Will Wright's Spore

[Smoke]

Here's a really good article that goes over the different gameplay modes. And another article from GameSpy.

And here's a thread about the game started by someone who saw it at GDC.

Wright has teamed up with European demo coders to assist the game's design, capitalizing on their reputation for putting together amazing amounts of content in the smallest data space possible.

a big emphasis of his presentation was on compression, storing model and texture data into procedural driven 1k spaces. Since all the objects in the game share the same seed its fairly easy to compress them and rebuild them using the same procedurals.

It was an amazing demo.... to go from a bacteria and zoom out to an entire solar system, albiet with visual abstraction... Is just mindblowing.

but then to leave that solar system to view other worlds in a galaxy... its uncalled for.

Well, when I said phases, I didn't mean the game is divided into discrete sections. It all seems to flow in a ridiculously organic fashion, scaling fairly effortlessly from one scale to another. There was some abstraction built into it; when you move from civilization view to the global map you're given a somewhat iconic map to work with. But the zooming from planet to solar system to galaxy is just unbelievable -- it's fast and fluid.

Also, the common reaction to this game from people who weren't there is, "Nice idea, but not realistic as a game." But he showed what appeared to be the whole experience running as he spoke on a PC of some sort. It was pretty freaking robust.

From a thread at CGTalk:

This was, quite simply and with no hyperbole, the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Even a small part of it, such as just being able to edit and design creatures, would have been groundbreaking alone. But with the massive scale Wright demonstrated, from editing paramecia up to editing your own buildings and cities and spaceship designs, it was just breathtaking.

With the creature part, you could edit and modify the spanes and scale up all parts. You could ad on all sorts of things to them, like limbs and graspers and wings and all sorts of facial parts. The skin would wrap smoothly around whatever you added, complete with procedural textures wrapping appropriately too. And whatever you created, it would walk! He stuck a third leg on a two-legged creature... It walked. He showed a weird 8-legged thingy, and it walked. He showed a creature like a push-me-pull-you from Doctor Dolittle, with 2 heads and 3 pairs of legs, and it walked. He showed an awkward mega-encephalic 8-beaked parrot thing with legs and vestigal wings, and it walked, its top-heavy head lolling back and forth ("Like driving an SUV," Wright joked.) He ened shoed whis bizarre creature (as if the others weren't) with 4 linbs, but two of them branched out into two more limbs each bearing a foot. And yes, it walked. It was just incredible: Making any kind of bizarre life form ytou can think of and seeing it in some environment moving around, attacking prey, fleeing to avoid being prey, comminicating, dancing, the works.

I'd better get some artwork done now, 'cause when Spore ships, no-one's ever going to see me again! :-)

-mike

SimUniverse?