Wow, its good to see that this game is finally getting recognized in other communities. Yes, Spore is an ambitious project, one that could, quite literally, revolutionize gaming in a single move. While many have said that it's ambition would be it's downfall, we do have the best man for the job working on this bad boy: Will Wright. The man is great at what he does, and he makes great games. Spore might be the feather in his hat, except this feather is solid-gold and diamond studded baby!

Well, to answer a few questions on here, Wright himself has confirmed that there will be underwater intelligence and underwater cities. The bubble technology, we think will be used to put water-filled cites on land.

Someone mentioned cyber or robot parts. Well, in the concept art that has been released on one site, there are cybernetic or robotic parts depicted. So, if you want a race of robots or cyborgs, it seems it will be possible.

The site to go to for just about all the known spore information is http://www.gamingsteve.com. There is an entire forum dedicated to Spore, and Steve has a podcast that tells about everything you see in the video from his perspective. Each podcast includes a segment on Spore, as well as just being a darn good all-around gaming podcast.

It said that you can have flying creatures but the cities will be ground based.

Great, I'm too lazy to check, but I really want a fire farting, acid pissing flying creature with diamond scales right about now. And a long neck with longer teeth to eat all of your pathetic creatures whole. Or at least slice them to pieces while they are trying to desperately run away.

Being a carnivore is going to be so fun.

Everyone's Human creatures are reminding me of that game Impossible Creatures. If you want Half Lobster/Elephants play Impossible Creatures instead... I'm thinking that it may be more interesting that way. As with the other creatures, can they even use Magic?

I can see myself just staying on the FPS part of the game, playing it like EVO.

'cause EVO was cool.

But, seriously, my first race?

Tentacle monsters.

In Japan.

This is going to be the most amazing video game ever made.

Really only fun if you can also make a race of extremely naive schoolgirls.

Haha I wouldn't believe the release date they have on Gaming Steve farther than I could throw it. Fall 2006 mo' like Fall 6002. :sweatdrop


(Reverse Psychology or something like it)

Well, if I remember correctly, this game has been in development for several years now. And Steve usually knows his stuff, so I wouldn't doubt him.

What I wonder is if your computer will maybe give you some sort of choice or maybe a filter before it loads a new race into your game. . . It would kind of suck to have to destroy loads of your planets just to get rid of two dozen different types of penis-people or something.

I believe I read in the Gaming Steve transcript, you either allow Internet downloads or you don't. The game itself will come with a local database of races to populate the galaxy, if you want a truly single player experience.

I'm still cautiously neutral on whether I want my galaxy full of elephant-lobster and butt-asses.

The way I see it, in the long term you could easily be seeing just as much cool stuff as you do stupid crap. The sort of people who live to create things like wang monsters aren't the sort of people who would dedicate themselves to this thing long-term. As time goes on, I think that more and more of the playerbase will put some real effor into their creations.

yeah, like penis-butt monsters!

I'm absolutely ecstatic about the whole terraforming aspect. Some of my most favored of sci-fi books were entirely about terraformation. Building Harlequin's moon and Rainbow Mars (okay so Rainbow Mars wasn't about terraforming, but it was about interplanetary travel, surviving on a foreign planet, etc.) to be more precise.

Well, I'm stoked. Of course, I'm going to have to get a new computer to run it (my computer is ancient and it is thoroughly corrupted by my influence so that I am the only one who can use it - all others get BSODs on startup) but the POTENTIAL behind this is just too good to pass up.

I just hope it doesn't wind up decidedly underwhelming and aggravating, as did Black & White, decidedly limited, like Populous, or largely pointless, like The Sims.

I'd like, for once, a God-game where you can actually feel like you've accomplished something, yet it's free-form enough that you can set your own goals. This looks like it might just deliver on that.

EDIT: as a sidenote, I'm unable to watch the video. So far, my computer has *never* successfully ran an .avi or .mov file, no matter what codecs or versions of Quicktime are involved, so I only know what I've been told about this.

I wonder if they'll be smart enough to have a third option for Spore -- internet downloadable races, but only ones approved by Spore's head honchos. In other words, get Will Wright and his buddies to glance at some race archetypes being created throughout the interweb. Include the ones that are creative and worth inclusion, and don't include the penis monsters. Seems an easy enough solution to me, it can't be that difficult to casually monitor new races and 'pick and choose.'

