Computer Graphics World

adapt to their environment. ose stages include cell, creature, tribe, civilization, and space—a metamorphosis that Hecker hilariously compares to Mr. Potato Head. e game involves several distinct phas- es, each with its own style of play, whose outcome aff ects each subsequent encoun- ter—which becomes increasingly more complicated. e complete destruction of a player's creations means the species reverts to the beginning of that particular level or the last viable point in their devel- opment. Spore runs on both PC and Mac formats, and there's a Nintendo DS spin- off called Spore Creatures in which creature sharing is done over the Internet. However, it isn't a multiplayer game in that players do not compete in the same shared space at the same time; rather, the fundamental art assets (characters, vehicles, buildings, and planets) are shared with other players. Pushing Boundaries Hecker presented a peer-reviewed paper at SIGGRAPH 2008 that densely described in highly technical and mathematical detail Spore's animation system—one of the game's featured innovations. He was one of six co- authors who cited 36 sources in explaining their novel approach to developing charac- ters whose morphologies are unknown at the time the animation is created. Spore's authoring tool uses a robust in- verse kinematics solver to capture various poses when animating characters whose highly varying skeleton morphologies may turn out to be substantially diff erent than what was envisioned at the time the anima- tions were authored. e method retains the animation's structural relationships and stylistic details. Unlike traditional charac- ter animation that indexes selected objects, Spore uses explicitly specifi ed semantic in- formation to record movements and dif- ferent character morphologies to generate individual retargeted motions at runtime. Greg Turk of the Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Computing, who served as the SIGGRAPH technical papers chairman, issued a statement noting how "the modeling and animation techniques used in Spore will inspire others to think more creatively about user-created content in computer games." Hecker says his number-one career objective is to make high-concept video games "the preeminent art form of the 21 st century" by pushing boundaries from both a technical and design standpoint so that player interactions are heightened. Popular Web sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia now serve as an inspiration for game developers who work within the user-created content template. October 2008 21

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