Sorry I'm at work and can't view youtube. I'm sure they created many animations and and tweaked the animation system in many ways during development.

Some systems may have worked well for animating some models but been useless for others.

Sure. And we even saw a lot more procedural animation on the CC, that is no more present on the full-Spore.

The whole issue with this game is that everything went DOWN... as the opposite of seeing a product getting better up to a finished product. From an unfinished demo, to a bugy, glitchy, unpolished game... stripping it out of content, features, ad nauseam...

Least I can say, a weird way to conduct a project. First time I see anything the like. But seems many people here are used to playable demos being better than final products... I might be a newbie.

My anger is rising. Bring on some farmer tools and sticky things.

Nah.

Well, i think that the game should be more complex.

AnotherPoster wrote:

Guineh wrote:

Look at how the legs/feet/arms move. It's all procedural. You can have any number of configurations and it just works. The thing is, it works so well that it's virtually transparent to the end user. You don't notice it.

Sorry, no. They created skeleton animations and mapped the creatures to that. That is not procedural, that is just an exercise in mapping. Just because an arbitrary creature is animated does not make it procedural.

Fine. I'll give you that. They have targets for movement of feet and graspers. They move along preset splines, so the system only has to solve the kinematics of how the joints move, and figure out the timing of gaits. What he did was find a more efficient means of creating a plausible gait for any number of morphologies. Again, keep in mind the minimum target machine they wanted this game to run on. We're not talking a high-end multi-core machine. The calculations to handle such things must be done quickly. The system proposed also gives the animators some control over how the final animations of the parts will look. If you had to calculate the physics of the creature's motion as the creatures move you're going to need a high-end system that can deal with that or have a means of offloading the calculations to a secondary processor (such as a GPU)

To be honest, when looking at some of the prototypes, especially the physics based one (ParticleMan) I was a bit concerned my aging computer would be brought to its knees by the full game.

There will be little tricks like this going on behind the scenes in an effort to make the gameplay experience as smooth as possible. Its a compromise, sure, but it beats having a game that only the latest desktop systems can play, vs a game that can be played even on a mid-level notebook. And given the nature of the game, this is probably a good thing.

But how come on 2008, my cuadruple-core workstation that has played last years Crysis on "full everything" needs to be forced to deliver me with the same 90's graphics and sloppy textures as your old labtop?

It all went to "down for everybody"... Were they aiming for people having super-computers by now, so they had to rearange everything? Maybe. But it's not just those devatable performance/graphical issues. The filosophy permeated to the hold plot, game-play, aesthetics... all. Dumbed down, simplyfied and absurd.

And let's not get started on the prototypes, because those were the most deceipful, treacherous, misleading marketing strategy I faced myself to this point. Politicians aside.

I don't look at the graphics of a game to determine how good it is, I look at the gameplay. A game with "kiddy" graphics can still be as amazing as a game with realistic graphics, as long as it has amazing gameplay to back it up.
Look at spore, no one would have cared that it looked kiddy if the gameplay had been "science spore" because the gameplay would have been what was promised.
What really ruined Spore was the cutsie gameplay.

The crappy gameplay is what we should be tar and feathering hecker (or should I say PECKER! haha!) for, he dumbed it down big time grrr

Despite the title of the thread we still don't know exactly who to tar and feather, and since they asked, would be nice not to get personal, then... Apparently there is a guy by this name and his employees might be forced to defend the guy.

Virakotxa wrote:But how come on 2008, my cuadruple-core workstation that has played last years Crysis on "full everything" needs to be forced to deliver me with the same 90's graphics and sloppy textures as your old labtop?

It all went to "down for everybody"... Were they aiming for people having super-computers by now, so they had to rearange everything? Maybe. But it's not just those devatable performance/graphical issues. The filosophy permeated to the hold plot, game-play, aesthetics... all. Dumbed down, simplyfied and absurd.

And let's not get started on the prototypes, because those were the most deceipful, treacherous, misleading marketing strategy I faced myself to this point. Politicians aside.

Yes... but can that old laptop even run Crysis with low settings on everything at an acceptable frame rate? Probably not. Spore's target audience was never meant to be the übergamer that has the latest and most advanced hardware out there. It was meant to be accessible for anyone and work on what can be considered the lowly family computer.

