Procedural Programming- The Secret Behind Spore

imashoe writes "Ever wonder how Spore works under the hood? The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The answer is Procedural Programming."

Well, no

[ucblockhead]

Given that I've only seen videos of someone else playing "Spore", I have to say, no, I don't wonder how it works. I wonder when the hell it'll be done.

Can one use PP

[Anonymous Coward]

to generate one meaningful article about it? since apparently it's good at increasing noise by putting out fluff pieces as this one.

--
captcha: uncouth. Quite.

not really

[clubhi]

Actually I never even heard of Spore.

Re:Typo in summary

[buswolley]

Yeah who here is sick and tired of crates being everywhere in games. I hardly ever see crates in my day to day.

Re:Well, no

[zn0k]

I wonder when the hell it'll be done.

$ apt-cache showpkg spore
Package: spore
Versions:
1.0
Description Language:
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/spore.maxis.com-i386_Packages
MD5: b7b55c3327e373b0abee0ccb25902a2b
Dependencies:
1.0 - dukenukem3d

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[thegnu]

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Re:not really

[dohzer]

Welcome to Slashdot.

Re:not really

[clubhi]

Thanks!

Re:Typo in summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I kept jumping up, punching this one crate, just waiting for the gold coins or extra man to come out. Instead, one of the loading dock guys just chased me away.

Re:procedural generation anyone?

[thefear]

From TFA:

So why can't this be used in games like spore? Well in games with so many options, the IF/THEN list becomes so long it becomes scrambled. Several calls to previous points in the list are made and the whole thing gets disorganized

Its not just the title, the entire article is written like that.

The review is by communications majors

[whitroth]

who literally know *zip*. I just dipped my toes in the article, and lines like "procedural programming is ... object oriented..." snapped any suspenders of belief I had in the article.

Of course, it'll be smaller and faster than Objectionably-oriented software....

            mark

Re:Inifinite Creates?

[nschubach]

Sure, it's infinite until the computer tracking your winnings hits it's floating point limit, throws an exception and crashes losing all your winnings.

creates created?

[Afecks]

A little help please? Does anyone have a slashdot-editor-to-enlgish translator?

Re:Eh?

[ultranova]

I really feel like the person who wrote the article doesn't know what he is talking about.

Nah. Procedural programming is indeed what made a project of this complexity possible. Just try to program Spore in line-number Basic, I dare you.

Who cares?!?

[IonOtter]

I just wanna play God! [vgcats.com]

Why do you abuse my games so? - Will Wright

Re:Crap alert

[TrappedByMyself]

This article makes baby von Neumann cry

Re:The unexplored realm of dynamic content...

[michaelhood]

This all sounds very interesting.. have any links to your games we could look at?

Where's the "Bury" button?

[Doolwind]

As a game programmer, I'm actually offended by this article. Why do I get the feeling it was written by a football jock who used to bash me (and other game programmers) up at high school? I was going to list the mistakes made in the article, but realized the entire article (even its name) is wrong. I spent 5 minutes looking around Slashdot for a "Bury" button, can someone contact the Slashdot President and tell him to launch a preemptive military strike on any future articles of this quality.

Procedural Programming- The Secret Behind Spore

[Cafe Alpha]

... and COBOL

Yes I noticed poster tagged the article "wrong."

Re:creates created?

[cowens]

No, they are already speaking in enlgish. We need an enlgish-to-English translator.

Re:Inifinite Creates?

[advance512]

Good god, you silly putties...

Why do you bother typing in these comments? No one thinks you're any smarter now than they did before reading your message. If anything, they think you don't have a sense of humour.

The article in a nutshell

[Dormann]

• Programs use if statements
• The more complex the program, the more if statements
• FF7 filled 4 CDs with if statements
• Spore is even more complex than FF7
• Spore must be using some new programming paradigm
• I'm confused about what the paradigm is or what it's called, but I'm sure it uses fewer if statements

Re:Typo in summary

[Nazlfrag]

Next time just aim for the barrel next to the loading dock guy. Kaboom!

Re:Vaporware

[TheLink]

Wrong? He did say quake 2 first then unreal.

Heavily modified or not it's not really that big a deal since it's heavily not here yet ;).

Re:All you need to read is this sentence...

[Anonymous Coward]

What went wrong?

Have you ever been part of a thread involving three or more slashdot users?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present exhibit 'A'.