Theoretically yes Solid Snake. It shouldn't be too hard...but theory and reality don't often see eye to eye. Remember, people eventually will be running entire galaxies (those that actually have the patience and devotion to go that far). Ubdoubtely hundreds upon hundreds of people will obtain this game. There will be dozens upon dozens of planets to inhabit. Now the thousands of races that will increase and an exponential rate would just be too damned overwhelming for any sized team.

Sure Will Wright and his chums could pick a dozen or so of their favorite player made races, but I'm sure Mr. Wright could better spend time on his own projects.

About creating new species: can you create your own content in an editor somewhere as extras and have the game randomly add it in along with other players content? I know once you get your spaceship you can go around making things up and putting them wherever you want, but I'd like to see one of my own creations just crop up somewhere unexpectedly.

You wouldn't see it crop up in your own game, the idea is it crops up in someone elses.

Dang dude, I may have to get this. Armies of werewolves dude, armies of werewolves.

Or maybe armies of Grim Reapers? Try beating DEATH itself, bizach!

Yea, this'll be good. :P

Anyone remember the Cthulhu like being that cause BB to question his sexuality? Yeah, I'm gonna make one of those, although I may need to upgrade my computer to do it. But if what has been said here is true, it MAY run on my current one.

Rethought my original tentaclemonster world.

Instead, I'm going to go for Dark Elf kinda guys... (too bad we can't make caves and the such, that would make it even more interesting)

Question: Once you reach Civilization age, how do you get points to buy stuff?

I suppose you would do the whole "mine and trade" deal, as is the standard for civilization games.

On the topic of natural weapons, fire breath seems unlikely, but, at least early on, you can have things like cnidocytes, which leads me to believe this: if you can find it on Earth, you can have it. If it doesn't exist on Earth, you can't. Add wiggle room for cybernetics and UFOs as you see fit.

Dont forget the Ecosystem planning... THATS your filter...

if you create a race of Aggressive carnivors, your world will be populated with a lot of races that can be eaten by you, that are dumber or smarter than you, and a few that surelly can kick your ass...

Create a race of Flying Creatures and im sure you will have some really small and quick creatures running around...

Go underwaters and for sure you may face some giant sea dragons

I was wondering, if you're playing the pre-tribal part of the game and your creature dies, is it game over or do you move to another creature of your species?

Also, do other creatures on your planet have the possibility of becoming extinct if you kill too many of them? Can they die off on their own if they are unfit?

Does it even keep track of how many creatures of each species are in the world?

Is this game going to be only on the pc?

In the movie Will keeps talking about procedural this and that what exactly does he mean by all that procedural stuff?

bombadier beetle. suck it
edit: for those of you who don't know, the bombadier beetle is a little creature that shoots naplam out of it's arsewhole, it actually burns things with it's butt juice. And since (at least in the case of humans) the anus and the mouth do most of the same things, it is completely plausible for Spore creatures to breathe liquid fire. and another fun Bombadier fact when Darwin first discovered it, he popped it in his mouth, to hold it.

After watching the video, I must say that I am VERY interested in this game. I've always liked the simulation genre; especially when it's done right.

And me being interested in a game is saying a lot for me these days.

From what I gather, The computer approaches some level of creative thought: The ability to drag caracasses was never programmed into the game directly, but order your creature to eat and move at the same time and that's what it does.

And hey, don't hate the lobstelephants.

What I'd like to know is if you could manitain a physical sturcture similar ot the one in your cellular form. Jellyfish armies anyone?

One person asked how one garners points in the civilization stage. I believe that the economy of your people gets you the points, dependent on your population's attributes, your resources, and your relationships with other cities.

Another person suggested holding off in the brains department. As a UFO, you will eventually be able to get the "genetics tool" which will let you revamp anything you've come across, including plants!

Oh, and underwater civs have been confirmed. Just in case there was any more confusion about that.

Ben

Excellent, this looks incredibly interesting....

