#Spore game test skin
#Spore game test code
#Spore game test professional

#Spore game test code

The incredibly awesome Henry Goffin took over this code after he joined the team and did almost all of the hard work of getting the skinning system into the creature editor and game.

#Spore game test skin

Here are some images of the first 'creature' I built with the metaball skin system, showing the skin, wireframe, the metaballs, the voxelization, and a 3D print of the creature. Robustness, on the other hand, is vitally important, because we let the player have so much control over the creature morphology, and the skin always needs to flow smoothly over the skeleton of the creature. The deltas for per-polygon editing get big, fast. We don't let the player manipulate at the polygon level anyway, both because we would end up with an interface as complex as Maya, but also because we need to keep the 'recipe' for the creature very small so we can transmit it over the wire to and from the Sporepedia. However, the topological robustness is actually more valuable to Spore than the local control, since we have a higher level user interface on the creature creation. This lack of control compared to modeling with triangles directly (called a boundary representation, or b-rep) is one of the reasons implicit surfaces haven't really ever gained traction for regular 3D modeling-when you're making James Bond, you want to get his nose just right. Implicit surfaces are interesting because they are very topologically robust, yet they lack 'local control'. I chose a blobby implicit surface (sometimes called metaballs) to represent the skin.

#Spore game test professional

While a typical game's fixed or parameterizable character mesh might be worked on for days in a 3D modeling tool like Maya by a professional game artist, Spore needs to regenerate the skin in real-time as the player deforms the torso and attaches and detaches limbs. Unlike games with fixed characters, like a James Bond or Lara Croft game, or games with parameterizable meshes, like the Sims or City of Heroes, Spore has to generate the entire mesh on the fly as the player makes the creature.

The first thing I worked on when I started on Spore (in October, 2003) was the creature skin. These sections are in rough chronological order of my contributions. It also leaves out the contributions of the awesome artists who used the tools and systems.

In most cases I'm limiting my discussions to the specific code and tools that I contributed to directly, which leaves out descriptions of a lot of the incredibly important and groundbreaking work other people did on neighboring code, whether higher level, more player facing aspects of the code, like user interface and gameplay, or lower level systems stuff like resource management, threading, rendering, and the like.

It's great to watch players be delighted by something they just created. My favorite moment in the game is when you first attach a leg or arm or mouth to the torso in the creature editor, and your creature comes alive and turns to look at its new limb or roars with its mouth. I hope more developers put up pages like this for the games they work on.Īlmost all of my contributions center around the creatures, and helping to bring them to life for players. This is my attempt at this for my contributions, before I forget the details.

Although assigning credit is a bit tricky because large-scale game development has a lot of subtle, overlapping, and often blurry responsibilities, I still think it's interesting to have rough descriptions and color commentary of the major things each person worked on. I think credits are very important for game developers, our industry, and the art form. If I've left somebody out or made a mistake, I apologize please email me and I'll correct it immediately.Ī Brief Note on Game Credits This page could be seen as augmenting the game credits, like what you'd get if you could click on the names to get more information. Given that, I will strive for inclusion and accuracy, and I will only talk about systems to which I made substantial contributions. I think the game had over 80 people working on it towards the end, and it was in development for more than 5 years, so basically everything in the game was touched by more than one person and was a team effort. It's a place for me to write up miscellaneous development comments about the parts of the game I worked on, while they're still fresh in my mind. This page is intended to be a sort of liner notes for my contributions to Spore.