Spore

I don;t think it could be done. For example, in spore you can make whatever you like. The randomizer might try to make an animal with 18,000 legs on it's back, 1 hand, and 2 eyes, nothing else. It cant walk, fight, or do anything. On the other hand, the next time you randomize, you get a crature with 3 legs, 66396639663 eyes, 18 ears and a pink colour.

My point is, the randomize script would put any amount of parts, anywhere on a randomly twisted body. Useless. A script could be written to fix this, but still useless... if you have run outta ideas, pick an obscure animal, and make that, but better.

OR, even better, if you have a game called Impossible creatures, use that as a basis!

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Lulz

it could also end up looking really good

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well the thing is in sims the shirt goes here, no exceptions, there are only a few bars, hieght skin tone, and few else, in this the arm goes..? up you but if you want, how many, for example, the sxsw it has 2 mouths on its hands.

no there will probobly just be a lot of template creatures for you to get ideas from...

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Maybe one day, i will play spore like this monkey.
(i am one of the 2% who doesn't smoke pot)
A dirty book is never dusty

You don't really need a randomize button since the you can find almost anything in the browser and adapt it to your liking

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HEIL MUDKIP!

"Together we made it,
We made it even though we couldn't spell our own names,
On our own, on our own, on our own"-We made it, Linkin park

The most they would have is a name generator possibly. The random for other stuff would be bad b/c it could make a car with 1,000 wheels and 58 rocket jets.

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Dr Rockso gonna make you a balloon!

i think they wont have ANY random generators... Spore is all about making original content yourself, so any random generators would destroy that idea...
Thats what i think... and if you don't find any names, just go online and find a name generator on the internet ! problem solved !!

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There was once a little donkey, he enjoyed to play outside and kill people, then one day he saved a princess and killed all the other princes trying to save her, he then did something horrible to the princess and then god killed the donkey. The end p.s. <= love it

The whole game is about being creative and create stuff so i highly doubt there will be a randomize button!

um... it's VERY possible. in fact the game will be creating several randomly generated creatures when played by someone without internet access.
as has been stated in quite a few interviews of will and his team, as well as in many previews, the game does NOT, repeat NOT, require an internet connection to be played. in cases where no net connection is available, the game will populate the galaxy with randomly generated content.
afterall, as will has mentioned, shipping the game with a library of content vast enough to last/outlast (i.e. so that you don't re-encounter the tribble on every 16th planet) the users play time (i.e. over all restarts, and all planets visited), the game would need to come with, i think he said 2 or 3 extra disks or something like that, and the time before release would be pushed way way back if it was all made by the Spore team.

in terms of the "in spore the arms can go wherever" vs "in the sims, the shirt is here" - well i'd point out that the number of variables involved in generating a single planet so that it still has a nice asthetic look, and seems unique, (and extending this over a solar system as well) is quite large. you have to consider things such as atmosphere, weather, temperature (all of which are modelled to some degree in the game), terrain geography, water level, also to a very limited amount, material deposits (i.e. where the 'spice' grows best). and remember, this is all before we start planting the flora and fauna (aka generated content).
the fact that an entire planet can be made, and the spore team are happy that in almost all cases nothing trippy will happen (the last thing i saw from the spore team was them saying something on the lines of leaving the planet generator running all night long and then humanly observing a random sample) shows that computers today have the power to do this. afterall, we are only talking about running simple repeatable calculations, with certain constraints applied (constraints applied to facilitate an asthetically pleasing outcome), and a computer excels in mathematical calculations.

finally it's also worth considering a point that has been stressed since day one - user content is to be only a couple of kilobytes in size. i believe it's fair to assume that computer generated content would weigh in at the same value. thus, we can see that it's really not that many calculations, as the output data is quite small (comparative to, say the file size of a randomly seeded RTS map, or a computer game's average save file size. - these typically weigh in at between a couple of megs, to circa 50 megs in size).


i'll end this by saying this one last thing:
on game release, there's not going to be really that many vehicles, buildings (tribal or city), or UFOs on the spore database - however, i'm sure none of you expect to find that upon reaching space phase, no other race in your galaxy has a city/UFO due to a lack of said objects on the online database?

- one question that i think it does raise though is this: would the computer generated content in your game also be able to appear in another persons game via download/upload from the database, or would that be exclusively user created.


quick edit:
as to whether you'll be able to force-randomise your own content, i have no idea, but if there's enough demand, it could easily be added/modded in.
on that note however, if you jump into a phase without playing from the start of the game, you WILL be assigned a creature (and when relevant, buildings/vecs/ufo) at random (although i suppose this could have been changed, as it was one of the earlier interviews that mentioned this, i believe) - and again i'll stress on game release,there won't be many things out there to download, particularly in the buildings/vehicles/ufos areas.
similarly, in cases of no net connection, there will not be a database to draw from.
to prevent issues of repetitiveness, the computer would be necessity have to step in and lend a hand here.

Ezekel, there's a few holes in your argument. First, it was said that creatures made by the developers would populate the offline game and there's theories going around that people using the pre-release editor will also populate the game. Second, it is not difficult to make a planet look good with script since it has so few variables (water amount, texture and colour.)