No, I'm not just agreeing with everyone else, I did actually watch the movie.:sweatdrop

O.o What the heck... :stressed:
:gonk: The only problem with that movie is it's hard to see what's going on for parts of it...because it's so bright.

Well, Premonitions, you are required to have a backbone before gaining access to the brain palette (straight from Will's mouth. Or, straight from the previously linked interview), so you can't exactly have a jellyfish army. You could have creatures that look like jellyfish, but they'd have at least one vertebra, so they wouldn't technically be cnidarians.

Also:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/img/bombeet1.jpg
Doesn't look like fire to me. It's hot (according to Wikipedia), sure, but it isn't fire.

You could (maybe, hypothetically, if they put it in there) make a dragon that spits boiling hydrogen peroxide at its prey, but actual combustion... seems unlikely.

I think the main point in holding off on the brains would be more than likely used as a way to bring your creature to a higher link in the food chain before you evolve it making it slightly easier to advance in the next stage or at least that's why I would do it :)

In other words, you dont expend points in Brain, because the creature that you control has YOUR brain... right?

But as soon as you start working on a City, the creatures are on their own... thats where brains kicks in... they way creatures react to new thing you give then, to other civilizations and such...

Actually, this game has a nice chance of failing, being a total crap... but istill it opens up the idea for future games and a REALLY huge option on player-to-player content that can be applied to other games in the future...

The creator of Spore just took the "Ragdoll" system to the next level

When Will Wright keep saying that everything in the game is generated using procedural methods, basically he's trying to say that the game is NOT made using traditional methods, aka the game artists model and animate everything you see in the game. For example, in most games, if you see a tree, that tree was drawn, colored, modeled, animated, and placed specifically by the game artists in the spot you saw it.

In Spore, however, the graphics in the game are generated taking the info you supply (and, I imagine, random generation in some cases) and applying/comparing many small rules and fractal algorithms to that info, which then generates the graphics and animation. It relies much more heavily on the work of the programmers and coders of the game than the graphic artists. In the tree example, when the game generates the terrain, it looks at the info about the planet, figures out how many trees there should be (ecosystem tolerance), what configuration they would be placed (spread out, clumped into forests, etc), and what kind of tree might exist (climate and topography). Then it looks at the "rules" that the programmers wrote for how to create such a tree and generates it.

If you've read anything on emergent systems in nature, I'd imagine it's similar in concept to that.

So sad that this didn't recieve a proper response way back when the original video came out.

http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/gdctv/ Scroll down to Will Wright's segment. You can use my email if you wish, rpgsuperfan@yahoo.com No need for a password.

And there is already a LOT of discussion about this game here: http://gamingsteve.com/blab/index.php?board=12.0

For now, gamingsteve.com is definately the place for Spore info.

P.S. Any PC that can run The Sims 2 can run Spore, and that sort of PC can cost less than an XBox 360 if you know where to look (newegg.com learn to buy parts and assemble yourself and you can cut costs in half). Besides, a good PC will benefit much more than the XBox. All the good XBox games will be ported to PC anyway, and you'll be missing out on a LOT of downloadable content by going the console route. Trust me, XBoxes are about as good as furnaces to burn your money in. A new video card, RAM, and chipset costs the same and gives you acess to so much more (and better) stuff.

Let me add to that...

If you make a Race of raging carnovors, no much need for Herbs and stuff... so, no so many trees... also... tall creatures = Taller trees, hot planet = no so many trees, Small Herbivors = Smaller trees and lots of bushes

and so on...

surely if the whole game is generated 'on the fly' rather than having pre-made models, then it would be quite intensive? I was going to build a computer after i graduate this summer and get a job, but I might put off to nearer the time of this game's release or just wait till next year for the quad-cores.

:)

If it's generated on the fly, it will be using mainly math, which is what a computer is built for. These are just big calculators, after all. Since there's less memory used up saving the locations of this and that and the way this animal or that animal moves or behaves, the system requirements will be lower, despite how impressive the game is.

If the game generates the world realistically, most worlds are going to have a large amount of plants just to feed the herbivores - if you're the top of the food chain, there's going to need to be a lot of fodder for you to snack on (10% rule). I'm not so sure about the "tall creatures = taller trees," since it's because the trees are tall that animals like giraffes became taller, not the reverse. If the overall climate of the planet is dry, there will probably be less life because water is needed to sustain it.

