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Author
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Topic: Spore & The Creature Creator (Read 111942 times)
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Sjofn
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8286
Truckasaurus Hands
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This is the best ten dollars I have spent in years. Ha, yes. One thing I've noticed about myself ... I am completely incapable of making cute things. I'll start out with cute, and then it evolves into this horrible plated monstrosity. I don't want my cute widdle herbivores to be defenseless!
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God Save the Horn Players
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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« Last Edit: June 20, 2008, 07:44:12 PM by Sky »
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Aez
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1369
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Anyone figured out how to download a creature from the sporepedia?
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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Drag one of those PNGs to your creature folder. Load that png into Spore. Somehow they developed an algorithm to extract creature info from it. I don't know how. I looked at one of the PNGs in Photoshop and noticed nothing weird, just a normal PNG.
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Aez
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1369
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I don't get the "load the png into Spore" part. The png are in my creature folder but I can't access them from the game.
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Aez
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1369
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Ok, got it. The problem is that the last 3 creatures I did are bugged. Sad. I can load other creatures just fine but for some unkown reason 3 of them are bugged.
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Bzalthek
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3110
"Use the Soy Sauce, Luke!" WHOM, ZASH, CLISH CLASH! "Umeboshi Kenobi!! NOOO!!!"
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Do you have the trial or the full demo? Apparently, creatures made with full demo toolset cannot be utilized by the Trial CC.
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"Pity hurricanes aren't actually caused by gays; I would take a shot in the mouth right now if it meant wiping out these chucklefucks." ~WayAbvPar
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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Drag one of those PNGs to your creature folder. Load that png into Spore. Somehow they developed an algorithm to extract creature info from it. I don't know how. I looked at one of the PNGs in Photoshop and noticed nothing weird, just a normal PNG.
The creature data is cleverly embedded in the alpha channel as a bunch of just-barely-opaque pixels in the background.
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Aez
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1369
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I present you Munchkinball - your new overload. Ugly has hell but he has 5 points in all the figthing skills + 5 sprint, 5 stealth, 4 speed, 4 fly, 5 charm. Destroyer of world. Upload it to your world and watch the genocide.
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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Will Wright gave a demo of the full game yesterday at the SF Apple Store, and I was able to squeeze in toward the back. He basically ran through everything up to the UFO stage in the course of an hour by using cheat codes to speed advancement, so we got to see a good chunk of the game in action and how it all fits together.
Cell (sea) phase: Yes, it's kinda cutesy. The creature is 2D during this entire phase, and everything sort of looks like those plush microbes that Schild was laboriously modelling in the creature creator. As you progress through this phase, the game keeps track of what sort of things you eat and labels you as an herbivore, omnivore, and carnivore accordingly; depending which category you fall into, you get a special ability at the end of the phase that'll help you in the next phase.
Creature (land) phase: The transition to 3D is made at the same time as the transition to land; your "cell" creature (which has been scaling up slowly throughout the cell phase until it's not really a cell any more) gets legs attached to it in the 3D editor and you climb up on land. During the creature phase you can start having rudimentary social interactions with other creatures and form "alliances" (like symbiotic relationships) with other species. You can also hunt a species aggressively to the point where it becomes extinct. Other creatures that you become friendly with will join your "pack" and follow you around helping you out; this can be other creatures of your species or of another species (finding members of your own species tends to be easier, it seems, so it's not hard to build your species up as a pack hunter). Again, how you play during this phase gives you a special ability to use in the next phase.
Tribal phase: This is the RTS bit. The cutscene transition between the creature and tribal phases is a very cool 2001 homage that we all cheered for. During the tribal phase you control a bunch of your creatures, harvest resources (mainly food), build buildings, and interact with neighboring villages of other species, either by trading with them, socializing with them, or trying to exterminate them. IIRC there were five other villages in the vicinity, and the phase was over once you'd either allied with or conquered each of them; how you dealt with them influences how you play the next phase yada yada.
