The "I'm Playing Spore" Thread

Anyone who is worried that Spore is going to be a big dissapointment after the wait can stop. It's really, really, good, Maxis have managed to create another one of those games you enjoy so much you suddenly find the hours just vanishing.

The tutorials and evolution in the game is superb, it's just paced nicely; you learn at about the right speed and it's not too easy or too hard. Before you have a chance to get bored you are moved onto the next stage, a couple of times now I haven't wanted a stage to end because I was enjoying it a lot.

I'm currently on the Tribal bit which is interesting.

One thing I did find a little frustrating is you can't do some things (like diplomacy) properly until you have collected enough "bits" and the order you get "bits" in seems quite random. I suppose it's good because it means you have to adapt your play to what you get but it is a little annoying, this is a tiny niggle though.

I'll post a few links to pics of my "Alexican" evolution so far (my son wanted the race named after him):

Early Alexican

Alexican Phalusius

Avian Alexican

Alexican Evolvus

The only problem I have is everyone wants to play the game, oh and it IS pretty unstable (big surprise), had two crahes so far, save often.

Darkheart

The second one should be called "Alexican Phallus Minisculis"

The game has been stable for both myself and my brother. I'm with you though- I love the game... it's just plain entertaining.

Don't attempt to install it more then 3 times... http://www.simprograms.com/?p=692

Yes, that does suck. I'm happy with it for now, but the instant I see an issue EA (and a few other people) will hear about it. This kind of DRM protection really only hurts the people who pay for the game.

So where does one purchase the pirated version of this game?

Can this be purchased (and downloaded: legally) online? I won't go to a store to buy a game when things like steam exist; actually, I won't bother buying the game at all unless you can lol.

You can buy it from the EA store... but... that might not be a good option.

Because of the 3 install limit?

I would probobly only play it a few hours anyways lol. Thanks, i'll check it out.

will wait till they remove the limiter on the 3 installs before I buy it TBH

The download version of Mass Effect from EA's website does have that 3 activation limit and I presume spore is identical in that sense. I bought FIFA soccer 2008 and FIFA Manager 08 from their website a while ago and it does have DRM but you can back it up and reinstall it later.



Same here.

Well, I've just reached the Tribal stage.

It's good, very well put together and clever, but it's not really gripping me. I don't think this is a fault of the game though, just my personal preference.

Go ahead and (re)install it as many times as you like, just not on more than 3 computers...

Why would you purchase a pirated game? That kind of defeats the point.

Ever heard of bittorrent?

COD 4 is a REAL pain in the arse on steam, only one astray from the awesome abilities of steam :)

EA is hell, as Valve is heaven (Portal 2!!).

As I type this in chrome, I am now installing spore. Hope its good

Does the game feel different each playthrough, or is it essentially the same scenario every time, albeit with a couple differences based on random factors and your creations?

Will pick it up eventually, but am also waiting on the 3-activation limit to be removed. I already blew my 3 activations on Mass Effect within the first three days of owning it thanks to it being buggy with my laptop, suffice to say I wasn't too pleased.
(aside from the fact they were later fixed with a patch that came out well after a month of its retail release)

So far it got moderately good reviews gameplay seems to average about 8/10. The downsides being that it combines several gameplay types and genres in a very simplistic form. Sounds like it's aimed at the more casual gaming market like The Sims. Which makes sense I guess.

One review compared the early stages as a simplified single player MMORPG whilst later stages like the space stage are very tricky with bad camera and controls.

Hi my name is Mikkel, and I'm an addict.

They won't. But it isn't worse than that XP activation deal. When you run out of installs, just phone up EA. They'll give you a new one. Eventually (like with XP activation) this will happen so frequently and be such a tedious task, that the support reps are just going to give you a new license with even bothering to check if you're a legitimate customer.

That's not the way it works. You have three installs. Either on one machine or on separate ones. My Mass Effect has already been counted as being installed twice, because XP decided to screw up when I replaced my motherboard and I had to reinstall everything.

Back in the day there used to be only one way to get a pirated game, by buying it. Whether that defeats the purpose depends on your concept of what piracy is.

I think they meant a cracked version of the game

It's definitely not what I was expecting it to be, but it's not that bad - it doesn't near live up to the hype it's been getting though.

Just think of it as a very simplistic RPG, where you build a creature out of parts instead of add weapons/attributes.

I find the whole evolution part as kind of odd, since there's nothing of the sort in the game really. You pick everything for your creature yourself out of stuff you pick up or get as a reward. I was kinda hoping there'd be a Darwinist element to the game where your creature adapts based on the way you play it.

My theory is they pulled out 80% of the game for future expansions.

