As a precursor to the full game, the Spore Creature Creator was released a few days ago, and it’s really quite awesome.

The creature editor gives you essentially a blob of plasticine with a backbone that you can mould into any shape you like, adding all sorts of limbs, body features and whatnot. And with anything you create, the program figures out how to animate it procedurally. Pretty neat. Here’s two creatures I created:

Unsurprisingly, there’s a rampant proliferation of Spore cock-monsters and goatse-men. I would expect no less from my fellow ‘neters. So all I did was contribute to the trend with a suitably lewd design of my own and EA promptly suspends my Spore account! LoL, I guess I had that coming.

On an unrelated, web-design topic, I came across this humourous little video titled How to fix the Web with Greasemonkey in 3 minutes. Check it out.

Less than 100kB you say? Not possible right? Check out kkrieger.

I’ve been really interested in the demoscene lately and came across this cool creation. It’s not so much the quality of the gameplay or anything, but the way they’ve managed to cram a fully rendered, interactive 3D environment into the size of a word document file.

The demoscene has been around for years as a programming sub-culture that make audio-visual demonstrations that often push the boundries of computing. Since the creators know waaaay too much assembly code, are fueled by copious amounts of caffine and aren’t constrained by anything more than imagination, they make some incredible (usually non-interactive) procedurally-generated content.

As a step up though, these guys from The Produkkt designed a fully 3D first-person shooter (FPS) game kkrieger, with the entire thing fitting into 96 kilobytes of data.

It’s like the old 20 clowns in a Mini trick - 96kB is less than the size it takes to store an ingame screenshot! Pretty amazing. And the graphics use all of the advanced rendering techniques (normal mapping, spectral lighting etc.) found in games like Doom 3 that usually take up a couple of gigs in uncompressed textures and sound (admittedly they take advantage of directX libraries too).

Here’s a screenshot:

Note: you probably need a decent graphics card and processor to run the demo (it crashed on my laptop).

I’m pretty sure Spore uses some of the procedurally-generated ideas that the demoscene guys pioneered. Apparently most of Spore’s music is procedurally-generated too. Sounds interesting.

Anyone else found any cool interactive demoscene creations?