I think it's more like because the trees are taller, taller animals are the ones who survive and make offspring more adapted to the environment.. this brings me a question:

You saw how terraforming could make a planet habitable? Can you render a planet's environment hazardous and useless too? And if you do that, what happens to the species that are there, if they can't escape?

I'm SO gonna buy this game: It is God's gift to gamers.

That's a little misleading. It actually might need more memory/processing power because of the intensive calculations. I doubt it'd be ridiculously high, but if 'math problems' aren't that simple for a computer to do. The Revolution has a separate processor just for physics calculations. It's definitely a big factor.

I imagine this would involve nuking the planet repeatedly. They had a volcano tool, so I imagine you could generate the tonnage. A 'lil bit of over-terraforming?

I remember reading something on Spore a while back saying that all the information for a creature, building, or plant would be able to fit in under 1Kb of space. I have a hard time believing it would be that intensive on the processor, though I could be horribly wrong.

Oh, and hiya Drey! :3

to phil: yeah I know bombys don't actually shoot fire, but who needs fire when you have the fluid they use, and it does burn stuf, leaving smoke and ashes, instead of corrosion like acid does. f you look carefully at the editor while wills still in cell mode, you will notice that the creature has a structure, it might be an interior cell, wall but there are bone like structures at that stage. my next question. burrowing. Can I build a society of ant/termite like creatures? I saw swimming, I still don't have enough verification on flying, but noone has addressed subteranean creatures yet.

Hard drive space != active processes.

i would say that the Mole-people would be a Stretch to this title...

Maybe a Expansion pack would do it later on... afterall... its impossivel for the game to get it right on EVERYTHING...

like a said... this is the Ragdoll system... to the next level... just imagine that the whole game is a Index of file... and each construction in it (plants, Creatures, etc) is a Txt File with a series of codes that take a reference from that index...

so the game has all the files, and the downloadable material is only a Guide that says wich pice goes where... like a Save file of most of the games today... they are REALLY small (Check a save file from The Sims 2 and see how much stuff is in there to get a idea)

The Minion brought up "Tall critters = tall trees."

Ya know what? He's right. Important part bolded

So, since the first world you come across is your homeworld, it follows that that world would also be biased toward your critter.

I would strongly reccomend that everybody read those interviews. I'll even link them again. Part one. Part two. Go read'em; it'll give you fine info, like specifically saying you can have flying and underwater societies and that you can opt out of getting other players' content.

Well, that certainly goes against the theory of evolution, seeing that environments adapt to their populations..

What am I talking about? Who cares about realism when you can create your own army of humanoid interestelar platypuses? Doomsday is slowly coming to you, people of the galaxy -_o!

:fighter: All Hail the Fighter Empire!!

Thank you for bringing that up, Tera-san. After reading Will's comment's, I understood them to mean that you can't make a race like us, who cover up almost completely, but you can make folks like the Wookies, who wear some clothes. As I pondered what would happen when making a nearly human race, a bizarre idea entered my head. I'm gonna spoiler text this, as it gets a bit crude.

I thought, "What's Adam without a wang?" I tried to come up with a reasonable use of the tools I've seen and read of that would approximate dangly parts. My first thought was tentacle. However, since their original behavior is based on their anatomy, and the tentacle is seen by the AI as an arm, I imagine that the creature would end up grasping things with it. That'd be weird (almost as weird as sharing these thoughts with ya'll). So, I moved on the the horn tool (originally seen on the microscopic critter, but also on "butt-face"). The shape seemed right, it could be bent slightly (look at butt-face's back), but my thoughts moved yet again onto what the AI would see it as: a weapon. This lead to an astounding mental image. You'd have a man who humped his prey to death. Facinating.

So, be careful with what Mr. Potato Head parts you use. It could lead to nightmarish behavior.

Also, anyone with any respect for me now holds none. Hooray!

I'm going to have nightmares now, phil. Thanks.

What I'm most intrested in with Spore is, however, not what you can make but what you can DO.

