Spore!

[shinygerbil]

So, a lot of you have probably heard about the fact that the Spore Creature Creator has been released, along with Sporepedia. I've always been more than a little sceptical about Spore, but I have to say, the Creature Creator is pretty damn fun. It's fairly limited in some ways, but when you look at the Sporepedia, you can see just how much is possible with this thing. My imagination is the main limiting factor.

So, a few of the things I have thrown together so far, and actually deemed worthy enough to upload:









The awesome thing is, that those there pictures contain the complete data for the creature - just drag them into the Creature Creator and away you go! (so Sporepedia tells me, I haven't tried it yet.)

[Pox]

Some of them look quite interesting... though I find your last assertion hard to believe, unless there's some meta-tagging or serious steganography going on here.

[shinygerbil]

Apparently they hax extra data into it somehow. I've just tried it out, it works! :O

[NeoThermic]

PNG does allow comments to be added in the actual image file. It would be trivial to store sufficient config data there to rebuild such characters if the data was simple (and being procedural and that, I'd expect it to be). However, upon checking out the images, they lack the chunks for any kind of text (you'd look or expect either iTXt, zTXt or tEXt chunks), ergo this is a great example of shoving data into LSBs

NeoThermic

[mibias]

I have no idea why there's no thumbnails availible, but the images are there

[xander]

xander

[osdeath]

my sporepedia page

[Hmuda]

I was wondering when will this show up here.

I've been waiting for this ever since the 2005 GDC presentation (first ever mention of Spore to the public). I even paid for the editor (will get the full price back when I buy the final game ).

I must say, that Maxis really made a technological marvel here. All this complex animating, texturing and body-part positioning compressed into a tiny PNG file. Can't wait for the building/vehicle/spaceship/plant editors.

Here's my Spore page, and some of my creatures. Won't link the importable PNG, you can find them on my profile if you need them.

[xyzyxx]

Tacklebug (His arms are on his legs)


Spynral (He looks like a pretzel)

Also, some of you are posting PNGs that can't be imported. If the filename ends in "_lrg" it doesn't seem to work.
Use the download link, not the picture in the Sporepedia.

[shinygerbil]

http://www.spore.com/view/profile/shinygerbil



(the server seems to take regular beatings )

[Hmuda]

Also, some of you are posting PNGs that can't be imported. If the filename ends in "_lrg" it doesn't seem to work.
Use the download link, not the picture in the Sporepedia.

Won't link the importable PNG, you can find them on my profile if you need them.

This way people see the bigger picture, with more recognizable details. If they want to import, my profile is also linked.

[Pox]

Damn, that looks fun... a curse on limited bandwidth. :/

[KingAl]

Damn, that looks fun... a curse on limited bandwidth. :/

Not... a pox?

[Hmuda]

Damn, that looks fun... a curse on limited bandwidth. :/

Bandwith is not an issue. The editor itself is arond 200MB and all my 27 creatures only take up 700kB of disc space (not even 1MB!). They made an awesome job at minimizing disc-space and bandwith requirements.

[Montyphy]

My poor MacBook struggled with the Windows installer. Took about 10 minutes or so for it to load it but it handles the actual program rather well.

My minions will be along shortly.