yea I love that game
take over the universe with carebears with mechs!!
but can you imigine how much computeing power that game requires? thats why most games arnt procedural, unless you have a freking uber computer it will run as slow as snot
This is why you'd have a LOD (level of detail) generator,
as you move ___ far away from the planet, things aren't rendered, IE:
Clouds, roads, the like.
The animation processes... I can nearly guarantee you that they ran their meshes (legs and hands.. etc) through a pre-built engine to animate them... It's too complex to animate them by hand. This way, all the game is doing is playing different animations, and for facial features (if any), using something similar to shape keys. They will probably use static particles for grass, having textures with alpha channels in it ... phew, that's a mouthful.
Either that, or they just attach a "leg bone" (the skeleton of a leg or arm) to the main body bone, and poof. It acts normally.
For the meshes to be customizable, they would have seperate skeletons for the upper body, lower body... legs... arms.... tentacles? Lol, similar to what we plan on doing with vehicles in OP3.
There will be a lynx chassis, and when a vehicle spawns, the correct turret is placed ontop of the chasis, and attached to the chassis skeleton. There you go, somewhat customizable vehicles in a way.... it's just you don't customize them
. You reuse parts ^^.
Spore looks like a very interesting game. I'm debating whether or not to buy it when it comes out... :lol: