Spore is back in the news, now that an edited version of Wil Wright’s presentation is available on YouTube and Google Video.
We’re all gushing superlatives (myself included), but it’s actually quite difficult to overemphasize how important this game is. Games used to use generated (instead of pre-created) content all the time – read this excellent Guardian article on the creators of Elite for an instructive example. (Try to ignore the completely irrelevant Reagan and Thatcher-bashing.) They did this simply because they didn’t have enough room on their media to store all the data for their worlds.
Then CDs came along, and suddenly that room existed, so we (as game developers) ditched generated content for the much prettier custom-created content. Now we’ve got games on DVD, and we’ve got the opposite problem – so much room, and such high player expectations, that the content takes forever to produce, driving the cost of the game up and driving the actual game playing time down (witness all the games that can be beaten in ten hours or less).
If this game comes out and is successful, it will prove that triple-A titles can be made with generated content. Generated content will become easier and easier, and finally it’ll become another standard tool in the game development toolbox, like first-person controls and streaming levels. This is something that has been needed for a long time.
As regards to generated content, I think it’ll become necessary just because of the cost of filling games with content nowadays. We’ve already got tools like SpeedTree and SpeedGrass. Who’s to say we won’t have “speedOffice Furntiture” or “Speed-chitinous-Biologically-based-alien-technology-landscape” or any other commonly used art set in games. Certainly random dungeon generation is a fun and exciting way to make RPGs easier to create.
People are already working on complex AI and artificial Personality software for game characters. “Please enjoy your day on this planet.” They are probably originally for military simulation but it’d be gangbusters for games. Combine that with the Half-Life 2 lip synching technology and voice generation from a text parser and a library of phonemes and you’ve got cheap dialogue.
Please, you’re making me drool!
A few years ago, I was actually considering trying to write a tool that would generate a landscape heightfield (no problem) and then attempt to place buildings on it to form a village in a realistic manner. I should pick that back up and try it again. It could even come in handy for Star Revolution!
If you really want to go crazy with Star Revolution, you’ll create fake planets with erosion, plate tectonics, even meteor strikes. Then it’ll paint climates into those regions, let water flow and build cities and villages on the large water bodies in the ideal climates.
I had an idea for writing dialogue in a game with marked up text. Those markings would then use auto-generated voice to actually add emotional content to the dialogue. Red text is angry while yellow might be afraid. By wavering the generated voice or making it sound stacatto or any number of things, I think you could make it actually sound emotional. The next step would be to combine that with the emotion-generating AI and get closer and closer to putting artists and designers out of work.