Spore Hands-On Preview

cardjoe writes "The release date for Spore has just been announced and what better way to celebrate than to check out the latest build of the game? That's just what bit-tech.net did, spending hours with the full version of the game. The article covers all the different editors and stages in the game as well as providing a brief on the pollinated content and how it may well introduce an entire new genre to PC gaming — that of the Massively Online Singleplayer. The article is in-depth and has a whole load of brand new screenshots too, showing the various stages that the player will go through as they play the game and move their creature from single cells to galaxy-hopping space freaks."

Comments

So...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

... if third parties are getting to try it, it's not vapour anymore, right?

Re:OSS

[casualsax3]

I think that actually means it's *your* loss.

It's fine that the source is closed, for them...

[capnkr]

I just wish they would have made it cross-platform or Linux compatible.

As a die-hard Linux user, I wouldn't mind paying retail for a copy of this game, based on what I've seen of it. I give money to developers for their work on other apps I use, why wouldn't I do the same for a game? I understand that it took years for them to develop, and they need to make money for what they've done. I don't need the source to play it.

Game Devs don't have/need to give us their work for free, IMO, but if they'd make it to where *anyone* could use the games they write, they'd sell more, and I for one would sure appreciate it.

Re:I've got mixed feelings

[cHALiTO]

Screw spending more and more money on newer graphics cards, CPUs, mobos, etc.

I'm getting this game for Wii.

Re:It's fine that the source is closed, for them..

[SimHacker]

There is absolutely no way to justify the millions of dollars EA would have lost if they delayed the release of Spore for another year, just to port it to Linux, so that they could sell a few hundred more copies of it.

If you really want to play Spore, then you probably can find a Windows or Mac to play it on. If you really can't find a Windows or Mac or game console to play Spore on, then you have much bigger problems, and probably should not be wasting your time playing games, because you should be working on solving your bigger problems instead.

If you've decided never to touch a Windows or Mac box, then that's your decision you made with your eyes wide open, and one of the consequences is that there are many pieces of software you will never be able to use, like Spore. If you made that decision yourself without being forced into it, then you made your own bed and now you must sleep in it, so shut up and stop complaining. If you're disappointed or surprised about the consequences of your own decision to boycot Windows and Mac, then you obviously made the wrong decision, so don't blame EA for not supporting you. You have no right to complain about the consequences of your own decision not to use Windows or Mac.

-Don

Re:It's fine that the source is closed, for them..

[capnkr]

Take a chill pill, bro. I wonder if you work for them, based on the handle. I'm surprised at the anger that came out of your misconstruing what it was that I wrote... You might need a re-read.

Though apparently you took it that way, my post was not criticism, it was observation. I'm just saying it would be nice if game companies would make their products cross-platform, including *nix users in the mix.

If they started out doing that from the beginning of development, they would have games at the end which they could sell to everyone, *without* needing to port them to different architectures.

There's lots more than a few hundred Linux users out there now, too. And more every day. Emerging market, and all that.

Re:Overhyped

[Bob-taro]

Nothing in the operating system is ground breaking, every aspect of it has been done in other computers already, its more about the combination of user interface elements and design that sets it apart I guess.

I disagree. The "massively online single-player" aspect is pretty new (AFAIK), but the "parameterized models" and "procedural animations" are subtly revolutionary. I mean they've DRASTICALLY streamlined the process of creating a 3d model for a game. Do you think the game studios run something as simple as the spore interface to create a 3d model and all of it's animations?

Imagine how other games could benefit from this approach: Imagine, say, a zombie game where instead of randomly spawning zombies from a set of 10 or 20 (or even 100) models, you have a nearly infinite variety of zombies generated from randomly chosen inputs for height, weight, hair, wounds, clothing, state of decay, etc. Now suppose the animations are not all the same, but are randomly determined by the zombie's height, weight, and number of functional limbs. Or imagine characters whose walk or climb animations are based on the actual geometry of the world, so they don't "jump" with every step up an incline or "moonwalk" trying to go through a wall. The game studios have done a very good job of making fixed animations and fixed characters look good, but there is a lot of room for improvement (especially since a high-end CPU is usually twiddling it's thumbs in even newer games while the GPU does all the work).

I bought Loki SimCity 3000 for Linux

[lennier]

It wasn't a much fun as good old SimCity 2000 was, but that wasn't the fault of the port.

What was annoying, though, is that being a commercial binary compiled for one specific kernel/glibc version, it now no longer runs on a decently modern Linux. That's a problem that Windows doesn't have so much, with its pretty good binary back-compatibility. It's also a problem that open-source games on Linux don't have either, because they get recompiled. In fact, I have DOS games that run better under Dosbox and Windows games that run better under Wine/Cedega than late-90s ported-specially-for-Linux games now do.

So commercial ports on Linux are in a bit of a technical bind, really - more than an economic one, I think. Linux is fundamentally a closed-binary-hostile environment because it makes no promises of enduring binary compatibility, except under specific retro emulation environments.