Spore Patch Nearly Lets Creatures Into Other Games

Dalambertian writes "The release of Spore's Patch 5 lets players export their creatures (and soon vehicles and buildings) in Collada format. This includes textures, bump mapping, and rigging for animation. Maxis developer Ocean Quigley recently posted a nice tutorial for getting said creatures into Maya, and other 3D packages are soon to follow. This could have a huge impact on the games industry, and the indie games scene in particular. Unfortunately, if the patch falls under the usual EULA, then any legitimate use of the art assets outside of the Spore community becomes impossible. EA is apparently just teasing us with its taste-but-don't-swallow policy, and at present it's not clear whether the genius that came out of Spore's development will ever truly be accessible to the game dev community."

Comments

Re:The reason I quit making my game was cuz of mod

[ZackSchil]

While it's sad that he spent 6 whole years on the project with not much to show for it, I'm sure it wasn't a complete waste of time. Look at the skills learned here: latency-minded networking code, 3D graphics, control basics... it's not like he spent the time watching trash TV.

Go buy some artists some drinks

[linzeal]

Why not talk to Artists? I see this shit over and over again from aesthetes and geeks both where one whines, " I could never afford to do x____ really cool project because I can't afford to pay ( geeks/artists ) money. "

You know what this is the fucking time to go make some new friends. Hell, go out tonight its Friday and artists don't turn down drinks no matter how geeky you are. I suggest art openings in the inner city and start asking around, here in PDX you can't pull out your laptop without hitting like 3 of them.

Re:Go buy some artists some drinks

[mark-t]

My experience with artists is that they *DO* cost a fair bundle to get decent quality work done... to the tune of hundreds of dollars just for one model. Multiply that by however many unique models and textures that you need and it quickly becomes thousands, if not tens of thousands... Now, I can appreciate that an artist's time and effort is worth money, possibly even justifying such amounts, but it's impractical for a sole developer to finance such work without having a whole lot of surplus income from other sources.

Re:The reason I quit making my game was cuz of mod

[Gravedigger3]

Thats funny because I AM an artist but have very limited programming experience. You just need to find the Yin to your Yang to help you finish your game, I'm sure there are people out there (like myself) that have the time and enjoy doing it enough to do it pro-bono. You just need to look around.

Re:The reason I quit making my game was cuz of mod

[PyroMosh]

Have you even *looked* at any game development community? Ever?

Modelers and level builders outnumber programmers about 1000:1.

A typical forum will have the following threads:

Check out my new MOD!!!11
PROGRAMMER NEEDED FOR AWESOME NEW MOD MUST BE GOOD!
Scripter / programmers needed. JOIN OUR TEAM!
levels almost done, need help with programming!
Awesomemod 3 sucks. WTF?
help with scripting
Idea for Crysis TC. Just need programming help!

etc, etc, etc.

The long and short of it is that there are many, many more modelers and level designers than there are programmers in the gaming world. The barrier to entry is easier, and yes, a lot of them suck. But there are probably as many talented modelers and level designers as there are good and bad programmers combined.

If you aren't developing because you don't want to deal with the art, the only thing I can think of excuse wise is that you don't want to work with a team.

Re:Can they do that?

[mark-t]

That's only because the tools that you mention don't put any copyrighted content that they haven't given permission for others to distribute into what those tools produce.