Give Me Sight Beyond Sight

I am happy to report that my acquisition of the aforementioned entertainment went off without a hitch and my life is now bursting with samurais named Jack.

In other news, if you watched the video I posted the other day you were likely as dumbstruck as I was the first time I watched it. I've since watched it probably three or four times since as I've shown it to others. I'm still fairly stunned by it. I feel a naughty tingle each time it pulls out further and further into space. If you're interested in knowing a little more about it there is also this video, a fully rendered version of the talk from which all that gameplay footage came originally given by Will Wright - the guy responsible for The Sims. Between each segment is about a ten minute little blurb about how they're doing all those interesting things in this game and what drove them to this end in the first place.

Even in the shorter version of the gameplay footage Will uses the buzz word "procedural" many times. I'm by no means an expert on this stuff but that's never stopped me from handing out ill-informed opinions. As I understand it, before the advent of the CD-ROM games were, for the most part, made to be as small as possible. All of the millions of lines of code, graphics, and behaviors had to squeezed onto 3.5" floppy discs. The use of algorithms was popular in order to get the maximum amount of compression. Again, I'm no math whiz but basically what that means is they had they used the player's computer to run the algorithms or formulae on the discs to get the end product. That way, they minimized the need for raw data space. Once CD-ROMs hit, then they had all this space on a disc and I game design shifted more toward filling up data than these algorithms. That's the way things have been for several years now. With this game, Spore, Maxis has gone back to this algorithmic structure for creating the world that the player occupies. So everything in the gameplay trailer you saw, except for the evolved creature and the city he built, was generated by the computer on the fly, so to speak.

This kind of thinking may be old hat in the computing world but it confounds my dumb cracker mind. I mean, I understand it on a conceptual level, about the same way that I understand, conceptually, what a black hole is. If they tell me they can generate that entire solar system, ye even a galaxy, I'll just believe them on and go on breeding my race of Thundercats™™.

What I'm really interested in, is this idea that you pull content from other people's computers. They plan to have a master database that each game synchs to and when that synching occurs they'll suck up all the things you've created in your game and re-distribute it back out to the world as random encounters. I'm really curious if you can be selective about who's content you pull down. Say I want a planet where my Thundercats™™ can live caught in an eternal struggle with a friend of mine's warlike clan of My Little Ponies™™. I would like the option to choose a race or tribe that can be my primary aggressor.

-Kroy has gone offline


mean and strong like fear