I saw the demo of this and it was by far the coolest thing at the show. What the article doesn't talk too much about is that all the artwork in the game is procedural. Creatures have skeletons and body part attachements that determine their animations and meshes, which give you procedural texturing options to choose from. Buildings have a similarly complex editor. Vehicles let you slap a tank tread, a propeller or a gun wherever you want, and the resulting vehicle will move around and behave based on how you built it.
Wright said that he hired a group of developers from the Scandanavian/Helsinki demo scene. Thats the same scene that produced that 64k FPS a while back. So, anything you create can be synced up on Maxis' server very cheaply, sorted based on usefullness, and then every player's universe can be populated with an entire solar system worth of content designed and built by other players at a minimum of disk space. Remember, there's no geometry or textures to transfer since everything is algorithmically generated.
An example: Wright took a platypus-like swimming creature he had been playing with, took it into the editor, pulled the tail around like a scorpion, dragged a toothy mouth onto the end of it, added three legs (yes just three, one was sticking out of it's neck) and popped back into the game. Well, I say 'game,' but the 'editor' is a huge part of the game.
The creature walked out of the water onto land. All the animation to make this crazy thing walk was procedural and yet it was completely believable. He led the thing over to a smaller creature to have it attack it, and it had to figure out how to use the mouth on then end of the tail to attack the thing, kill it, and then eat it (bit by bit being subtracted from the procedural mesh). Then he had it do a mating call, which alterted him to the location of another creature of the same species. He walked his guy over to the girl, and they started mating. This was unbelievable: porno music comes on and these two mutant creatures had to figure out how to get it on with their crazy anatomy.
Also, unlike any other procedural art I've seen, it looks great. Unless the demo was all smoke and mirrors (which is a possiblity), this will be one of the most revolutionary games ever made.
wright coming back to his uber-game ambitions... and God bless him for it. if there's anyone who can pull it off, it's him. i still remember playing simearth when i was younger and while it was difficult as all get out i still played a lot of it.
Awesome find doc rob. This is definately up there on my list of future games. I'd like to find some more info on how the whole procedural part of it works.
Any Highly evolved Technology is indistinguishable from a rigged tech demo :-) It's probably way along, but more as proof of concept internally of various modules, rather than a tuned and completed game.
I don't want to be a naysayer, I want this game to be cool too, but I find it hard to believe those textures are completely procedurally generated. There is too much localized details in areas you just can't get with procedurals, the one that does it for me, are the actual characters, the dino has what looks like ribbed yellow belly, how the hell do you procedurally generate that?
I think this game will be good, and I am looking forward to it, but I think some of that looks done specifically by an artist, especially the textures.
Replies
Wright said that he hired a group of developers from the Scandanavian/Helsinki demo scene. Thats the same scene that produced that 64k FPS a while back. So, anything you create can be synced up on Maxis' server very cheaply, sorted based on usefullness, and then every player's universe can be populated with an entire solar system worth of content designed and built by other players at a minimum of disk space. Remember, there's no geometry or textures to transfer since everything is algorithmically generated.
An example: Wright took a platypus-like swimming creature he had been playing with, took it into the editor, pulled the tail around like a scorpion, dragged a toothy mouth onto the end of it, added three legs (yes just three, one was sticking out of it's neck) and popped back into the game. Well, I say 'game,' but the 'editor' is a huge part of the game.
The creature walked out of the water onto land. All the animation to make this crazy thing walk was procedural and yet it was completely believable. He led the thing over to a smaller creature to have it attack it, and it had to figure out how to use the mouth on then end of the tail to attack the thing, kill it, and then eat it (bit by bit being subtracted from the procedural mesh). Then he had it do a mating call, which alterted him to the location of another creature of the same species. He walked his guy over to the girl, and they started mating. This was unbelievable: porno music comes on and these two mutant creatures had to figure out how to get it on with their crazy anatomy.
Also, unlike any other procedural art I've seen, it looks great. Unless the demo was all smoke and mirrors (which is a possiblity), this will be one of the most revolutionary games ever made.
all i can say is i pity the EA testers that have to test this game.
BWAHAHAHA
http://www.jesperjuul.dk/ludologist/index.php?p=171
http://www.4gamer.net/news.php?url=/news/history/2005.03/20050314184429detail.html
Scott
I think this game will be good, and I am looking forward to it, but I think some of that looks done specifically by an artist, especially the textures.