Lets say I make a race of scorpion-monsters and while traveling space they meet a race of, let's say... moogles. And "THE SCORPIONS DO NOT LIEK THE MOGS" (as Fighter would say), we have several options for dealing with the kupo-freaks:

1) Blow up their planet, quick and simple but feels too much like they got off easy...
2) Over-terraform their planet causing their slow and horrible moogle deaths.
3) Abduct them and perform horrific and disturbing genetic experiments on them creating a moogle-scorpion crossbreed that will take over the mog planet.
4) Abduct them, take them back to the homeworld and use them as food/entertainment/cannon fodder.

I like this game the more I think about it...

Brilliant!! Thats definately on my "to do" list.

I want to make a race of Cliff Racers from The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind, just annoy all those who played the game ^^. Myself included. (Luv teh Morrowind)

So umm...
When is the game coming out?

I noticed no one asked or answered that question in the midst of all the penis horns and whatnot.

It comes out this Fall.

Thanks, Toilet Rancor, for rendering my spoiler text completely pointless. I appreciate it. Dumbass...

Christ, everyone's violent. Is there anyone who would try to be an altruistic society out there to seek knowledge and betterment of not only themselves, but others in the universe?

I think the novelty of ultra-violence would wear off quick--in any game. I'm sure it does in real life. It's more challenging and fulfilling, I think, to follow the alleged 'moral compass.'

I often go the indulgent route in paidic games, but every time I wack a senior citizen with a baseball bat or burn books crucial to a mendicant society's survival, I feel a pang of guilt. I just am that way. But the way the games are structured, it's so much easier to acquiesce into the decadence that is evil.

With Spore...I'm actually not necessarily saying you have to be 'good.' I just mean, Barbarians (in the classical quasi-prejudiced sense of fragmented nomadic tribes of killazz) stay Barbarians for a reason: they're wild, disjointed, and impulsive. Destroying planets more than a few times, for me, would miss the point of the game.

Hey. If I can initiate literal universal peaceful anarchy, I'll be happy.

If I can do it, you'll all be dominated by the destructive might of a race of super intelligent firekitties.

It sounds really cool, but I bet it'd take quite a bit of work to get your creature up to the interplanetary scale.

Sweet merciful panda crap, this is amazing.

I've seen this "Spore" thing on all my forums, so I figured it was just some silly flash thing... "Yattah!" for 2006. My buddy Lionbait sent me the link to Spore tonight, so I figured "Fine, I'll give in, and see what this is all about..."

I want this game.

I want it right now.

This is truly unbelievable. This is the game, the exact game, I've been advocating since grade fucking eight, and we at last have the computing power, and porn mp3's, to make this game possible.

Thank you, Satan.

Also, he said it was a detached asynchronously mutliplayer. This means that YOUR copy of Spore uploads OTHER players Spore creations to YOUR machine. OTHER PEOPLE don't play against you, their CREATIONS play against you on YOUR machine. This way, other players can't actually bomb the snot out of you. When you pause the game, it's paused, because no-ones ACTUALLY playing against you... just AI-controlled versions of what other people have made.

Also, in honor of my wife, I would have to create a race of flying vampiric ninja cows. With spiked tails.

FUCK no!

I'm saddened only for the fact that I probably won't have the time to put in all that extra work. Or mayue I will. It comes out in the fall, so I have plenty of time to finish all the other games I want to play. So that's a plus.

The only thing better would be to have an adventure game that's totally free. Like Morrowind, but even bigger, and better, because you don't have to walk fifty thousand feet to get to every place.

My first race keeps on changing, but so far, I guess I'm gonna go with the Dinosaur Men, and make them a super-advanced race that spreads its likeness throughout the galaxy... in a weird version of the Borg.

Weel... ofcourse it goes against evolution... but that is the fun in it...

if it was the reverse situation it would be a damn boring game... if you had a herbivore on a planet that the CPU generates big high trees and not so much bushes, you would be forced to create a taller critter...

or if you builded a carnivor and the game just filled the planet with "flying dingies" it would suck... so its kinda nice to see that the game adapts to you intead of you having to adapt to the game...

And i really hope that you can see where your thing are going and where are they coming from... because will's system is so close to "Random Creation" that its sucess actually depends on showing to the player that "it aint random"

How hard would it be to actually make the game completely online? Having everybodies solar system accessible in the galaxy while the player is online, and sentient.

