UCLA student Michael Chang has created a nifty final project in just three weeks that captures
part of the essence of Will Wright's widely anticipated game Spore.
The great big idea that has won Spore kudos for innovation is the idea of procedural content generation. Instead of hiring armies of artists and animators to produce every character animation that a player of a game will ever see, procedural content generation allows animations to be built programmatically, by the code itself.
That's what Chang has done in his Spore-like project, Manifest, in which players create amoeba-ey things that then take on a life of their own. Writes Chang: "Procedural animation drives all of the creatures, including the physics and kinematics. At the lowest level, physics runs everything from the fluid simulation, masses, and springs."
It's only a fraction of what Spore will eventually be, but it'll have to do until the real thing arrives on store shelves some day many moons from now.
[Via Aeropause]
