Macroscopic Editor, Progression, and Principles

[hhyyrylainen]

@Deus

But how do we ensure that organisms visually don’t look bland and repetitive if they do fill in shape guides?

I think the shape guides maybe need to be optional. I foresee that being very hard to do with auto-evo but, if the player is also required to use shape guides for functional parts, we are in effect requiring this visual similarity rule to player creations as well.

@Deus

Creating very fine parts, such as fingers, jaws, etc. would still be very difficult with just metaballs. In Spore, you can see issues of creating things that are too narrow in that surfaces just blend together or animate weirdly (such as not having enough space between the limb and the torso, thereby creating what is essentially a skin flap). Even the current metaball structure does seem pretty high resolution and capable of doing that, but would it animate and move in a way that is sufficient?

I feel like this is not going to be much of a problem. Thanks to the metaball structure we’ll know exactly what is part of an arm for example thanks to setting the joint on a metaball that it rotates around. If visually the metaballs don’t cause the arm to blend into the body skin, animating the skin with bone skinning weights applied to the vertices just on the arm should be fine. The harder part with animations is generating the actual animation motions in a way that they look good, and try to avoid intersecting other parts of the body when animating an action.