First phases all feel like a means to an end. It may feel better if they flowed seamlessly and one never lost capabilities as he progressed, but I guess that could be a bit convoluted. I really like how things come full circle with creature and space phase, though, where in creature phase there are often little rock showers and UFO encounters, then in space phase the player himself is doing that :)

The game is definitely built for the space phase. Everything before that is just to establish your creature's histroy and has a quick, finite conclusion.
...Particularly the city phase, which takes about 10 minutes and pulls the player completely away from the creative aspects of the game. Just about the only good thing I personally found with the city phase was that the voices were an obvious parody of Starcraft :) (But again, WTF happened to my Dyloodians' distinct voices?!). It would help if the city phase had at least involved strategy, but Spore is no strategy game. To win city phase one basically gathers a lot of something (be it sbucks or military might in air, land or water) and unloads it on the enemy one city at a time. In that realm, creativity is irrelevent; the player built vehicles are generally lifeless and the editor basically just gives control over the shape. That is a sad departure from the creature editor, with which a subtle change like knee position can substantially change the behaviour of a character.
Even in space mode I find myself smiling at the way creatures are animated.

One big problem I have is that Spore gives the player too much responsibility. In the city phase you are commander of all, whether you like it or not. In space, I keep needing to swoop back into allied planets to save them from attacking pirates / whatever, or else I lose something, because apparently my ship is the only one ever. (Even though alien races are doing a fine job building them in bulk). It's too direct; Spore is begging to be, and is meant to be, and was said to be, a sandbox.
The problem is the player has to really work to get to that sandbox stage. I don't see how it is going to be fun for a casual player who doesn't want strategy or space invaders.

What I liked with the creature phase was that I had a small presence so could be creative. I could take off and explore without my civilization being demolished. In the space and city phase I feel constantly pressured. My inaction can lead to war, which means it gets harder for me to unlock toys and harder for me to navigate without getting destroyed myself. "Defending the homefront" is a chore and a departure from the rest of the game. My creatures should be quietly defending themselves and not bother me with such matters unless they really need to. This way we still have that amazing depth but none of the hectic madness that follows it.

Aside from those negatives, the game is really cool. It's a shame that I can't immediately grab and mess with asteroids floating in space, or use any tools outside of a planet (I hope this is possible eventually, since otherwise that is a very cool feature lost!), but the tinkering Spore allows right now (even if far less than it should allow) has kept me hooked for an embarassingly large chunk of time. Really fun. This game has a lot of character :)

Spore:Nightlife, Spore:University, Spore:Pets etc?

I'm pretty sure players take on the role of evolution depending on what challenges they can't overcome, there by adding parts to their character which enable them to get to the next stage ... however it is they choose to.

I got a chance to play it yesterday and enjoyed the first part which is 2d in 3D, kind of like an old school shooter. I got bored pretty quick once I was on land though. The editors are kind of dumb, much less sophisticated than I expected, and the wandering around does seem like your average mmorpg.

You just walk about looking for something to eat, have a couple of buttons you can press to get a reaction. Choose to be friendly to other creatures, roar which you can do once over a set time period to scatter enemies or attack, attack just means pressing a crosshair button to enter attack mode and mashing the mouse trying to get your monster to bite as fast as possible.

I got bored of walking around looking for skelletal pieces near nests where the other creatures hang out. There really isn't much to hold your interest there.

Maybe the later levels are more fun, they sound like they might be, but I was done with the game already and wouldn't play it again.

Yeah. Which isn't really evolution, so much as creationism. Of course a true Darwinist approach wouldn't work well as a game.

Looks more like lamarckian evolution than creatonism from that statement (which has been proven wrong nonetheless).


Will Wright actually made two games that feature darwinian evolution, being SimEarth and SimLife (though, granted, these were more simulations than games).

Really when you think about it what's the difference? I think that is a key element of this game. Aren't "intelligent" solutions really just evolution derived from simulation in the form of abstract thought traditionally or in this case a game? Either way evolution is occuring.

That one is a fantasy. Evolution does not have a goal or purpose, it just is. It's certainly not about a concios choice to "evolve" manipulators to grant you an extra attack in combat. In Darwinism you need to adapt your behavior to your gentic makeup in order to survive. In Spore you adapt your genetic makeup to suit your behavior.

I've enjoyed watching others playing it but i dunno it's not as fascinating as Sim City for instance was to me. The technology is great but i'm not this convinced by the game design this time.

A good write up on Spore...

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/09/05/spore-things-to-know/

Very uninspiring...

I rather suggest looking at this one instead.

-> http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=V5TXEUiR1Xk

Taumel, that's only the Creature Creator... which isn't bad at all, despite being able to create vertebrates only (it was actually quite a success when one time I left it on the tv for my friends to try while we sat back and relaxed).

@Reactor: thanks for the link; the review above gives a good insight of the game, something magazines all over the place weren't even able to hint (and ended up describing Spore as a minigame extravaganza).

