Character animation in video games—whether manually key-framed or motion captured—has traditionally relied on codifying skeletons early in a game’s development, and creating animations rigidly tied to these fixed skeleton morphologies. This paper introduces a novel system for animating characters whose morphologies are unknown at the time the animation is created. Our authoring tool allows animators to describe motion using familiar posing and key-framing methods. The system records the data in a morphology-independent form, preserving both the animation’s structural relationships and its stylistic information. At runtime, the generalized data are applied to specific characters to yield pose goals that are supplied to a robust and efficient inverse kinematics solver. This system allows us to animate characters with highly varying skeleton morphologies that did not exist when the animation was authored, and, indeed, may be radically different than anything the original animator envisioned.

OS: Windows XP/Vista (FAT 16/32 file systems not supported for Digital Download)
Processor: 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
Memory: XP needs 512 MB RAM / Vista needs 768 MB RAM
HDD: At least 300 MB of space for installation, & additional space for created creatures. (600 MB for digital download)
Video Card: A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0*
Input: Mouse,Keyboard

For computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game requires at least:
* Intel Integrated Chipset GMA 950
* Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent




SUPPORTED VIDEO CARDS:
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ATI Radeon(TM) series
9500, 9600, 9800, X300, X600, X700, X800, X850, X1300, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950, 2400, 2600, 2900, 3650, 3850

NVIDIA GeForce series
FX 5900, FX 5950, 6200, 6500, 6600, 6800, 7200, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950, 8400, 8500, 8600, 8800

Intel(R) Extreme Graphics
GMA 950, GMA X3000, GMA X3100

1. There are users out there who want to play Spore but simply don't have internet access. In this day and age, I know it's surprising, however there's still a decent size population. Plus there was a promise that you could play Spore without being online.
2. What if you're on holiday/vacation? Are you simply gonna play Spore for the first ten days and then have the game suddenly die out on you? Or go to a country where internet is heavily filtered and they block these data from being sent to and from the server?
3. Let's not forget that we're depending on EA's servers here to validate our game. Let's say the demand overwhelms the servers and we've seen this happen too with previous games. People had to validate their titles (I believe just once) but people decided to validate all at the same time that validation servers came crashing to their knees. End result: People paid $50.00 for coasters. Imagine having to renew every ten days and the sheer volume of requests it is processing to validate the games. It isn't just Spore they are validating here too; they are also validating mass effect users.

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“My focus started shifting more and more to players, and what they were doing,” he says, “Because I found that fundamentally as interesting, or more interesting, than the actual games [was] parallel play. Sitting and looking at what someone else has done with the same game as you is fundamentally interesting to me.”

Spore uses procedural textures to give players almost unlimited scope in painting their creatures, and groundbreaking animation technology to determine how they move, hunt, fight, mate, and even dance. Less well-publicised is Spore’s procedural sound technology. Unique creatures are given voice by algorithms that take into account the creature’s size, age, biology, structure, and behaviour. Even more amazing is its procedural score. Prog rocker Brian Eno has co-operated with Maxis to write and record small pieces of music for the game. According to in-game events, these elements will be manipulated procedurally to make non-looping dynamic music that suits the action be it a fight, a hunt, or some quiet space exploration.