Also, just because data can be compressed to such a small file does not mean that it would take a lot of effort to script an auto button. A computer doesn't necessarily know what looks good where and you'll more often than not end up with a slew of parts jammed together to make a barely functioning creature. You'd also have to code the same for the other editors too. Why would you do that when you can just hit the randomise button on sporepedia and pick something there? It's essentially the same thing.

nonetheless, i'd point out that i was generally referencing the other (non creature) editors.
there isn't a pre-release flora editor for example.

furthermore, i was not talking about an auto-create/randomise button, but rather was reffering to the fact that creating random species of plants, vehicles, buildings (in all phases), etc can be done.

i admit that i have not come across any sources stating that the offline game will be populated by developer creations. the online game, of course, i know will.
now, i admit, that if what you say is true regarding offline content, than i can assume that they probably dropped random seeding of content creation. a shame.

regarding what you say in terms of planets however, i'd reference my previous post in regards to planet creation. it is not a few variables. the planet itself, looking in simplest terms can potentially have far more polys than a creature (simply due to the relative surface area between the two, and considering the malleability of the surface for both).
also i'd like to point out that the game also factors more variables then the 3 that you mention. (although texture and colour probably can be considered to be linked as 1 thing)
the game considers atmosphere type and content, ambient planet temperature, appropriate flora and fauna, elevation, prevalent features (e.g. spiral mountains vs grassy planes), as well as multiple texture/colour schemes across the surface.
also it has been stated the amount of work that was put into making the planets all look distinctive, interesting and unique in some way and most importantly asthetically pleasing.
basically, what i'm trying to impress upon you, is that it IS difficult to make good looking planets. even if you discount what i have said, the fact that the spore team spent so much time and so many tests on the planet generation system shows that it wasn't plain nor self-evident in creating and facilitating the task.

as far as a truly random auto-builder, i concede such a thing is unlikely and improbable - since, as will has said in several of his talks, the scope of "this looks good" is a minute fraction of the total possibilities. however, if you constrain a system with certain rules, you can significantly reduce the chance of an undesirable result.
an example of considering rules can be seen in the creature editor already. although it can be turned off, the creature editor defaults to bilateral symmetry in object placement.
this is because in a majority of situations, a person will expect a certain level of symmetry by default.
in a very simplistic case, you could consider the following:
race X requires a military land vehicle. create a random basic shape (e.g. pyramid, cube, cuboid, etc). apply locomotion (e.g. wheels, tracks, etc with each locomotion type also referencing info such as "this should be on a underside surface" or "this should be on the back"). apply weapon (with similar ruling system as locomotion).
create a random number between 0-4. add this many extra parts to vehicle, while still referring to rules.
seed random texture from the options, and random colour.
seed random name (likely from a list of names that are in a textfile "names_military_land.txt" or similar)
presto, you have a computer generated vehicle.


and yes, i agree that the time required in the process of creating a file does not have to have any correlation with file size itself. however, considering will's desire for code efficiency (i.e. if you want to say "hello world" do it all at once rather than print "hello"; print "world"; ), i considered that as the code is (supposedly) efficient, then it'd also have to be 'fast' in order to be acceptible as something that can be handed out to users. (again, this is comparible to the requirement of fast planet creation).


wrapping this up, i'd just like to restate that i'm not talking about implementing an auto-create button, but rather am making comments regarding the capability of creating random content.

Good post Ezekel!

That pretty much clears it up. I'd like to say two things though.

My point was that due to the nature of planets pretty much any variables put together will look good and that only a few will need to be specifically controlled in order to stop a planet becoming overloaded with certain characteristics. I apologise for not making that clearer.

Next point, a huge amount of Spore's gameplay and lasting appeal will be in the internet connection therefore even if the dev team spend time creating an automatic population system for those offline it'll only cover half the problem and undermine the quality of properly created creatures made by both the devs and the player. Access to the community, videos and other players creations will still be denied. Though it might seem mean I think the devs would rather work on something more important since the bulk of players will have internet connections.

I'm not sure, WW & Co used a 'random' button in the Sims. Never used it but it still was included. So there is a possibility. Although, as said above, WW wants People to make their own stuff.

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thank you.


although, if i remember right, they do still want those without interenet to be able experience a good time in/on spore. - makes you wonder how much time was devoted to making creatures/vehicles/etc by the spore team. (and if it meant some mechanics had to be dropped as a result)

as an aside though, there's one thing i just considered, that being: humans can also make creatures that don't look that great. (there was one i saw recently in the last batch of vids that had no legs, and it's lowest body point was it's elbows. it kinda slided/glided/floated about.
so, there's still a chance of meeting a, how shall put this, "that's just... no" sort of creatue due to online content.
thankfully though, the content banning/filtering exists (although to be honest, i just hope i never come across a creature/structure/vehicle that i need to ban, because that detracts from gameplay in my opinion. but if it has to be done then it has to be done)

Did you say something?

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HEIL MUDKIP!

"Together we made it,
We made it even though we couldn't spell our own names,
On our own, on our own, on our own"-We made it, Linkin park

i'd say that that is a resounding 'yes'.
(but that's just me and my opinion)

he WAS trying to be funny its ok, i didnt read it either.

If there were to be a randomize option i doubt i would ever use it.. useless really, seeming its a creature creator whats the point in letting it create somthing for you? way to ruin teh gamez >.<

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I'm not gonna ban anything if i see sumthing like pokemon or sum other crap i will just destroy there planet and all of there people

Quoted for truth.


I will too.

What if you see a race of penis's on your planet in the creature stage. Remember, the ban-hammer is always viable.

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