Agent_KaryoThe evolution sim that was never meant to be.
Original Source:
Spore: An oral history by Jay Castello / Designroom (free registration required)
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 The only fantastical promise about the game I ever remember reading was the animations were supposed to be kinesthetic based on how you made your creatures; kinda like how GTA’s Euphoria physics engine works.
And as far as I had read regarding that, they were struggling with it and had to abandon it at the behest of management not giving them more time to figure it out.
KushanI know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games.
Animations are extremely finicky and requires a lot of manual tweaking and adjusting to get right, it doesn’t surprise me that they struggled to make a procedural animation system because if they could solve that, they’d actually solve a well known industry challenge.
If you were building spore today, you could train a little local model that purely creates reasonably good animations for arbitrary creature designs. It wouldn’t be perfect, but for a game like Spore it would be good enough.
PhoenixDogI know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games
And everyone just immediately stopped reading your comment.
slimerancherYou should have written the last paragraph first, would have gotten less downvotes.
OrphanatorNo, that’s a problem we’ve already solved, with math.
You can make a rig like that yourself, just by following some advanced tutorials.
It feels like you’re saying “this is hard, let’s throw AI at it”.
That’s not the fun way for humans to do things.
You can make a rig like that yourself, just by following some advanced tutorials.
It feels like you’re saying “this is hard, let’s throw AI at it”.
That’s not the fun way for humans to do things.
Can you link what you’re talking about? Because I’m not aware of any animation system that’s purely mathematically derived AND that can generate aesthetically pleasing animations for arbitrary body shapes.
There are certain techniques like Inverse Kinematics that might vaguely fit your description, but that’s a tiny piece of the puzzle - it might get you 5-10% of the way, but given arbitrary body shapes it’s gonna look horrible in most cases, and it doesn’t give you actual animations since you’d still need to purposefully move the creature’s extremities.