Official Spore Creature Creator Feedback Thread

[theenythoos]

First of I would like to say I really like the creature creator and I'm hoping spore will also be amazing. I do have a few thoughts about the game, the first being the paint options: I would like to be able to have more control over where paint is placed, I would like to see maybe an extra option with body parts that can be selected and coloured differently to the main body colour. (I created a creature named Marley and I wanted to make it look like it had hair but I was unable to as there is not way to control where the paint is applied.)
I would also like to see a larger amount of vocals. It would be very cool if you could change the pitch and tone of your creatures voice and maybe have a selection of 2-3 for each mouth, I think it may get boring when you've played spore for hours and you've heard the same vocals over and over. Also I think this would help the creatures sound more how they look, for example: I made a one legged rabbit with one huge eye and I put small insect jaws on him and fashioned them to look like buck teeth, however my 'cybunny' now sounds like a cricket, I would like to change it to a squeek but to do that I must change the mouth, which I spent ages working on.
Great job though
thoos

[PhillAllsop2506]

This has been mentioned, but there is really just one thing that i'd like added:-

A spraypaint mode per layer.

The skins that are available are great. But i'm already a bit bored with the limitation there is.
Is it not possible to just paint each layer to ones own personal design/pattern?
At thee moment, when you apply one of the set skins, they don't allways suit the shape of your creature.
I'd rather be able to just highlight the areas i want manually, such as highlighting the eyelids, and top of the mouth, without having to highlight the rest of the body.

[PhillAllsop2506]

Originally Posted by Wishbone77

Arm & leg operations:

What you could do was to remove the stretching function from the joint pulling function, and instead scale the length of limbs by pointing at the limb and using the scroll wheel. The wheel isn't used for anything on limbs right now, and since it IS used to scale the thickness of joints, I think it would be quite intuitive.

Actually it is : - if you place the cursor over the ball on the limb & scroll, it changes the size.

[Wishbone77]

Originally Posted by PhillAllsop2506

Actually it is : - if you place the cursor over the ball on the limb & scroll, it changes the size.

No, that's not the limb, that's the joint. It's the part between the balls (joints) that's the limb. It's already got its own selection mechanism, since you need to point at the limbs to pull them off. Might as well add length scaling on the wheel to it.

[Mugge]

Originally Posted by Wishbone77

No, that's not the limb, that's the joint. It's the part between the balls (joints) that's the limb. It's already got its own selection mechanism, since you need to point at the limbs to pull them off. Might as well add length scaling on the wheel to it.

Well, for me that already have a function. When scrolling at the joints it resizes the actual joints, when scrolling at the limbs it seems that the muscle structure is scaled, and not the actual joints.

The idea is good anyway, but might need a keypress.

Mugge

[Asmayus]

I've noticed that the adults nuzzle their young on a spine-to-spine basis, as opposed to head-to-head. The result it the heads of the two creatures clip though each other. It looks a little weird.

[Malgor]

Here is a couple of ideas, which are hopefully already in the final game, but I'll throw them in just in case

Weapons should always act as weapons. It is kind of annoying to build a creature with loads of spike balls and crappy little hands, then click the strike attack and watch him claw wildly with those hands. Why have strike weapons if they are not used?

On the same theme, arms should always act as arms, even with no hands - and especially with weapons instead of hands. Again, you make a great creature, with big spiky limbs poised to attack... and watch them become boneless, floppy, and pointless the minute he moves. As above, they are also not used to attack if it has arms.

The point dance, and single armed creatures - it is broken. Due to the way the animation is handled, it seems that single limbs are assigned as right limbs - so, in direction specific animations, like the point dance, they react as right limbs. This means that, when the creature should, logically, use its one arm to point in both directions, it only points in one direction, and does half of the dance. This is also apparent in other odd numbered groupings, like 3 arms, or 5.

Attachments should follow what they are attached to, but they currently dont when attached to a mouth. The system allows you to put eyes, noses, etc. on to mouths, and this can lead to some nice creatures - but when the creature calls or roars, the attachments stay where they were placed, and the mouth moves without them - often 'swallowing' the attachments. this is most apparent if you attach anything to the chin of your creature, or to any of the leech-style mouths. This just looks shabby.

It would be nice to be able to choose a 'hard' or 'soft' attachment when fitting details to the creature. By this I mean that 'soft' attached parts would act as they do now, flopping lazily around the attachment point as the creature moved, and 'hard' attached parts would 'stick' to the creature, like weapons do. This would allow creators to avoid making great looking creatures which suddenly look like they are going to fall to bits when they move, and everything comes unstuck, unless they wanted to.

Another animation point: it seems, based on some creatures I have built, that the animation routine assigns anything with a mouth as a 'head', rather than anything with eyes. This seems flawed to me, since I have a few creatures now who happily 'look' around (during idle animations, etc) with completely sightless mouth-parts, while their eyes stay motionless.

