

Liner notes for Spore from one of the game developers - weaksauce
http://chrishecker.com/My_Liner_Notes_for_Spore

======
jrbedard
Interesting notes. The way he's doing procedural mesh generation + procedural
texturing/skinning/animation is very similar to ZBrush's ZSpheres. I used to
work at Pixologic on ZBrush and those types of surface subdivisions concepts
and algorithms (Organic modeling, Catmull-Clark, Conway polyhedrons) are
definitely a non-trivial field of CS engineering. Nice work to bring this
technology into a game!

------
nihilocrat
This is the sort of stuff that makes writing webapps and doing data plumbing
for a living seem completely banal and amateurish.

~~~
patio11
I don't know. My data plumbing gets parents home to their kids an hour faster.
Spore's considerable technical chops were in the service of a game which was
_not fun to play_.

I don't wake up in a cold sweat at night going "Aww shoot, two years of work
on this project and it is useless!"

~~~
plinkplonk
"This is the sort of stuff that makes writing webapps and doing data plumbing
for a living seem completely banal and amateurish."

"I don't know. My data plumbing gets parents home to their kids an hour
faster. "

Illustrates a classic dilemma, one I am working through.

Would you rather work on something that is intellectually demanding, but maybe
used for "trivial" purposes (the spore algorithms end up being part of a not
so great game) or something that is intellectually trivial but adds "business
value" (most web apps). It is hard to get into the first type of work, but
you'll probably gte "just a salary", the second type of work is easier but
could probably make you significant money(at least in a startup).

------
weaksauce
I think it is interesting to see some of the design decisions, the algorithms
used for example, from the guy that actually implemented it.