Civ phase: Bigger RTS bit. Now instead of hunting animals for food you're planting derricks on "spice" nodes (yay!). We got to see a bit of the vehicle editor at this point, and it looks pretty fucking sweet. It's a bit more flexible than the creature editor in that you can texture each part of the vehicle separately if you want to. There are land vehicles, air vehicles, and sea vehicles. There are also three different focuses: military (blowing shit up), economic (trading with shit), and religious (peacefully converting shit). Each city will have a different focus and produce different types of vehicles; Will had a religious city that "attacked" neighbors by sending brightly colored propaganda jeeps over to their borders to project televangelist holograms and blare bible verses from loudspeakers, or something like that. It was pretty awesome. During this phase you can also start adding (predefined) clothing to your creatures to give them a sort of uniform; Will slapped a Roman centurion helmet on his creature's head and put some bracelets on its wrists. I caught a glimpse of a top hat in the clothing palette, so I know Yegolev has something to look forward to.
Space phase: He described this as being the "MMOG" portion of the game, but I don't think he meant that in a derogatory way. This phase is heavily exploration and quest-based; you actually continue with the Civ portion of the game by managing your cities on different planets (spice continues to be an important resource, for example, so you want to plant colonies that will mine spice for you), but now there are a lot more civilizations out there to interact with, and many of them will have missions for you like "go explore this planet and report back to us" or "go blow up our enemies and we'll pay you". During this phase you've got terraforming equipment that lets you mess with a planet's climate, paint it a different color, carve canyons and mountains into its surface, et cetera. (Will mentioned that it was possible to attack an enemy civilization by using terraforming tools to accelerate global warming, lol.) Planets you encounter will be in different stages of development; you might find some planets that are lifeless, some that are in the tribal stage, some that are as advanced as you, et cetera.
There were a few bits of "polish" that were new to me, such as achievements that Will kept unlocking as he blazed through the game, such as "finish the civ phase without ever building an airplane" or "cause the extinction of a species during the creature phase" or "finish the cell phase in less than 500 million years". There was also a very cool "timeline" view that charted the progress of your species through the game, including snapshots of each generation of your creature as it evolved, a graph that showed its tendencies over time, labels for milestones and achievements (for example, in between generations of your creature there will be stats on what it ate/fought/killed/allied during that period of time), all kinds of stuff.
So, the good news is that the game looks pretty much done and it looks fun; I'd been worried that the creature creator was the only part that they were really finished with and that the rest was in flux, but what I saw was pretty much a fully functional game with only a few noticeable bugs (and no crashes). Definitely getting it when it comes out now.
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MrHat
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7432
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
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Thanks for the write up!
Quick question that's been plaguing me. Can you lose?
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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He mentioned that in the creature phase, if your creature dies you respawn as another member of your species back at your nest. So not in the early stages, I don't think. But it seems like it'd be hard to recover from having your village demolished in the tribal phase, so unless there's some clever deus ex machina to save you in that case, I'd guess you can "lose" that way in that and later phases.
On the other hand, if that happens you can just start over from the beginning of the phase with the same creature, since each time you "unlock" a new phase you get the ability to start a new game from there. So you're not going to get thrown back to the primordial ooze because your city got blown up.
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MrHat
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7432
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
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Cool.
I guess, I was asking if it's more like Civ in some of the later phases, like, is there enough AI in the diplomacy etc. to actually make it difficult. Or can you raise the difficulty. Or something.
Also, lol @ the cheats. Those are going to ship retail ala Sims. Good times. Could probably spend 2-3 hours a day just building creatures/cars/buildings.
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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There was a "difficulty" option in the "new game" screen, so I imagine you can be fairly masochistic if you want.
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MrHat
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7432
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
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Awesome.
