"SPORE" - Watch this video!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore

This is a game developed by Wil Wright, the creator of The Sims.

You might think you've seen all there is to see about the game once he evolves his microscopic creature to a macroscopic one which can walk on land... but you ain't seen nothing yet!

yeah I heard about this a while ago but the vid is cool.

that's a lot to take in. i'm speechless.

Yes, I saw this video a while ago.
Quite amazing, isn't it?

IGN claims that they EA is hinting at a handheld version of the game. I hope that's true :)

The stream works ok..

But the downloaded AVI won't run in my players.. anyone knows if I need some obscure codecs for it?

(win98se)

get flash.

Is this the same video talked about a year or so ago? I was hoping there was some new info <sniffs>

wow.

I had heard a bit about the game, but hadn't seen anything before that. Just watched the whole thing,... amazing. definately looks like one for my "Must buy" list.

Wonder what kind of hardware this is going to require.

That looks prety darn good! I'm buying it! A game with constantly evolving gameplay sounds great... Though I'm sure I will still prefer classic "Civilization" over it.

That...... was amazing!!!!!

Looks like nano at first...

Son of a %$Z$ wow!

Another game idea to scratch off the list.

I wonder what the size of the dev team is and how deep
it's going to go into evolution.

Yep.......

You got me curious, so I had a look. GSpot reports the file as a standard avi/divx 4 (opendivx) with mp3 audio. But regardless, the DirectShow render fails with a certification error. I have XviD installed, so maybe if I installed 'official' DivX it would work. I doubt it somehow... Now I am wondering what Google do in their downloadable player to make this work... I wouldn't mind betting a few header/key frame infos are simplistically scrambled...

EDIT : Here's the paydirt... http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=106537 - re: GOOG chunk at beginning of file that 'borks' the DirectShow splitter. Other splitters (virtualdub for ex) works fine. There must be a DS fix for this...

How deep? How deeper can it get?!? it takes you from primordial life to space exploration

It looks like this will be one of the biggest games to come along in a long while. It's just simply amazing.

Gaming in 10 years will be unimaginable.

Obviously, I'm pretty excited about it.

This stuns even me... and I ain't sunned by anything... This impresses me with what I find impressive... Gameplay and emergent content.. Meaning it looks fun to play and will never get old.. a rare combination.

The fact that everything is alterable or creatable is a huge plus for me.... I died and went to heaven over this one...

impressive... so, they can make planets... SPEAK...


yeah... when that guy made the Sims, he probably thought about something like this, and then he probably dismissed it...

... later he came back to it...

good...

--Mike

I wasn't really interested by this until I saw the video. Now I'm getting it...

hmmm...

as cool as it is, it doesn't look like much fun. very mundane and veeeeeeeery tedious.

I reckon he's ripped of my next game Universe Bonus. Must have spies or something.

I kind of agree. It looks like a game which requires a serious amount of dedicated time for growing and evolving your creatures.
I can't help but think of Lionheads Black & White game. Initially, that game sounded fantasic but proved to be rather dull in the long term.

However, you can't knock the technical acheivements of Spore.

Hello.

Markd - you took the words out of my mouth. It looks dull - fascinating and clever - but it's no Jet Set Willy.

Goodbye.

you know, ye of the "boring" camp might have a point ... It's like he's made a great science project but like does it play OK?

Just hope this game doesn't turn into a convoluted mess of micro-management later on, if it doesn't I'll be grabbing it the day it comes out.

Wil Wright != Peter Moleneaux

Wil Wright created The Sims. Peter Moleneaux created Black and White.

The Sims is an open ended game where you get to build and improve your house over time. The little people in it are merely incidental to this.

The Sims and it's expansion packs have been in the top ten sellers SINCE THEY CAME OUT.

Wil Wright also created Sim City. And we all loveed sim city, right?

From what I saw in the video, it will be like his other ganes. Open ended. No story. No end. You just play around however you want to.

Think of it like a box of legos.

Syntax Error
This is a BASIC forum, use <> ...

Peter made populus didn't he? Bit of a classic.

And yeah sswift: this aint no C++ forum!

No. You'd have to pay me to 'play' a game like that, or this BORE, er, SPORE game.

It's all too much like hard work. Hardly twitch gaming. :)

*yawn*

jaw-dropping technical achievement !

I have a feeling one day all games will be made this way !

He gave the swimming creature legs, and from this demo it seemed that was all that was needed to change it from an ocean creature into a land creature. On irc it was suggested the game is not doing any evolution, the player is; it seems you spend some time collecting points by eating stuff, then you use the points to evolve the creature by buying legs. On the other hand, the idea of downloading other player's evolving creatures is nice because this will make for an evolving environment.

I liked the first part of the demo more than the part in which he was flying around and blowing up planets or starting life on a rock. The first part of the demo showed a game, while in this later part, for me at least, it wasn't quite clear why that would be fun. It wasn't (yet) clear to me what the challenge was there. Maybe it will be like a sim-ant on a universal scale. Or rather sim-city, trying some things and waiting to see what happens. Like Sswift said, open-ended.

I think it looks kind of cool and is technicaly impressive. But I really don't see much of a game I would like there.

It will likely end up like a tycoon game, that is.. a simulation with a game overlay... When you get down to it, all the sim games are exactly what they are called. Simulations.

Spore is going to be a simulation, with game like elements. Just like the sims, or any of the missions in sim city.

It is a vein of computer entertainmemnt that runs along side games but really aren't games.

I choose tycoon games because they simulate a task and overlay a weak game model over top to provide a goal. In Rollercoaster tycoon, it was to meet certain goals, either of money, or people or to perform tasks like making 10 coasters with high ratings.