Thanks, i already knew that. I just found the situation kind of weird, you know there are quite some not so pleased reviews and then there are the reviews about those reviews which aren't pleased too. I thought it' smore fun watching Robin instead. ;O)

I think the technology in SPORE is great, the music is very pleasing, and there are a lot of great sandbox ideas and Space Age after a first view feels a bit after ELITE but i overall just miss some depth which makes all these components more interesting. Actually i would have prefered a Space Age game alone but were planets and it's inhabitants are really different and were it's just fun observing space and jumping from system to system.

When you think of it, the game feels like a disguised tamagotchi, which is what I think the aim was in the first place in order to repeat the success of The Sims without risks.

Personally I would prefer a game more oriented toward life and ecosystem simulation, like the two older Sim games I mentioned, but that would be a niche and Maxis now looks for the bigger audience.

I didn't notice a lot of technology in the first two gameplay stages. The creature editors just arent that impressive. Stretching and adding bones to simplistic meshes and distorting them with a few skins to choose from and adding bits mr potatoe head fashion isn't that tough in a good engine.

Maybe the last two stages of gameplay show off the tech better. The terrain and vegetation in the walkabout and collect stuff in the first on land portion was a bore and didn't look like it did anything you couldn't do building levels the old fashioned way.

Ad, didn't you watch the tech vids 3 years ago? Heh, I guess dynamic animation isn't that big a deal anymore. That was the big thing though. No pre-canned animations ... all those algorithms from the demo scene.

That comment is just mean. :)

It's not just metaballs and bones. It's not easy at all to reach that level, and I'm sure some of their algorithms could be useful in 3D tools. The fact that the creature creature looks like a simple playground (which hopefully will be exanded in a Sims fashion) doesn't mean that it's an easy task to code it properly.

Dynamic motion isn't *still* a big deal but surely will become more and more important during years (a good example is all the hype around Euphoria).

Spore is a long way from perfect but I've not seen anything like it that's better. It is a lot of fun, for me that is 90% of a "good game".

Darkheart

Alas, we did lose half of that procedural animation stuff Will Wright was showing off at GDC in 2005. For example, dragging things (mix of eat and walk, for example) is disturbingly absent. Voices turn into uninspiring Simlish as soon as we get to Civ and Space stage (and they start using a tiny library of pre-written dialogue, which kills a lot of the game's character). Tech demos from prototypes before it was all EA-ized had much richer voices, blended animations and very complex space dynamics. (With exploding planets creating asteroid fields orbiting the sun, for example).

If those tech demos were absent, I would probably be entirely positive, but after all the attention this game got earlier on, it would be a reasonable expectation that they actually hit the target.

The game itself tells an interesting story just from its design, a bit like a good book. I like how the player ultimately communicates with a miriad of space-faring civilizations, who seem to exist on a level so different from the tribal civilizations that they hardly notice each other. It almost feels like Greek mythology with all these different empires being given so much power to mess with the smaller creatures, yet still just as mortal to themselves as when they were single cells.
It makes me feels small, and inspires a lot of thoughts about those crazy alien conspiracy theories :)

So evolution just is? That sounds almost like dogma to me. What about intelligence? Does it actually have a goal or purpose or is is simply a speedier or more complex form of the basic evolution algorithm?

It's utterly simplistic to draw a line between evolution and intelligence or creativity. They are wholly intertwined. It's not unlike electromagnetism or spacetime. At one point each of those components was considered separate but then it was realized that these are complimentary components which can affect each other. In fact it is pointless to analyze one without the other.

Spore's representation of creativity and evolution (how about createvolution) might be the most insightful yet.

I'm sure that stuff is still in there to some extent. Perhaps it was unstable to allow the dragging or maybe they just didn't see a need for it in the gameplay.



When was the last time you coded dynamic mesh deformation and procedural animation? If it's so easy why are Maze Monkey's characters balls with pieces attached to them Mr. Potato head fashion? Why don't you do up some appendages for those bad boys and actually allow players to create a real monkey?

Creating polished software is hard. Don't pretend otherwise just because it's another person's work on the line.

The procedural modeling in the game is pretty simple. So long as you have a render engine that allows you to deform bones and asign vertex weights to them in code it shouldn't really be all that hard to do the character deformations.

The animation might as well have been canned, I doubt there are very many variables that control the simplistic animation I saw. You can make some pretty bad judgment on the limb distortion and wind up with some pretty poor animation, which suggests that its mostly defined by a few simple variables and doesn't even offer the more basic gait controls of Biped or softimage CAT for 3dsmax.

Maze Monkeys (Flow demo) never really set out to be a advanced rendering tech demo, just a simple gameplay demo and test bed for the editor. If we decide to pursue it further after flows release it's possible we might explore some things a bit further. Most of flows development has been focused primarily on creating an engine for the team to use in our contract work. The Blitz community module hasn't been a priority we just figured that after spending so much time on it, releasing it as a product was a nice bonus. I don't think we spent a month total man hours on the demo. If we decide not to pursue the game further we may even release the Mazemonkeys source to help people understand how ogre and flow work with blitzmax so there isn't much incentive to really push the demo when we may be giving it away for free.