On a related note: it is possible to mount mouths facing backwards, at the back of your creature - which is exactly as it should be - but this really screws up a few of the animations. It is most obvous in animations like the laugh, as the creature desperately tries to dislocate the rear mouth/head to laugh pointing forwards. This usually leads to massive amounts of clipping, and looks horrible. Would it not be better to have animations like this be relative to the limb/part/whatever's current orientation?

While talking about clipping, it is worth mentioning short, fat creatures. if you make a very fat creature, with only 4 or 5 vertibrae, and give it a mouth at the front, and put legs near the mouth, but just a little further down the body, things get messy. The system seems to assignt he flesh around the first vertibrae, where the mouth is attached, as a 'head', and so the idle animations are applied (like looking around, looking at new parts, etc). Because the legs are so close however, and cannot be twisted with the head, you end up with the 'head' section just shearing off from the rest, clipping horribly, and causing huge streatching and mangling of the textures on the 'neck'. I'm not sure what the solution to this would be, but I think it worth considering for the 'useful to fix, if we have time' list.

Hmmm.... I think that's it - at least for now

Oh, wait, I have more: bring back the water phase, and the ability to reach ufo technology with a fully aquatic race

[Flamebeast]

Originally Posted by LilFurryOne

Thanks for reading, and for making Spore!

dont give EA credit for something they havent done! Maxis made spore, EA are just publishing it because they own(and will probably ruin) Maxis.

[Deandria]

Originally Posted by Flamebeast

dont give EA credit for something they havent done! Maxis made spore, EA are just publishing it because they own(and will probably ruin) Maxis.

Maxis is a subdivision of EA, they're not seperate and haven't been since 1997...

[flixern]

1. Paint-free if its possible Might be to big I know...
2. They shud update the site so you know who downloading your creatures (Like an message on your profile). Then they can't claim your monster as theres.
3. Friend system on the Spore site To watch your friends progress xD

_______________________________
My Spore Page

[MrEccentric]

Here's a few ideas
I apologise in advance for any spelling mistakes and if any of these have been done already.


Magic powers:
How about the ability to give powers to your cretures? I'm pertty sure I saw an earlier demo with a creture that breathed fire. We could have sharmans and wizard at the trible stage onwards. Envision your creations in one of those epic mythic battles!
Yes I know this game is about eviloution but it's not exactly scientificly correct as it is, is it?

Clothes:
Staring at the trible stage, clothing should be avialable to creatures. It would give a better impression of evoloution and civilization, be a way to futher customize your creatures and add coulor and charicter to the game. Otherwise we'll have a galexy of nuidists.

Male/Female:
Perhaps most important of all, the abillity to create male/female of the species. In the game all the members of the race look exactly the same, why not have some way of distingishing male/female?
The game could have an atuomatic feture where it adds long eyelashes and other fem features.

Well those are my ideas. Hope you like them.

[Taxus65]

I've found how to stretch and deform bodies using the spine, and arrows at each end. I'd like to be able to deform or reshape the bodies in 3 axis, length, breadth and height.
Then I could get a flatter body for something like a crocodile or alligator based creature.
And some other tails would be good, mammal ,reptile, avian.

[Newbunkle]

Yeah um, the creature creator crashes to desktop if I left click in the arena to move the creature. The creature can still be moved manually with the cursor keys. I have no other issues, and it runs quite fast. My computer beats the minimum requirements.


Edit: One other suggestion... I gave my creature one of the pre-made skins, but I wanted to edit the colours a bit. It would be helpful if the chosen patterns and colours were highlighted, so I could see which ones I needed to modify. At the moment its guesswork.

Edit2: Can we have a pause button on the editor so the creature doesn't keep moving while we're trying to adjust things?

[dontcountstars]

original creator protection - so users can't for example, just modify the colour or add a horn or two then re-share it as their own work. once a creature is downloaded you can save it for use in your own game, but it cannot be re-uploaded to the Sporepedia as their own creation. I think this is important as there already many almost identical 'copies' in the Sporepedia, and it is a shame on the original creators.

more paint options - the ability to colour specific parts individually etc. Many times I have wanted a specific part to be a different colour, but the current system just does not allow for this.

separate tails and necks - it is difficult to achieve certain shapes with the spine making up the tail and neck, it also limits the overall size of a creature.

male and female creatures - this would be nice, and possibly baby creatures not just being miniature replicas of the adults but actually have missing features like no horns, which later grow as they reach adulthood. This of course depends on how the actual gameplay works, so is just an idea!

more variety in voices - you end up with a lot of creatures sounding identical, it would be really nice to be able to specifically pick from a set of voices.

descriptions in the paint section - it is hard to see what the base/coat/markings patterns look like from the thumbnails; it would really help to have a typed description, or the ability to zoom in for a closeup - currently you have to go apply them one by one - it's unneccessarily time-consuming!

