Just 2 new e-mails
Brian,
>>Dear Will,
>>My world, in Spore, only has one creature that I created; every other creature will presumably be created by some other player. What will prevent me from travelling into space, visiting a planet created by another player, and discovering the same species that populated my world? The same buildings? What if that player downloaded my creature as a low level species and there are hundreds of them on this world? It would be kind of a letdown to finally get to travel into space and the first creature you encounter are the same creatures you've already seen on your own planet. This is further complicated by your procedural feedback system; the more popular an object; the more it shows up in peoples buy window; therefore it becomes more popular. If someone creates the absolute best monolith, and everyone uses it because its the best, theres a significantly higher chance that I'm going to travel halfway across the galaxy to discover the same monolith that I myself used.
>>I assume the database will be large enough to make this occurance a statistical anomaly (if i visited 100 planets and each of them had 1000 objects, that would still only be a fraction of the total database) but it would be nice to have some overlap protection (I will only download items that do not already exist in my galaxy, etc etc).
Since we control the injection of creatures into your ecosystem as well as the injection of planets into your local space we can easily prevent the "content collision" problem.
>>Also, when does the procedural decompression occur? After download, so each creature is stored on my hard drive as a 5 meg file? Will there be a "populating worlds" loading screen everytime i start up? Does it populate only when I'm focused on it? Given the size and price of hard drives today, I can see storing it as a 5 meg file being the cheapest option (slow game, small footprint vs fast game, large footprint. Hard drives are cheap, CPUs are expensive) but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
We're currently planning to do most of the reconstituting of downloaded content while the player is in the editors (where we have a surplus of CPU).
>>How are you going to deal with copywrite issues? Givin the ultimate freedom to create what they want, many players will recreate their favorite universes to play in, much to the chagrin of the people who own that universe. The same goes for mature content as well, I wouldn't want to be that unsuspecting parent just as Johnny lands on planet Cocknballs.
As for the copywrite issues, we've had to deal with that already with all the content for The Sims. It basically comes down to giving anyone the ability to flag content they think is inappropriate for any reason.
-Will
Scott,
A few quick answers:
Will there be population dynamics such as predator/prey
population cycles?
Yes.
Will there be procedural evolution in
addition to drawing from the central databases?
Probably not, but we're going to give it a shot to see how far we get.
Will there be any sort of
gameplay in space along the lines of Space Empires or
Master of Orion?
Yes, federation, empire and alliance building.
Will there be an option to design space
stations, ringworlds, and/or Dysons spheres?
No.
Will there be
interstellar vehicles other than UFOs?
Not sure.
Will every game have the same universe, or will every
game have a random distribution of stars?
Every player's galaxy is different and tailored to how they're playing.
In the editor, how extensive will the library of
primitive shapes be?
Depends on the editor, about 200 shapes per editor.
Will it be possible to add third party primitives to the
editors library, or would it be too difficult to work in
with the central databases?
Probably not, they are quite complicated.
If third party primitives
arent tenable, will additional primitives be added via
patches at Maxis's discretion?
Probably.
Will the cellular world have any impact on the
macroscopic world?
Only in terms of changing your starting point when you enter the macroscopic evolution game.
Will there be any means to remove species from the game,
short of genocide?
It seems like removing them is the definition of genocide.
-Will
