Pokemon invade the Sporepedia

Pikacock

Pikachode I think would be the correct term.

There are plenty of candidates in this weeks Something Awful Comedy Goldmine:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/goons-spore-creature.php

SSBB's map maker is STILL extremely limited, even after you get all the parts. I never use it anymore, not enough variety.

The aforementioned gallery begs to differ

I had made a Slowpoke that I was sad to see omitted as I thought it was superior to the one in this gallery. After looking back at it maybe it was my choice of mouth that tipped the scales, but my newly revised Slowpoke is definitely the best out there.

http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=ast-500003635278%3Asast-500003635278

That one stood out the most to me as well.

Karp karp....

This is pretty cool...maybe I should get that creature creator because I [sarcasm] need to waste time on things instead of finish up all my other projects [/sarcasm]

It's a PNG file, but yes. You click on the Download, then right-click save the pic. You drag the pic into the Spore CC, and it's in the Everything file.

Keep in mind, every creature's file size is 4-20KB. The magic of procedural generation.

Well, they're JPEGs at Nintendo Wii Fanboy. Does that mean they won't work?

Um, no. PNG files. The Wii has nothing to do with this version of Spore anyway. (That "Wii version" isn't a port of the PC/Mac Spore. It doesn't have the hardware to handle it in the first place.)

...

The link above...To the gallery of pictures...Leads to...The blog known as Nintendo Wii Fanboy...and...The images in that gallery...are JPEGS...

...

The jpegs probably don't work, but it's a possibility. You can store extra data in a jpeg because photo viewing programs only search the beginning of a file for photo information. If it stops being a photo they ignore the end, meaning you can attach extra info.

Fun fact, rar files actually read from behind first, so you can merge a jpeg and a rar file using the copy command in command prompt. As long as the jpeg is first the file will appear to be, and open as, a normal jpeg. You can -also- open it with WinRAR or 7Zip and access the hidden data.

Oh, OK, but that's still really really cool. So, how exactly does Spore import the creature from just a PNG? The same extra-data-at-the-end thing?

Honestly I don't know, but that'd be my guess =]

I've always known PNGs to include extra data because that's what Fireworks uses. Fireworks used to be owned by Macromedia and was a competitor with Photoshop, only a little more web designed base. While Photoshop used .PSDs ("photoshop documents") Fireworks took a different route and used .PNGs for their saved projects. The advantage was .PNG was already a widely used format so everyone without Fireworks could still view them (although they were kind of larger than normal pictures.. obviously). Fireworks is owned by Adobe now, but I think they still use PNGs.

ANYWAY. PNGs have always been used to contain extra data, I'm just saying it's possible with either file format under the right conditions. If I had to guess I'd say their jpegs don't contain anything extra.. I'm just pointing out it's not outside the realm of possibility =]

Just did a test you might find interesting, I went to the Spore site and copied a png which also had the creature's data inside (for loading into Spore..) and noticed the file size was 28KB for a 128x128 pixel .PNG

Then I copied only the pixel data into Photoshop and resaved it as a PNG. The only differences were there was no creature data and also I didn't bother to make the background transparent. The new file was 20KB. Supposedly that means the extra, hidden data only accounts for around 8KB per creature

Ah, good find. So that's probably the answer. :)

Still a really cool idea for sharing creatures.