That's all I can think of for the moment!

[Wishbone77]

Originally Posted by dontcountstars

male and female creatures - this would be nice, and possibly baby creatures not just being miniature replicas of the adults but actually have missing features like no horns, which later grow as they reach adulthood.

Male and female varieties would be nice.

The baby thing? I've thought about it, looking at a baby creature with enormous antlers and spikes everywhere, and thought "How on Earth did its mother give birth to that thing?" Assuming of course that it's a mammal.

[dontcountstars]

hahaha yeh, I reckon those mammals will go extinct pretty fast if that's the case!!

[Wishbone77]

Uhm, here's one I'm surprised noone has mentioned yet (including me): How about if the game actually created a shortcut on your desktop, or at the very least, an entry in your start menu?

I'm on Vista, and the game did create a shortcut in Vista's special "Games shortcut folder", which I never use, and none of the other Vista users I know use it either. But that was it. I had to open the folder where the binary was installed and drag a shortcut to it to my desktop.

This is not rocket science, people. This is from "Windows installers for dummies(TM)"

[PieJesu]

Originally Posted by PhillAllsop2506

This has been mentioned, but there is really just one thing that i'd like added:-

A spraypaint mode per layer.

The skins that are available are great. But i'm already a bit bored with the limitation there is.
Is it not possible to just paint each layer to ones own personal design/pattern?
At thee moment, when you apply one of the set skins, they don't allways suit the shape of your creature.
I'd rather be able to just highlight the areas i want manually, such as highlighting the eyelids, and top of the mouth, without having to highlight the rest of the body.

This is not possible. Custom textures require a different storage medium. The game would then need to render the texture + mipmaps, normal map, bump map, specular map. This would use up alot of memory and would make it impossible for Spore to allow creature sharing.

You speak as if you are limited in texture choice.

The Layer Paint mode allows you to pick from many, many different textures that suit virtually all creatures I try to make. It also offers a very robust colour pallete. Details can be coloured by choosing a colour in the "Detail" section.

Free paint is not needed for what you are describing.

Originally Posted by Mugge

What I'd like to see is a third "tab" on the top of coloring menu. Besides the single click full paint job and the three layer one.

-snip-

Another problem with is that the game uses each seed for its purposes. All creatures in the game will be made to look unique. In the videos you can see that each creature has different sizings and note, different textures. I suspect the game uses the individual seeds so that your creatures can be identified as each texture has a slightly different pattern.

If control were to be given to the player then the texture seed selected wouldn't be broadcasted across all members of the species so some of the species may not look as you want. On the other hand if it were to be the same, then the game would be pretty dull with all your species looking identical.

I also think they are looking for simple things that can be implemented, not game changing ones.

My Suggestion

I think this has been said before, but I'd very much like a popup box telling you the names of each texture in paint mode. Currently only the clear texture pops up as "Clear" when you hover your mouse over it. I think it would be very beneficial in helping people choose what textures to use and would also polish the engine up a bit more.

[AcesOyster]

It is annoying how some mouths have spit stat boosts, but when you click the spit annimation it doesn't create a blast.

[orifice]

How about a forum tutorial for technically challenged among us!?

[JohnConnor101]

More fur and feathers, please, and in test drive mode, more backgrounds reflecting the range of environments available in-game (or more enviroments too, if three really is our limit).

[PieJesu]

Originally Posted by JohnConnor101

More fur and feathers, please, and in test drive mode, more backgrounds reflecting the range of environments available in-game (or more enviroments too, if three really is our limit).

Yes, I would like to see a low poly hair feature similar to the cotton ball already seen in the game. Something that could be used to resemble a beard of somesorts would be nice.

I also would like to see more environments in the game released as a download. It shouldn't take too long to come up with basic enviros with different lighting features.

[Wishbone77]

Oh, if at all possible, I'd like to make asymmetric creatures possible. Not as default, of course, but I'd like the option to switch the automatic mirroring off.

Also, the centered single limbs currently act like right limbs, rather than centered ones. And most of the feet and hands are asymmetric, so they're right ones too, if centered.

So, options for asymmetric anatomy, and symmetric limbs, please

[roo42uk]

Would like it if possable that when you create a limb remove the grasper/hand from it and place a weapon on it it still remebers that its a limb rather then just some floppy extreimty when you walk around with it

i.e. when you put the praying mantis type claws on a limb instead of hands and then tell the creature to walk the limbs drag rather then being held upright like they do when they have graspers/hands on them

[roo42uk]

Oh and also would like more morph abilites on some items
like the wings, they are very flat you cant make them curve up and down or back and forth.

also great game by the way its awesome i love it. feel like an artists who is finally able to create something decent =D