Theme Set: jarnomiedema's Spaceships

Here's a selection of jarnomiedema's spaceships. There's a noticeable Battlestar Galactica influence to most of them, and they all look awesome. Click the thumbnails for direct Sporepedia links.

Theme Set: Two building sets and a Creature

Today's theme set is a mix of two complete sets of amazing buildings - the Aves set by Tomanomanous and the Off-World set by LarvaLounge - and an incredible creature (in the center) by Sibuna. As always, click the thumbnails for direct Sporepedia Links.

Crator Tip: How to make asymmetrical creatures

This may be old news for the hardcore SPORE creators, but since many people keep asking me, I'll explain here. Asymmetry is possible in the creature, outfit, vehicle and ufo editors through a mod - a file that changes some values that the game loads at startup. The bad news is that you have to install or uninstall the mod to enable or disable the asymmetry - that means quitting the game and starting it again; there isn't a magic switch that you turn on and off.

Here is the download link for the Asymmetry Mod.

If that doesn't work, try here.

That little .package file has to be saved in the Spore Data folder. That's likely to be located on C:\program files\Eletronic Arts\Spore\data.

What does it do? Well, it makes the editors ignore symmetry, wich means that if you change a part or place a new one, it won't be mirrored on the other side of the creature or vehicle.

Some tips on using it:

First of all, don't go trying to make an asymmetric creature from scratch. The game is often unable to save your creature if you make asymmetric limbs. Uneven legs or arms on each side usually create issues with animation. So make a creature with the mod turned off, save it, enable the mod and edit the creature, makin minor tweaks.

To disable the mod without deleting the .package file from your data folder, just rename the extension to ".package.old".

Another cool way to use this mod is on the outfit editor. Outfits never give trouble, since they don't affect animation.

So be creative, an enjoy!

Creator Tip: making NPCs use matching buildings.

Do you love making themed matching sets of buildings? If so, you might want to know this tip.

In SPORE, when the game picks cities for NPC (Non Playing Character) civilizations, it picks a random City Hall and chooses buildings that match it aesthetically. By using a tag "set:" you can assure that it will allways pick the correct buildings to match the randomly chosen City Hall.

Example:

This City Hall has the tag "set:galazan". If the game picks this hall, it will search for a House, a Factory and an Entertainment building with that tag, and will find these:

Update: further testing has shown that this system is not 100% reliable. I guess we'll have to wait for better ways to control our content and create our SPORE Empires...