Nerdgasm II: The Spore-Gasm...

Ok, normally I tried not to overexcite myself when it comes to new games being released. I am a bit of a computer game junkie, not as bad as I used to be, but sometimes a new bit of technology, or a really cool concept comes along, and I am left impatiently counting the days until it is released.

Today, I heard accidentally about a new game from the creator of SimCity and the Sims, called "Spore". It is possibly the most ambitious project since Project Ego (which eventually became Fable, and delivered on a surprising number of its original promises).

The basic concept is that you start with the primordial soup, controlling a single bacteria (or whatever, very small creature anyway) eating away at other microbes, avoiding things that are bigger than you and laying eggs to bring out the new generation. Each generation, you can "edit" or "evolve" your creature, to make it faster, meaner, bigger or smarter. Eventually, you move up from being in a bit of slime, to being a little swimmer in the ocean.

The process continues, and eventually you make it out on to land. In the demo video, he put together a creepy little three legged thingy with a hand on the end of its scorpion tail. But he went on to show other examples, such as a giant headed bird thing with a dozen beaks whos head had to tilt when he turned corners, or a dog-ish thing with a load of branching limbs.


Your creatures keep getting smarter, and eventually they become "sentient". At this point, it ceases being a physical evolution, and instead becomes a cultural one, with the creatures grouping into a tribe, and other tribes developing alongside them. Eventually you can take over the whole planet, and expand outwards into the stars and eventually the galaxy.

The sheer scope of the project is stunning, the way he kept zooming outwards from the swamp to the planet to the solar system to a large sector of space to the entire galaxy. Obviously, it would be totally impossible for any group of people to sit down and program every possible movement, every tree and creature. Instead, they use a process called "Procedural Generation".
That essentially means that rather than working out every possible bone/limb structure and programming in how each should move, instead they have algorithms to work out how each creature should be based on its structure. And the end result is smoothly walking creatures with three limbs or thirteen... the same goes for the other interactions, such as creating new planets within the solar system etc. Basically, it means that instead of an essentially infinite amount of content for them to program, they work on some really good AI routines to do the work for them on the fly.

The same goes for the rest of the eco-system (and other planets etc). Rather than program it all in themselves, or even randomly generate it, what they do is download and upload from other players to flesh out the worlds. So again they cut down on their own workload by laying the foundation and letting the details fill themselves in.

Anyway, thats enough gushing. Needless to say, I am pretty stoked about the concept, and I am looking forward to see how much of this grand plan makes it into production (with the 'Sims' empire behind them, I can't doubt that it will get made, from the demo video it seems pretty far advanced already). Of course the next problem is... what kind of mutant beast of a computer are we going to need to run it?!?