The procedural animation stuff is there invisibly. If you want to see it more obvious, check out the NDS version of Spore.
Due to its special style it shows the behavior much better than the fluent game experience on the PC.

I agree on "the editor isn't as stunning as we assumed".
But I guess they had so much more ideas they were forced to cut stuff.
But as Spore has the potential to become another Sims we can bet that there will be at least one addon.

Because the one most important feature I am missing is: Planet data holding basing on your online account similar to WorldShift instead of this local data shit.

Sorry if the game does have such an online centric approach, local data trashing is just completely against that approach ...

especially as I play it on my main system (WinVista64) and my MacBookPro (OSX 10.5.4) and copy data isn't that easy in that case sadly.
Would have expected that this basic feature is present.

IMHO It's just a normal progress they had to slim down all the things they wanted to put into the game vs the usual constraints of time, resources and practicaility. I hope they will add more stuff later, it's almost inconcievable thee won't be at least one expansion for Spore.

Darkheart

I've played through the tribal stage so far. I got the galactic edition of Spore, which includes two documentaries, one Making of Spore and one National Geographics one. I've only watched the first one so far, which was pretty interesting.

So far I liked the first stage a lot. The graphics are very cool, and I loved that there were creatures 20 times your size that were after you. A good reason to panic.:)

Creature stage was okay, but got kind of boring after a while. It was all the same and not enough to do.

The tribal stage was more fun, with more stuff you could do, and more excitement. I played as a peacful tribe, but still had to fend of hostile neighbours from time to time. Even encountered a few huge creatures here that ate a couple of my tribe members. :)

While the game is not perfect, it is very VERY interesting from a technology and game design point of view.

Maybe next time I get to play the game, I'll ask if I can have a stab at the later stages. The Creature stage bored me silly, but the three later gameplay types do sound quite interesting having read the reviews.

I just want to play the space stage which I think will be worth all the others. I fully expect to be bored for a few hours from what I read.

Actually my favorite stages so far are cell and creature. I got to the space stage, but it starts out really slow and I hardly have any tools (just an abduction beam, and a few simple weapons). Also, buying colonies are very expensive, and I can't even find a nice habitable planet (and I can't buy terraforming tools yet). I guess it takes time and patience.

If I get bored I'll continue one of my other save games. What's nice about Spore is it really is replayable - playing as a herbivore on a new planet actually is different from playing the carnivore I played on my first planet. And the creatures / buildings / etc. are always different and unique (although I guess after a while it might get old).

Just take it for what it is. I've enjoyed every part. The best thing about Spore is being able to interact with other races who are often going through the stages you've already been through. There's something just hillarious about it ;)

The only thing I don't like is that I can't get out of my spaceship to go and run around with my own people again. That'd be brilliant.

Really? Do you understand what dogma is?

What about it?

No. It's the result of billions of years of natural selection. Intelligence is one of the many factors that allows us to adapt to new situations and compete against otherwise stronger and more vicious animals.

There is no such thing as an evolution algorithm. There is no way to predetermine how a species will adapt or which random mutations will be effective.

Yes, do you realize that you made an authoritative statement from any organization which is not to be disputed mainly because in the context you presented it the only proof it falls back on is faith?

and again I quote ...





OK, while we're quoting Wikipedia, read this.



Just because it's an algorithm doesn't mean it can be predetermined. The world is more complex than a domino set but it still falls just one way in the end.

Uhm, I missed something. Darwinism is based on faith? Intelligence is part of the same mechanism which is reached at higher levels of complexity, and it doesn't contradict the theory of evolution.

Anyway, Spore is anything but a realistic simulation of evolution, so even trying to elevate it's mechanics to such an extent is pointless (unless someone brings religion into the equation, which I suppose would lead really fast to a thread lock). Hinting that Will Wright made hypotesis which are more realistical than Darwinism doesn't make much sense, when in fact the game resorts to a mix of lamarckian evolution (since the creatures evolve around their needs) and creationism (since the player decides in behalf of the creature what parts will evolve). It should just be taken as a creative game.


I would say that it is indeed an algorithm, just that the knowledge of the rules governing the universe and the computing power needed to make such accurate simulations is near omniscience. Randomness is just the substitute for the lack of data, knowledge and computing power. I understood your point though. :)

That is a faith based statement. You are taking it on faith that evolution "just is".

Far be it for me wanting to turn this into an existential discussion; everything about evolution points to it being nothing more than a reactionary force. It's just the inevitable outcome of chemical interactions to itself and environment.

It's hardly a choice to evolve one way rather than another. Much like certain aspects of quantum mechanics, every possible combination of cells that can happen Will happen. We only see a tiny amount of those today, because the vast majority simply can't survive in it's environment. Only the combinations that do work, will survive and evolve further. This is why our current ecosystem has such a huge variety of living beings and people can be forgiven for thinking it was created by design as it all seems to work together so perfectly. It is not design, but merely the result of action vs reaction combined with time.. a lot of time.