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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Okay, a few cool things I forgot to mention that are now coming back to me:
1) Wings. Creatures with wings can fly around in the creature phase (although I didn't see Will's creatures use their wings in the tribe phase, so they might be purely decorative after that point). 2) Epic creatures. These are giant extra-powerful abominations that you start to see in the tribe phase as enemies. You can't make them yourself until you get the UFO sandbox tools. In the game we saw, one of the rival villages got attacked by a giant frog monster thing, making them vulnerable to a sneak attack. 3) Domestication. During the tribe phase you can choose to domesticate nonsentient creatures rather than hunting them. We didn't get to see this in action because the first thing Will did during the tribe phase was start hunting the creatures around his village, which made them too skittish to tame easily later.
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MrHat
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7432
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
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Very cool.
Anyone know if the Creature Creator works without teh netz?
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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It's got a "play offline" mode. You can't upload your stuff to Sporepedia in that mode, but it seems to be fully functional otherwise.
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lamaros
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8021
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Nice writeup Sam, thanks. I wonder though, did it seems pretty linerar to you? Was there much scope to just mess about or did you get the feeling that you had to follow at least a few set objectives one after the other?
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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When you're blowing through the whole game in one hour-long demo, you don't do a lot of messing around. I did get the sense that there were lots of opportunities to stop and smell the roses, though, particularly as the world increases in scope in later levels. It also seems like they took pains to offer multiple non-exclusive ways to advance through each stage, so it's not like at any given point you've got only one thing to do and/or one way to do it.
If I had to assign a "shape" to the game, I'd say it's a funnel, with the narrow bit at the cell phase. Early on your options are pretty limited (eat stuff, avoid being eaten by other stuff), and the further you get in the game the less you're forced into a linear path. By the end you're basically in a sandbox and can do whatever you want.
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Galactic Edition of Spore announced. Meh, these editions never grab me, a couple DVDs and little books for $30? http://www.ebgames.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?product_id=71826UNIQUE GALACTIC EDITION CONTENT · 'Making of Spore' DVD video · 'The Human Toolkit' DVD video, by National Geographic · 'The Art of Spore' hardback mini-book · Fold-out Spore poster · Premium 100-page Galactic Handbook
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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The first comment at EBGames nailed the problem - Collector's edition with no in-game content?
Waste of money.
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Morat20
Terracotta Army
Posts: 18529
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If I had to assign a "shape" to the game, I'd say it's a funnel, with the narrow bit at the cell phase. Early on your options are pretty limited (eat stuff, avoid being eaten by other stuff), and the further you get in the game the less you're forced into a linear path. By the end you're basically in a sandbox and can do whatever you want.
Wright's stated goal was a "T" shaped game -- a ladder up the editors, leading into a vast sandbox at the top (wherein, of course, you go dick around with other races using all the editors. I plan to establish my own Star-Trek like Arena, in which aliens battle it out for my amusement). So that sounds about right. :)
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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Everything I've seen come out of the creature creator so far has been made of fleshy and suck. Where are the chitinous, armor-plated horrors of claws and spikes? I wanna see fuckin' Kryomek/Zerg/Tyranids tearing things up.
Good enough? I'm proud of my little bug.
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Merusk
Terracotta Army
Posts: 27449
Badge Whore
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My first one. My attempt at an armored creation. There's no large pieces of chitin, so you wind up having to add a lot of little ones which puts you up against the "too many parts" wall pretty quickly.
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The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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The "boneyknee" piece (I forget what it's called but it's something like that) scales up pretty well. I was able to cover most of this dude's body with only 3 overlapping pieces:
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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Wow. Even some of the penis monsters are pretty impressive.
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MrHat
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7432
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
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Wow. Even some of the penis monsters are pretty impressive.
I can't decide if I should make this a sig.
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Grief title for Sam: Impressed by Penis Monsters.
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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Oh god, that fits my current avatar so well I have to do it.
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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My grief title is ironic with my current avatar. Just noticed that Yours is now perfect!
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Tale
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8562
sıɥʇ ǝʞıן sʞןɐʇ
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Nerf
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2421
The Presence of Your Vehicle Has Been Documented
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So...pools open?
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19231
sentient yeast infection
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