We wouldn't want to be aubducted and anal probed by aliens before we've left the oceans.

I might be too busy exploring all the power in the game they've hinted at so far to even care about violence or non-violence for the first little bit. I'll probably try to mimic sci-fi novels of course, and form burgeoning Intersolar Commonwealth's who try to be peaceful, and sometimes fail. Though, perhaps that's being too human of me! Wait, this game was made by humans...

I think rampant annihilation of everything in the game would get boring, but an interstellar expansionist empire similar to the Borg might be fun. It really depends how in-depth galactic war goes.


I imagine it would be more expensive to make this game massively online. Considering the amount of gamers that would want to play this? Just look at this thread alone, with our moderately small little community here. How many have mentioned how much they think this game will suck? Don't make a joke about procedural servers, don't make a joke about procedural servers...

Making the game completely online would easily harm it more than keeping it in its quasi-single player state. Online means griefing, and griefing is universally bad. I really wouldn't want to spend 100 hours building up my E. Coli into a successful race of knowledge-seeking pacifist squids, to have AlbertRofl3943020000003 show up in orbit with an armada of UFOs and nuke me to shit.

Griefing?

Anyways, yeah, the partial online thing suits me perfect... I just hope we can go visit other galaxies (with each galaxy housing a certain number of races/planets, could be cooler...)

However, no catalouge of this game could possibly happen. Well, unless it was like a player-run Wiki. *shudder*

I just had a terrifying thought.

You know how buddy keeps mentioning you need 'credit' to advance to other parts of the game? What if you need to pay cash for it? Is there going to be monthly fees, I wonder? With the promise this game has, I'm not sure players would really complain.

You only have acess to one Galaxy, but this galaxy has hundred of thousands of planets and stars and several solar systems

Its not really a MMORPG... there are no fees for it at all... if there were, we would know by now... Although what a DO wonder about is how this game will fight against piracy... maybe your Cd-key will be constantly checked to keep track of where everything you created is going and coming from...

Wright said one galaxy only, but that it could contain a couple hundred thousand planets, more than any one person could colonize, conceivably in their lifetime if they renounced all of their worldly possessions save for a periodically stocked refridgerator, a landline to the Internet, and a computer.

I agree Locke everyone is saying they are gonna be horribly destructivly evil races. Ultra-violence does wear off after a while on any game, but at the same time not taking the path of evil just because there is violence in it is just as bad. While ventures to the dark side can be fun they are also typically emotionally affecting.
I nearly cried when I killed Juhani in Kotor

I for one hope that taking knowledge like this into consideration Will will :sweatdrop give the opportunity to the player to start multiple files of Spore without deleting a previous file

Save for the tribes bombed to radioactive dust?

And their families who live away too i guess...

a LOT of people will play this by the "Obliterate their asses away!" game style... thats why multiplayer would be a "No-no"... its just like MMORPG's today that dont have any control on PvP... they all were left for dust...

One thing that i belive its going to be impossible it would to colonize space... Having hundreds of Spaceships cruising the space and fighting creatures from other planets....

True, I'm not sure how intensive the micromanagement will be in Spore on the interplanetary and interstellar scale. I can easily imagine just controlling a few star systems as being waaaay too much for the common gamer, and even one star system after that causing full cerebral explosion to ANYONE. I figure most things will be automated, with the player interjecting where he feels like it.

Of course, most players will choose not to interject, since they'll be too busy flying around the galaxy on their suped-up UFOs, blasting the hell out of whatever they want. I personally might not take a genocidal stance, but I know I'm going to experiment heavily with terraforming tools and weapons systems on uninhabited moonlets and asteroids.

Someone mentioned sticky fluid in their pants?

Yeah. Same.

I am so pre-ordering this game.

Hey, I never said what kind of creatures I'd make! At the moment, a race of chibi merfolk seems quite appealing. They'd be too cute to enact genocide.

And I bet I could get the mitten hands working, too. Oh, cuddly interstellar travelers, masters of the sea. :)

I think what I'm actually going to do is have a basic idea for my creature, and then just evolve them based on what would make life easier or seems to fit what I've got them doing.