This is just speculation on my part ofcourse.. and therefor subject to debate :p

Anyway, the game is quite enjoyable. I'm surprised people here didn't have a greater appreciation for it. The creation tools are fun and let you make nearly anything. I can see how they might seem restrictive to a 3D artist but they are quick, fun, and you can make some impressive looking objects. I've actually enjoyed the vehicle and building creation modes most of all. This is by far my favorite "god" or "evolution" game. I might be simpler than something like Civ 4 but I find it more enjoyable because of the creative aspects. Also, the ambiance is just great. I love how everything actually takes place on a planetoid that you can rotate about. You can see the atmosphere and the sun. In fact a sunset occurs if you rotate the planet at just the right angle which was really cool. The game is really everything I thought it would be taking you from tiny nothing to galactic civilization. It's a great example of scope.

I am considering buying it, but the 3-install limit is holding me back.
What are they thinking??

Yeah, I don't know if that applies to the boxed version or not. I didn't do any sort of ignition database type check because I didn't even register with EA. I just had to enter the install code from the manual old school style.

No. First of all, feel free to dispute it. In fact if you can, you'll probably get some sort of award. Sort of like the biological equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Second of all, there is no organization that promotes that evolution "just is" as an absolute truth. Lastly there are very many observable (as opposed to faith) indications that evolution "just is". For a good place to start, I recommend Charles Darwin's "The Voyage of the Beagle", in which Mr. Darwin accounts for many of these observations.

I wasn't quoteing wikipedia. Nice try at an ad hominem argument tho'.

I didn't say there isn't a deterministic algorithm for evolution. I said there was no algorithm at all. Being a professional computer programmer, I'm rather well aware that not all algorithms are deterministic. In fact most probably aren't, and making a truly deterministic complex algorithm, is a pretty difficult task.

Well you're half right.

No it isn't and no I'm not. I'm applying Occam's Razor.

The same thing Microsoft was thinking 7 years ago with Windows XP activation. If you need to install it more than 3 times in a reasonable time-frame, and can't be bothered opening a support ticket to get your installs back, you probably stole it.

While I disagree with the principle, I still think it's a better deal than having to dig out the CD every single time you want to play. Sure no DRM would be even better, but until the industry wise up, this is probably the best deal we're going to get.

It does, and you don't have to. The first time the game is run, it "phones home" to see if it should be allowed to run. If you don't have an Internet connection, and haven't read the box too clearly, you can't play the game. At least that's how it was with Mass Effect. I haven't actually gotten my copy in the mail yet. Good thing I'm such a patient and understanding person.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but isn't true randomness a very very verrrrry hard thing to achieve? As everything follows a calculatable pattern, even if it is incredibly complex.

Anyway, i'll get the game at some point.

Away from religion for a moment and back to the game.

I just finished the civ stage, which was quite fun and took me about as long as the first three stages. One thing I didn't particularly like was that having played peaceful from the very beginning, you get religion as your main thing in the civ stage (oh..o...we're back into religion). I would have prefered economic personally.

One slightly annoying thing I found was that, your creature doesn't evolve after you enter the tribal stage. I had been gradually going from four legged animal to something more monkey like when I entered the tribal stage, thinking I could keep evolving my creatures...but they were stuck at monkeys, albeit with some clothes. Also, building houses and vehicles was not as fun as building creatures. I wound up downloading and modifying stuff, rather than building most things from scratch.

Anywas, I'm enjoying the game so far.

p.s. As an aside, some of the reviews for Spore compare it to Space Rangers 2...anyone played it and is it any good?

I'm having a hard time with the 'cutesiness factor' of it all.

My tribe's reminding me too much of Jar Jar Binks.

Screenshots!

Don't worry MadJack, you can abduct and kill your own people later on if you don't like them :)

Can I nuke them from orbit?

Shall we simply call it referencing then? Here's your remark with "dogma" linked to Wikipedia:



I wasn't changing the subject just simply backing up my use of the word dogma for your blind faith belief that evolution "just is".



Yes, actually what you said was:



I quoted Wikipedia just to let you know that an algorithm is in fact any process with changing states and that it doesn't have anything to do with predetermining how a species will adapt.

Now Occam's Razor:



Your understanding of Occam's Razor couldn't be more incorrect. It's an assumption to state that evolution "just is".

*Bender's voice on*
Hey, what's up?!
No more verbals fights in here? More than a hour past already.
Come on guys, i know you can do it!
*Bender's voice off*


By the way does anyone want to share Futurama on DVDs? :O)

You can call it what you want. Could you please point me to the wikipedia article I supposedly referenced? I'd like to read it.

Do you understand what blind faith is? Blind faith is (as I understand it) when you accept something to be an absolute truth (let's say New Earth Creationism), despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. How do you understand blind faith?

The hypothesis that Evolution happens without purpose is not a matter of faith, it is the case that the evidence suggests is likely. Furthermore it is also the one that makes the fewest assumptions about nature. All you have to do to change my mind, is prove me wrong.

