Best Spore Creatures

Well, it’s technically not new, since the site already had a search, it was just… not very good. You could only really search for an exact match for a creature name. Pretty useless.

The search now looks inside the creature’s name as well as the creature description. You can also search by username. To celebrate, I added a link to the search page to the top menu (I was so ashamed of it before, I didn’t even want to link to it).

That’s all for now!

Making games is hard.

I don’t have 20 years of game development experience under my belt to support that statement - but I don’t think I need to. I’ve written small OpenGL programs, I’ve played around with DirectX, I even started writing a small game using the Ogre3D engine. It’s a lot of work, and it’s not surprising that a game like GTA4 cost $100 million to make.

The most frustrating part when you’re starting out is setting up a good toolchain. You need a way to make 3D objects like characters and monsters and trees and stuff. You need a way to texture them. You need a way to make them move. You need tools that can do all these tasks and be able to understand each other. And you need your game engine to understand this entire mess.

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Just finished adding something that probably should’ve been there since day one - but you can finally see who made a Spore creature, and what other Spore creatures they’ve made!

You should notice links to the user pages when looking at any Spore creature. You can get your own link by clicking on “My Creatures” after you log in.

There are more improvements coming!

This is a bit old, but I’m a big fan of the TED conferences, and I think it’s definitely worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet. Will Wright talks about Spore, about his motivations for building it, and what he hopes it will become. It’s great to watch because it’s not a sales pitch, you get a good feel for Will Wright’s passion and love for his work:

The news is all over the net - Spore has officially gone gold. This means it’s done - the CDs (well, DVDs, probably) are being written - and there’s no reason for the release date (Sept. 7) to be pushed back.

There are announcements all over the place.

Apparently the system requirements have been released:

Processor 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
RAM XP: 512 MB / Vista: 768 MB
Graphics card 128 MB with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
Hard disk drive space At least 6 GB

When using a PC with an on-board (aka built-in or “shared”) graphics chipset, the specs bump up to:

Intel Integrated Chipset, 945GM or above.
2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent.
768 MB RAM
[edit] Mac OS X
Note: Spore will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac).

OS Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
Processor Intel Core Duo Processor
RAM 1024 MB
Graphics card ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
Hard disk drive space At least 4.7GB for installation, plus additional space for creations.

When using a Mac with an on-board (aka built-in or “shared”) graphics chipset, the specs bump up to:

Intel Integrated Chipset GMA X3100
Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent

If you want to preorder, feel free to use the following links, Best Spore Creatures gets a small part of the sale price

Just a quickie, but I noticed this creature by YadNiMonde in yesterday’s Spore creatures, and I had to post it:

Original logo:

We absolutely love the sheer, insane creativity of all the Spore creatures that have been uploaded so far. We’re going to highlight some of our favorites, and we’d love to hear what you think (and to see more!) If your creature isn’t here, don’t panic - we might be saving it for a different category, or we might have simply missed it.

So, without further ado - the Top 7 Spore birds I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley:

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