This seems more like the goal is to advance to the next stage and you are ultimately rewarded with, as Will says, the sandbox mode at the end. There are also metagames as he puts it in the sandbox at the end. These are things that are like games but don't have real game constructs like points, score, or advancement. Just the satisfaction of bringing peace between 2 bitter enemies.

I am excited about that aspect, but will have the most fun building houses and creatures in the earlier game stages...

With people like me making things, other people making whole worlds.. it should be very awesome and freash each time.

We've heard it before, but with this online database it's possible that you could actually play two games and not see any creatures you saw in the first game at all. Technically possible, of course not likely, but it's a pretty cool thought. I want that ravenous carebear.

And yeh, this is not a 'game' for those twitch gamers that require constant instant satisfaction from every key press.

I hope it has a one player mode :o)

Uhh, it's only one player? Except I can't tell if you were joking or not. That smiley is suspect.

In any case, you can opt to NOT connect to the online database, in which case you will be 'stuck' using the small CD database, which will only contains a few tens of thousands of objects. =]

I'm worried about disc space usage though... this has the possibility to reach gigs upon gigs worth of generated data even before you reach the tribal stage... either that, or the game will take 10 years to load. The Sims with it's 8 expansion packs took long enough...

I agree with Foppy about the UFO part.
I hope that it isn't as ridiculously simple as it looks. Hopefully we'll get real space vehicles that aren't like god-weapons and are controlled by your creatures...

A very ambitious idea and seems pretty well executed judging by the vid. As always though, the gameplay is paramount. IMHO an intergalactic sandbox is doomed to failure almost to the same extent as William Shatner was when his best mate told him he wasn't a bad singer ;)

You're forgetting something very important. The game
content is procedural. An entire species in this game will
take up 1k of space. No lie.

Will is using the techniques learned through the DemoScene.
Read about it here, it's amazing.

I will be shocked if this game ships with more than 1 cd.

This is so amazing. It's such a complex game. I found it amazing that you can modify the bone structure, and that it actually changes how the animal reacts and attacks. It's so amazing how this all works...how the monkey played the drum and the other monkeys reacted...the interactions between the the characters was stunning.

Sadly I doubt my computer will be able to run it...

Speaking of Shatner... did anybody else notice the Star Trek TOS fight music?

Just....... amazing.....

I meant, i hope it's has a one player option in it.

Again, it's ONLY one player. No multiplayer component from what I can tell. Much like The Sims...


Hence my concern in the paragraph you quoted. I'll elaborate.

Firstly, loading times. 1k of DNA (essentially that's what it is) data obviously doesn't take long to load, but creating the model and textures for thousands of objects on demand (ie during the loading screen) is going to chug. Chug like you have never known.

The solution to this is of cource cacheing. 1k of data is all that is needed to be sent to the global database in order to share a character with someone else - but if you actually want to USE that object, the program has to generate the model and textures etc... easy solution to stop chugging is to cache the generated data (which is what I specifically mentioned in my previous paragraph) - and for thousands of objects that is going to consume a mammoth amount of harddrive space.

Personally I can spare the harddrive space so I'm not so worried, but the footprint is going to be massive.


He has actually hired sceners to work on the game with him. And for reference, you ever tried one of those 40k doom style demos? Remember how long it took to start playing???

And that was with BAD graphics...

Try this one:
http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger.html
Everything is procedural. Take a while to load and is slow like hell, but generated textures are actually quite nice. But I agree with chacheing... You WOULD have to save them...
Like this is the procedural texture generator:

The texture actually looks quite nice and has all kinds of detail.

"He has actually hired sceners to work on the game with him. And for reference, you ever tried one of those 40k doom style demos? Remember how long it took to start playing???"

A 40K demo isn't written for speed, it's written to be small.


"And that was with BAD graphics..."

I didn't think that Doom style fps demo with the stencil shadows looked that bad. In fact, I remember the graphics being better than what I saw in that spore video anyway.

I'm not so sure thats the case after reading the following, it seems there's some kind of multiplayer component.

Spore populates the universe with creatures and cities created by players from all over. There's almost nothing in the world that wasn't at some point created by another player. Wright discovered someone else's civilization, a curious four-legged race who carried tridents and lived in cities with pointed walls and towers. What happened next was entirely up to Wright: he decided to try to communicate with the other species using a bizarre Close Encounters style mini-game. His UFO played music and waited for the aliens to respond.

All the informations on this game are nearly a year old. There has nothing been said on it since then so everything here is at best pure "intention" of some people.
As it is planned for Q1 / Q2 2007, its quite sure we will get some new infos in 2 months at this years E3 or at the Games Conventions in fall in germany.

I would not give too much on a year old information or videos after all ... its not like Duke Nukem Forever did this as well ... 6 years ago or so :P

Duke Nukem Forever is named 'Forever' for a reason.


If you read the whole article, you would also have read that like sharing lots and Sims and the Sims, you can select to share your buildings/creatures/vehicles/etc with the world (this happenns automatically in the background, instead of the user having to manually upload stuff, so the online content will be rediculously large). Likewise, when it comes to populating your world, the game automatically connects to the world database in the background and chooses content that it thinks is most needed. This is what he was referring to here.


All the speculation I've read in this thread is all stuff that Will Wright has said. Besides, since his E3 presentation last year, he has been doing interviews, so a little more info has been revealed since then.

He is doing -two- presentations at this year's E3, so there will be some juicy infos in just a few of months time... Oh, and it's slated for Fall 2006, so I think comparing this to DNF is a bit unfair...