I don't know which wikipedia article you were "referencing" but the one I found defines an algorithm as "a sequence of finite instructions", not "any process with changing states" (because you can also have stateless algorithms). Thus Evolution is not an algorithm. Q.E.D.

Is that so? What is your understanding of Occam's Razor then?

No, it's a hypothesis, but i digress. Why else would we be applying Occams Razor? My hypothesis has fewer assumptions than yours (it doesn't assume evolution has a purpose) thus my hypothesis is more likely to be correct. Even more important much easier to positively falsify, since there is only really one assumption to test.

My hypothesis isn't that evolution has a purpose. It is that evolution is an algorithm and that intelligence is simply an extension of that algorithm. Intelligence does not have a purpose either, it is following the same algorithm but wrapped up in a more complex physical system. The outcome of reactions outside a system like the brain typically follow the path of least resistance. Intelligence does the same but due to the abstraction caused by wrapping basic physical processes up in a system like the brain it becomes less apparent what the path of least resistance is.

Back to the game ...

I have to admit I had a lot more fun with the initial stages of the game than I thought I would. Low expectations are such a blessing! The creator tools are a lot of fun. The possibilities of what you can create are endless and it's a lot of fun to put your creations into action and see your creatures interacting with them. As a game creator I find this part of the game to be very satisfying. You get the reward of creating without the time consuming process usually involved in game development. I do wish I could control the algorithms behind the objects, but that's probably just the programmer in me ;)

Now, the space stage is also great. I had high expectations for it and I feel that they have been met. There was a bit of a lull in my feelings for the game when I initially got to the space stage because it really opened up the possibilities and without the goal of getting to the space stage on the table anymore I wasn't sure what I was playing for anymore. It's as if all I wanted to do was work my way up from single celled organism to building my space ship and then be done.

After a while though the space stage picks up. Once you begin to colonize and shape planets the creative aspect comes back into play. In addition the missions tend to be more interesting than those earlier in the game. There are many "achievement" style rewards and strange new life to discover.

Now the one aspect of the game that I was worried about was the ship control as I'd heard it wasn't too great. I find that it's actually one of the most fun control mechanisms to date. They did make one mistake which was using the scroll feature of the mouse wheel to control elevation. However, you can also use the + and - keys for this which I highly recommend. With the mouse wheel it's very similar to working a typical 3D modeling app but you have to scroll far too often for it to feel fluid. Aside from the mouse wheel though, the ship is a blast to move around. It just has a real pick up and play feeling that's just plain fun.

Basically, I've had more fun with this title than most 'Sim' type games. I've always wanted to play 'Sim' games but usually they bore me by not giving you any sort of direct control. I will admit that I have enjoyed 2 quite a bit. Those were Civilization IV on the PC and Sim City for the Super Nintendo. Miyamoto helped Will Wright with that one though and it was apparent.

This game however walks the line without Miyamoto's assistance. It's a 'Sim' game with action game elements and it works really well for me. I think the Eurogamer review was the most accurate ... 9/10. I'll always play this game from time to time if for nothing else than to help me prototype 3D models.

I disagree entirely. After a week of playing in between work, gf and gf-playing-Spore, I'd say those worried about how Spore was going to turn out can be relieved they weren't worried over nothing.

Truthfully, random but ever-increasingly-more-common game crashing bugs in the space stage have put me off playing further until a patch comes out (or more likely an expansion pack, knowing EA). I went to the Spore forums to see who else has the same problem.

No one, but I did notice a post that referenced the original GDC 2006 demonstration and I thought I'd have another look to see how things turned out. (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-262774490184348066)

After 2 years of waiting, I still want Spore. What I have now is Splorth.

After a couple of days of play I would have probably agreed with an 8/10. The more I play it, the more I'm leaning towards 4 or 5/10.


It feels the same everytime. There is even much less love for my own created creatures than I thought there would be - every creature just acts the same, the procedural animation appears to have been chucked out.


Do I have a different game? The only difference a subtle change makes for any creature I touch is the level of polygon clipping (in body or in ground) I see when the creature bobs around.


Watch it again! The creatures have a distinguished walking pattern based on leg configuration. Hell, Tweetys' head sways when taking corners. In Splorth 08 edition, bodys are rigid and a single leg always takes the configuration of a right leg and acts exactly the same as a right leg - not individually.


If you look closely, you will see each part has a specific pre-defined animation. In fact I don't think any of the animation is procedurally generated anymore. Generic animations mostly only seen in cutscenes are the worst.

I didn't like the way my creature walked so I maniplated the shape of its legs and it walked completely differently. Maybe you can't mix and match legs anymore but you can completely change the animation of your creature with just some subtle tweaking here and there.

