Spore System Specs Released, Creature Creator Coming Soon

Will Wright's long-awaited game, Spore, seems to be nearing completion, with a release slated for September. In anticipation of this release, EA has outlined the system requirements and will still be releasing their Creature Creator demo for experimentation on June 17th.

Comments

768MB RAM on Vista??

[Grave]

Did they even *test* the game before putting that number out? I refuse to believe it is playable with so little ram on Vista. Let me rephrase. I'm sure it's possible to load up the game with only 768MB, but you wouldn't actually want to play it like that. You wouldn't even want to play Freecell on Vista like that.

I think its the best AI technique -- cheating

[patio11]

You might think that this would take ungodly amounts of image recognition technology. And that is true, for the general case of "Import any image into Spore". But given that you have procedural creature generation, all you have to do is ship the Creature Creator with as many critters as you want to be discoverable (cheap to you: its just a list of parameters), give them all a unique ID, and then make sure your website serves up thumbnails with the ID embedded in the filename. The ID essentially serves as an unlock code for content which was already on the CD/download/etc.

(Alternatively, for extra robustness, you write the ID in the thumbnail somewhere -- there is plenty of dead space in the PNG specification.)

Then the user sees the import process work and is like "Wowza, you could read in pictures!" All of the joy of implementing a full scanning engine, none of the work.

Cost per player?

[tepples]

and Crysis runs like a dream but at what cost? AT WHAT COST!?! Oh right, $1300. But most multiplayer PC games require one PC per player. How much would it cost to upgrade the PCs used by the other members of your household?