Apologies for the downtime.  We had some server problems which required a reinstall, and we had about 24 hours of downtime as a result.  Everything should be back to normal now, and no pictures or votes should have been lost.

Thanks for your patience!

Just added a way to edit your uploaded creatures/buildings/vehicles/spaceships.  Simply click on “My Creatures” after you login, and you’ll see links under each creature that allow you to edit it.  You can change the creature category, name, description, and Sporepedia link - but not the image itself (fair’s fair, right?  All the votes are based on the image, so it doesn’t make sense to change the image but keep the votes).

That’s all for now!  Have fun Sporeing!

Well, it might look exactly the same, but bestsporecreature.com is actually brand new!  It should be a lot easier to change and add new features now.

There are some new categories - Spore buildings, vehicles, and spaceships.  Can’t wait to see what you’ve all created.

There is now also a “Flag this image” link on the creature pages - this will help us remove inappropriate images faster.

It should be a lot easier to comment on creatures now - you don’t even have to be logged in!  (though if you are, your comment will link to your own creatures page).

Thank you so much to everyone for the feedback in the last post!  Keep it coming!  I want to know if anything’s broken, or doesn’t make sense, or can be improved.  (and yes, there are more improvements on the way).

Now let’s see some buildings and vehicles!

Oh yes:  there’s still no way to edit your creatures or change the category after you’ve uploaded it, that’s coming soon.

In the meanwhile, if you want me to move one of your existing vehicles, buildings or spaceships to the appropriate category, let me know in a comment here.

On the last blog post, Xenoiaos wrote: 

Now the big question is this site going to be limited to just the creature’s (And would we include the cell stage as apart of this “creature” name) Or are there going to be separate arenas for vehicles/buildings/spaceships?

Yes, I’m planning to have categories for the other editors!

I’m looking for some feedback on what the new categories should be.

At one extreme, we could have a category for every editor:

• early creature
• tribal outfit
• civilized outfit
• space outfit
• building
• land vehicle
• water vehicle
• air vehicle
• spaceship

Well, Spore is finally out!

Traffic has been crazy with the release of Spore… and it shows.  EA isn’t the only one having server problems!  Our server has buckled under the traffic from the last few days.  Our apologies for the sporadic downtime, we’re working on having it fixed!

We’ve also seen more non-Spore-related images being uploaded lately… it’s a bit annoying, but I hope we manage to remove them fairly quickly.  I don’t really want to make images need to be approved before they can be shown on the site.  We’ll see how it goes.

I also desperately want to make some improvements, like adding user avatars, and making it a lot easier to comment on creatures - hopefully I’ll manage to get some time to do this soon.

That’s it for now, off to the store to pick up my copy of Spore!

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.

Many game projects end up making their own tools, fine-tuned to their exact needs. Hopefully this effort pays off, but it is still time spent not working on the game itself. Others use more generic off-the-shelf 3D products. The problem is that generic tools have no intelligence that applies to your game: a dragon is the same as a table or a mountain, and it’s up to the artist, animator and programmer to make them act differently.

This leads to a LOT of duplicated effort across game projects. At some very basic level, a dragon is a dragon: it kinda looks like a reptile, it has four limbs, wings, it can fly. As a gamer, I want your game world to be unique, but I don’t care if your dragons are hand-crafted polygon by polygon, textured pixel by pixel, and animated frame by frame specifically for this game, just like I don’t care if you wrote every single line of code in the 3D engine the game uses. This is just inefficient.

Well, you can’t really just use a generic dragon mesh and call it a day, either. The experience is cheapened if the gamer thinks “hey, that’s the same dragon from Hack & Slash 4, and from Point & Shoot 2, and from Roll & Hit 9″.

So, what are the problems so far? Game developers need tools that:

• can create 3D objects
• can texture 3D objects
• can animate 3D objects
• are intelligent enough to abstract away the really common parts of game content creation, and allow the artists to concentrate on the parts that are unique to the game

You can see where I’m going with this, right? Well, I have to spell it out, anyway.

The Spore Creature Creator is a tool that lets PLAYERS - not even game developers - do the following:

• easily create 3D creatures
• easily texture 3D creatures
• easily animate 3D creatures
• abstract away the parts common to all vertebrate creatures

I’m not going to belabor the point. Imagine if all game developers had access to a free set of tools like the Spore creature creator. The tools would need to have:

• A standard way to add new libraries of body parts, textures, and animations
• Ability to render and export to the common 3D formats
• A standard, well-defined way to use the procedural creature definitions directly in games that choose to do so

Now, to knock down a few strawmen before they pop up:

• I don’t think the creatures would look and feel too similar across different games. Look at the huge variety of Spore creatures already made, using only the set of body parts and animations that comes with the Creature Creator. Being able to extend the set of tools with new libraries should make this a non-issue.
• This wouldn’t eliminate the need for artists on a game project. Just compare some of the best Spore creatures and some of the worst Spore creatures to understand why a talented person will always be an invaluable asset to a project. Artists’ efforts would simply be much more productive than with traditional tools.
• No, this isn’t easy to do. Spore has been in development for 8 years, and I suspect the editors have been a large part of that effort. But no pain, no gain, right?

Now, in an ideal world, this is where I would say “here’s where you can download such a magical tool!” Unfortunately, I don’t think it exists yet, but I think it’s only a matter of time. Progress in software tends to be made through increasingly higher levels of abstraction. This seems like such an obvious abstraction that it’s unavoidable. So, I’m going to say it:

We need an open-source Spore Creature Creator-like game content creation framework.

I don’t have enough experience, or know enough game developers, to take the lead on something this big. I would love to do anything I can to make it a reality - even if it’s just administrative stuff like setting up a website or a mailing list, or heck, even if it’s just to get a conversation going.

So.

Can this make making games easier?

What do you think?

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