary benefit. Actually, there are two issues: There's player-generated content and then there's procedural content, which are closely related.
And in fact, it turns out that they hang off of a lot of the same technologies. So the things that allow us to give the player the ability to edit a planet very easily are the same things we need to randomly generate a wide variety of planets, this procedural generation of the meshes and textures, etc.
So by developing one central technology core, we now have the ability to give the players extreme creative leverage on editing it, and we also have the ability to give the computer that same extreme leverage.
And that is what gives the content high compressibility, because every piece of content can be defined parametrically. Every piece of content has, in essence, a genome, which we can now transport across the net very cheaply, because it's so small, or put a database on your hard drive that has 1,000 creatures and occupies a very small amount of space. “

What would a Spore expansion pack be like?
“ Well, I'm more interested in expanding this game broadly rather than deeply. With Spore, I want to take parts of the game to different platforms and then sell parts of it to people who never bought the original game.
That's what I mean by expand broadly. So, for example, we could pull out the creature part of this game, where I'm designing the creature and having them live and interact, and do a version on a handheld system. “

http://spore.ea.com/