Come to think of it, I agree with Hotcakes. What this creature creator gives me control over is raw "stats". Speed, attack capability, the three singing / dancing capabilities...
Knee position does definitely affect speed, but I agree it only seems to change the animation of the character alone. How that character actually interacts with the environment seems entirely unaffected, and often feels totally artificial. There is something strange going on with the stats system that causes tiny legs to move at artificially high speeds.
This may be partly because the environments and tools (in the case of the tribal stage) have so little variety unto themselves.

Most attack poses have been replaced with a forwards wobble and an overwhelming sprite overlay, just like a Japanese-style RPG. (Notice a pattern yet?). Now, I am sure procedural animation is hard as heck to get right, but the current state of it really does feel pretty weak. The early demos that built so much hype looked really impressive because the animations did not try to keep up with those useless and artificial stats, and partly becuase they used more energetic movements. (Thus a more wobbly feel). It's not too hard to guess why they reduced the wobbliness, but something else just feels zombie-like here.

Space is unforgiving in all the wrong ways. I encountered an angry civilization. (One of the religious types; Spode empire. I have ended up at war with that same empire on two different save files...). Because I do not feel like playing reverse space invaders, I pay my allies to attack them. However, the Spode folk ultimately get to my planets and start blasting me to pieces.

Spore is not and should never be a fighting game. Because Spore so easily devolves into that, I (the player) cease to enjoy it. The controls are not designed for fighting. Piloting my spaceship to attack invading enemies is the single worst control experience I have had in a video game. The act of right clicking to move my ship, then clicking directly on an enemy while in range, combined with the fact that the camera automatically points downwards so I must somehow middle click and drag with my mouse to hold it forward (while right clicking and dragging to move :/)... it is infuriating, and as confusing as I make it sound. One can use wasd on the keyboard to move the ship, but even then holding the camera forward facing while left clicking to shoot on target and in range is only difficult because the interface is poorly designed. Hence I notice the shell surrounding the experience and grow to despise it.

One cannot have space ships defending a planet. Only the player himself is allowed to have one, which is bizarre given that the things are freshly created whenever the player gets destroyed. My allies do not help me, even though I contribute a great deal to help them. Not cool, because that would allow me to ignore the combat crap and get on with all the stuff that is fun in this game.

The ideal solution is I go ahead and ignore the whole Spode conflict because it sucks and I just want to play with my toys. However, the Spodes blowing up my homeworld poses a huge problem for the constant grinding I must do. See, I just spent an hour flying from planet to planet, selling spice and doing missions to buy the latest toy. ...But now the latest toy is unaffordable, because I have no empire from which to earn spice. This wouldn't normally be a problem were it not for the impossible state the game ends up in at this point. That wouldn't normally be a problem if Spore was designed with this all too common impossible state in mind.
"Make peace with the Spodes," I thought! No, the only way to do that is paying them cash. Huge quantities of cash. The only way to get huge quantities of cash is to cease these constant interruptions so I can get back to grinding. The only way to cease the interruptions is to silence the Spodes. So on and so forth.

I want to know what moron turned Spore into an action game at the last minute. I want to see that person moved to developing Sudoku games for the remainder of his existence.

yeah, but the animation is kind of canned, its only procedural in that it probably adjusts for footprint dimensions, limb lengths and center of gravity. But all creatures mostly move the same. I'd give the first stage a 7/10 second stage 4/10 using none skewed ratings where 5 really is average :)

I don't know how you can say the animation is "canned". Certainly it had to be programmed at some point, but considering the limb configurations you can do (tripods, bipeds, octopeds, branched legs, etc., etc.) it's definitely not "canned". However, after a while the animations do seem to look all alike, so I agree the procedural animation system could be improved (although most of us have no idea how difficult it probably was to achieve even the current method, technically).

I agree that the space combat system is stupid. It's like a bad mix of RTS controls and action flight combat. I would have preferred a more 1st person or FreeLancer-like 3rd person control scheme.

LOL, that does sound quite infuriating. I have to admit, fighting with the ship is pretty cumbersome. What they should have done was let you control power to the ship via a simple spin forward or back (one way either direction) to make the ship move or stop. Then they should have let you control altitude by pressing the right mouse button and moving the mouse forward or back. This way you wouldn't have to hold buttons down just to fly. Then in a firefight you could just leave your ship moving and dog fight just by pressing the left mouse button from time to time and adjust altitude by pressing the right mouse button from time to time.

In the Making of Spores documentary they show some clips of Spasm, the animation tool they made for the game. In it they do the animations on one creature (they showed how pulling the IK handle for the arm work), and then load in a variety of different creatures to see how the animatin works on them. So it seems the basic animation is done by hand on one creature, and then they have some clever code to make that animation work on a lot of different creatures. Not really procedural I would think.