A lot has changed about the game for sure, a stage was dropped and a couple editors eliminated. The core of what Spore was is still pretty much there, although it is under a facade of "cute" Yes, some things were dropped, some things were changed to accommodate as wide a range of computers as possible. The biggest problem was the speculation machine making the game much bigger and much deeper than what was actually ever intended.

econundrum wrote:
Wrong, to quote from the absract of Chris's pdf on the Spore procedural animation system;

"This paper introduces
a novel system for animating characters whose morphologies
are unknown at the time the animation is created. Our authoring
tool allows animators to describe motion using familiar
posing and key-framing methods. The system records the data in
a morphology-independent form, preserving both the animation’s
structural relationships and its stylistic information. At runtime,
the generalized data are applied to specific characters to yield pose
goals that are supplied to a robust and efficient inverse kinematics
solver. This system allows us to animate characters with highly
varying skeleton morphologies that did not exist when the animation
was authored, and, indeed, may be radically different than anything
the original animator envisioned."


If you want to know in which way Spores state of the art procedural animation system actually works I suggest downloading and reading the PDF from Chris's web site.

I did read the paper and all it amounts to is the the animation team could not ship an animation system that provides the functionality of the GDC demo no matter what they call it.

If I have an animation skeleton and map that to an aardvark or a giraffe, it not procedural animation. Because the target is unknown has no bearing.

look at the end of the day I can conceed that something as far a looks and animaion had to be tossed for lower end machines that fine.

What gets me is how hollow the gameplay is . There is litterally nothing there. Super Mario # was more indepth then this 5 Mini game P.O.S.

Maxis employes can tell us all the time that they KNOW the game was not stripped down.However I doubt they would say any different since in these hard times looking for a new job isnt a goodidea.


Maxis/ EA s dealing with us like BAD parents . When the child starts complaining at first you ignore the child ( Done with the lack of contact or viable tech support.)
Then if the child is not willing to leave you alone you give it something to silence it like a soother . In the case of spore we are getting a PARTS PACK....

I dont know but that last thing I hear people saying is MAN I need more parts! there just doesnt seem to be enough parts .

I hear Game play is weak , hollow and boring.

Maxis Solution ..... OH no quick give them more parts? and charge them 20 for something worth 5

I continue the rant later

AnotherPoster wrote:

econundrum wrote:
Wrong, to quote from the absract of Chris's pdf on the Spore procedural animation system;

"This paper introduces
a novel system for animating characters whose morphologies
are unknown at the time the animation is created. Our authoring
tool allows animators to describe motion using familiar
posing and key-framing methods. The system records the data in
a morphology-independent form, preserving both the animation’s
structural relationships and its stylistic information. At runtime,
the generalized data are applied to specific characters to yield pose
goals that are supplied to a robust and efficient inverse kinematics
solver. This system allows us to animate characters with highly
varying skeleton morphologies that did not exist when the animation
was authored, and, indeed, may be radically different than anything
the original animator envisioned."


If you want to know in which way Spores state of the art procedural animation system actually works I suggest downloading and reading the PDF from Chris's web site.

I did read the paper and all it amounts to is the the animation team could not ship an animation system that provides the functionality of the GDC demo no matter what they call it.

If I have an animation skeleton and map that to an aardvark or a giraffe, it not procedural animation. Because the target is unknown has no bearing.

Read it yes, understood it clearly not.

Oh, can we please let this thread die? I can see how some people might blame Chris Hecker... But there was a whole TEAM ... not just Hecker ...

Hate is bad for your health...

econundrum wrote:
Read it yes, understood it clearly not.

Nice try with an ad hominem.

No matter what computer science buzzwords are using to describe how the animation system was developed, it doesn't function like a procedural animation system. Put a weapon on the tail or arm or head...no effect. Nothing affects the basic animation from the example. That is the issue.

Why Hecker?
Hecker was/is the lead on the animation system and the founder of the "cute" team and a vocal critic of science Spore.

Hecker also, according to MaxisLucy, developed the skinning methods and the procedural process behind it. In any case, the final say was Wright's alone.

Well now they have the chance to make an expansion for us.

Science Spore: The Big Fix


I bought the game for one reason and one reason only, and found that the one feature I was going to use was taken out, dynamic proceedual gaits

And would have been a perfect simulator for designing robots

IF they don't fire Chris and fix the game back to what its suppose to be, then it will be curtains for EA and Maxis