Jonathan Maïm's Page

EA Maxis has released Spore Creature Trial before launching the complete Spore game. I have finally tried it out and I can tell you that's really fun !

In the first phase you edit your first creature, you begin with a random spinal column and add piece by piece leg, arm, hands, mouth, etc. There is so many choices to build you creature that the rendering is unpredictable so that usual pre-designed skinning techniques are not possible. If you look closely in the edit mode, you can see that they use a metaball technique to get nice smooth connection between body parts.

Then you can customize the texture of your creature. In the trial you have a limited choice of texture with some nice shader effects, just enough to personalize your creature.

Finally you can test your creature in a small arena, see how it behaves when walking and playing some fun animation clips, you can even add some baby creature of yours. The skeleton of your creature is also unpredictable, so they created an in-house tool called spasm to create animation clips that can fit morphologically different creatures.

On the marketing side, this product is really advanced and really tailored for smooth word of mouth. You can very easily take pictures and shot videos that you can upload directly to youtube. Of course you can instantly email pictures to your friends and share publicly your creatures on sporepedia. Last but not least a small avatar picture of your creature is automatically created, so that it's really no hassle to embed it as profile picture on social networks if you want to. And if you prefer an animated gif, that's also possible !

Enjoy my creature and its family:

Here the abstract class hierarchy in actionscript3 for a Canvas ui component :

Container -> UIComponent -> FlexSprite -> Sprite -> DisplayObjectContainer -> InteractiveObject -> DisplayObject -> EventDispatcher -> Object

That's pretty scary when you know that it's the main branch without all the other implements, isn't it ? Let's try to know what's the features of each of this inherited classes.

Container -> scrolling, clipping, borders of child components.
UIComponent -> visual components and low-level events like keyboard and mouse input.
FlexSprite -> dumb.
Sprite -> basic display list building block.
DisplayObjectContainer -> if you want to have children and z-order (front-to-back) between them.
InteractiveObject -> interaction from mouse and keyboard.
DisplayObject -> x and y position and transformation matrix of an object.
EventDispatcher -> dispatch events and can be an event target.
Object -> root.

Papervision3D is an open source 3D engine for Adobe Flash technology. It's not using the GPU yet, so it's still a bit slow. But the incredible advantage is that you get a multi-platform 3D scene running on 99% of the computers of the world without any setup of any kind. For that I'm ok to drop some frame rates ! When coming from the OpenGL coding world, you need to be aware of some low-level concepts to tackle pv3d faster :

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• Pv3d uses a left-hand coordinate system (OpenGL uses a right-hand one).
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• A scene graph is included no need to build one. So every DisplayObject3D object (for example a plane primitive) need to be attached to a parent DisplayObject3D object (addChild and removeChild methods become handy to do this).
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• No z-buffer yet, it's using the painter's algorithm (the depth precision is per triangle).
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• Texture mipmapping are handled automatically thanks to the underlying flash player, but you still have to take care that your texture width and height are a power of 2.
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Just been trying the beta of SmallWorlds. My first impression is that it's very nice and really smoothly polished. The first thing you have to do in the world is to cutomize your avatar and optionally your pet, here is my avatar and my pet.



Then, you can chat with connected people and also play some games. I didn't really try all the games, but one game I really enjoyed is the samurai game ! You click on another guy and you can challenge him with an ancient sword. The game play is similar to RagDollKungFu, you control your character with the mouse, it's a very uncommon game play, so most players suck, but it's still very fun. I'm really the Afro Samurai as you can see in this picture :-)



A cool feature to grow the community and feed the word of mouth effect is that you can customize an avatar for a friend. Here is the avatar I customized for Barbarba ! As you can see, the UI is very slick.