They should have gotten Ken Perlin to work on it. He has some cool java demos on his site of these two characters walking, where you can adjust their attitude or emotion with sliders to have them move differently. I've always wanted to see this used in a game, so that you could tell how your avatar and other characters around him feel, by how they are animated. You could do this with pre-canned animation, but combining different emotions would be harder (say injured, but happy or sad and drunk). :)

Well, it does seem like there are some canned animations such as the dance routines and stuff. I think everything in the game is done that way though. But yeah I'm sure they have some animation transformation tools so they can map one animation to multiple creatures as well.

I just don't see the point of hyping up the procedural animation, working on the game for 3 years, and then not using it.

Most probably it just didn't work as expected. One thing is a tech demo, another an open ended creature creator with tons of different combinations.

Well I hadn't actually thought of that but you're right. There is no connection to the aesthetic and its abilities... I could be wrong (memory permitting), but I could have sworn in the Creature Creator if you add two sets of the same feet, you would get double the stats, at least. That got cut out too.

Anyways, I've developed two case studies I would like ppl to look at-

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-262774490184348066

The creature at 16 minutes and the creature at 21 minutes.

Then, in Spore, do a search for 'gdc 06' and grab tweety and the nameless one.

Watching the nameless creature side by side to the 06 demonstration, there are two noticeable differences- in the demo, each leg moves independantly. Left, middle, right. What we have in today's Splorth is a creature whose left and right legs move as you'd expect, but the middle leg has no idea what the f it's doing.

So difference number one is that even if it is procedurally animated (which I still doubt but this is not a good demonstration of it) the new routines are broken anyway. They had 2 years to -improve- this. Sure it was just a demonstration, but the code was there. What happenned to it?

Second diff is that the tail no longer sways. My tail has an arm attached because in the demonstration Will says he is attaching a grasper, however it does behave and look more like a mouth. So I attached a grasper anyway. In the 06 demo you can see the swaying as the creature walks.

In Splorth, the tail is rigid. The arms sways somewhat.

These changes are most noticeable with Tweety Bird. In the demo Will shows how Tweety's top heavy structure lends to him almost toppling over when cornering - in Splorth, Tweety is completely rigid.

The fairly basic 2x2 feet configuration happen to move mostly the same.


I definately think canned is the perfect word for it. On creatures with more complicated leg configurations, they don't move independantly as the creatures in the 06 demo did, it's just a simple left/right movement order (sometimes reversed if there's an easy front/back configuration) - this is relatively easy with a basic skeleton/joint system and some animation blending.

On the other hand, perhaps the fact that the system is now broken is indicative that it is procedural.


The way I see it, it's no different to the range of animations each npc in Vice City, San Andreas or 4 are able to play. Just with more or less limbs doing the same thing as each other.

Whereas in the demo, it -seemed- like there was more variety based on the actual limb configuration. Hard to tell when you don't get to play it yourself though.


I find this the likely explanation, however after seeing the demo (and the Robyn Williams demo) again it certainly -seemed- more realistic and robust to me.

EDIT : I won't even begin to rant about how in the GDC demo the cell stage still looks awesome and well, everyone's mentioned the water stage before...

Actually I even liked the way the UFO is represented in space stage better. Oh and civ stage looks like there used to be some kind of game attached to it. I guess I should rag on something about the tribal stage... well actually all the crature movement and reactions to things 'plonked' on the ground (ie spears, drums, campfire) appears to have been completely removed, except for the canned animations when you force click them on the campfire that already exists.

Yes, it says this in the manual (that things don't accumulate). It was in the creature creator, but it obviously unbalanced things like crazy.

Hmm, I guess. Still, I thought the 'too complicated'-o-meter kicked in pretty fast before things were able to get too out of control.

I made a dog in the CC. It had about 15 legs and a mouth (and eyes). So, it would have been lightning fast, but have a rediculously poor sing/bite and nothing else.

Meanwhile, in Spore, I find it really hard to resist building up creatures that have 5 in nearly every stat. And by the time this happenns it's time to go to tribal stage where none of it matters anyway...

Even if it became unbalanced somehow that I'm not seeing... it still would have been more interesting than what we have now...

EDIT : One of the biggest things I miss in Splorths creature stage are the roaming creatures. Who thought it would be a good idea to settle on lots of tiny localised groups? Who?!? My heart breaks.

Hehe, I always feel bad when I start eating creatures like that because it feels like I'm going to make their entire species extinct ;)

To be honest I don't think they actually had a game in 06. Just a bunch of tech. It was only last year that they started focusing on gameplay tying it all into the tech they had developed. Previously it was more of a sandbox. Perhaps in making the gameplay and getting it all to fit together they found the procedural approach just didn't work too well. <shrug>

Reminds me of Black & White. Remember how that was all going to be procedural with amazing worlds that grew around the player etc (can't think of the correct technical term right now). That turned out becoming a lot less exciting than promised, same wit fable.

Still I doubt that decent procedural technology is too far off. There are some amazing tools for 3D apps these days, and that technology always migrates to realtime eventually after a few years.

Looking back at that demo, they may not have. Will had described how the game would play and I sort of assumed that's what he was demonstrating, but probably not, as it turns out.