CreatorTip: Advanced outfitting technique

I have always been unhappy with how some of the outfitted creatures turned out: most of the time, your alien species' suit or armor ends up looking as if each part was glued on the being's sking. Of course, that's how the editors work: you attach stuff to a creature's skin.

But I'm going to share today a technique I have developed to help create outfits that are a lot more convincing. There are a few limitations to this technique, and it takes a lot of practice to create suits that animate properly, but here it goes...

This is what we're aiming for. This technique allows you total control over where you place an outfit part, and it's used mainly to let you place rings around a creature's limb or body.

This is how you should start: add a Snokelicious part and place a Ring part carefully on top of the Snokelicious. You can only place one part on top of another if you have installed Galactic Adventures or one of the latest patches. In earlier versions of the game the outfit parts can't be stacked.

Hold the "Tab" key while selecting a part to access more handlers and position the parts as shown below:

Now here comes the tricky part: select the snokelicious, NOT the ring, and hold "Tab" for the advanced handlers. As shown below:

You can then rotate the snokelicious - NOT the ring - 180°, so it now points to the inside of the creature's limb or body. You may have to resize and move both parts to get the proper placement.

This technique can be used with any parts, though you will find out that not every part stacks on everything. Parts such as hats can be only placed on top of certain types of parts, such as shoulderpads or chest parts. With training you'll learn how to get the best combinations of parts.

Another combo that looks pretty good is the Bolt/Tinker Ticker. I use that a lot, and it helps create some very cool spacesuits. You should start with the placement of parts shown below, and follow the same steps as shown above.

Practice this technique and soon you'll be making outfits like this one:

Update: Rebecca1208 has created a video tutorial based on this technique. It might be easier to learn from it, so here it is!

Attack of the Spores!

I just finished my biggest adventure so far!

In "Attack of the Spores!" your captain must help the human crew of the Starship Leviathan get rid of the threat of face-hugging, mind-controler alien spores - and without killing the human hosts! Get ready to explore the entire interior of this big vessel - there's even a hangar and escape pods!

Seriously, folks... this took me nearly 20 hours of work to build. I hope you guys enjoy it! I tried to make sure that there would be no bugs, and I hope you can appreciate the extra effort. If you play it, make sure to rate it up!

Click the image on the top for the link, or check more screenshots below:

CreatorTip: How to disguise gameplay objects as creatures

Many people keep asking about how to do this, after I created an adventure that feature "statues". These were actually Blue Gates disguised as creatures. You can disguise almost any object as a creature if you follow a few simple steps.

1. Add a gate (or another disguisable object) to your gameplay objects page.
2. Click on the option to disguise it.
3. When the editor opens up the Sporepedia, instead of selecting a building or vehicle and clicking OK, choose a creation and click the edit option (one of the bottom right buttons on the Sporepedia).
4. Inside the edit mode of the building or vehicle, click the Sporepedia button on the bottom left of the screen.
5. Use the Sporepedia filters to find the creature you want, choose it and again click the edit option.
6. Inside the edit mode of the creature, just click OK (the green "V" option).

Voilá!

F.A.Q

Since I keep getting the same questions on the comments for my creations, I've decided to post all the answers here. So here are the Frequently Asked Questions from my profile:


Q. "Can I edit this creation / Can I use this on an adventure I'm making?"

A. Sure!


Q. "How do you get that part on one side / How do you get it to be asymmetric?"

A. If you don't have patch 5.0 or a later patch, you will need a mod or a hacking program to do it. I don't have a link, but you can google it. If you have patch 5.0 or a newer one, you can do it by holding the "A" key on your keyboard and dragging a part to the creature or vehicle.


Q. "How do you get that mouth / How do you deform cell parts?"

A. There's a mod created by DarkDragon that lets you do that. It's called "cellparts xtended", and you can find it at sporemods.org. I'm not sure if it's compatible with the latest patches. I haven't used it for a while...


Q. "What is that part?"

A. If you really want to find out, just open the creation in the editor. You can find new uses for existing parts by distorting it to its limits or rotating it with the help of the "Tab" key.

Q. "How do you place that part inside the creature's body?"

A. After GA and the recent patches, outfit parts started working differently. We can now stack parts on top of each other, meaning you can use a small part to position another pretty much anywhere. Try placing a ring on top of a "screw" part and rotating the screw so the ring appears to be around a creature's limb or body.

Q. "How do you make building parts float?"

A. Just hold the "Ctrl" key and drag a part. Try the "Shift" key also, it's useful. While you're at it, check the in-game guides and the official video tutorials at the website. After that you'll probably stop asking questions that are common knowledge.


Q. "How do you tilt main building parts?"

A. This one is a little harder. Place the part you want to tilt on top of a connector part, and rotate the connector by selecting it and holding the "Tab" key. Then you can move the part away from the connector (try dragging it while holding "Shift" or "Ctrl"), and you can delete the connector.


Q. "How do you access the Advanced A.I. options on the Adventure Editor?"

A. Open a creature's behavior panel by double-clicking it. Hold "Ctrl" and click one of the "personality buttons" (peaceful, neutral, mindless, territorial, aggressive). Voilá!


Q. "When I try to play one of your adventure it says I don't have the parts, but I have all the expansions, patches and packs. Are you using a hack or a mod?"

A. No, I'm not using any mods. It's just a bug. Try downloading the adventure again, I guess. I really don't have a solution for this.


Q. "How do you increase the points awarded by an adventure?"

A. You can't. The game calculates the value by measuring how difficult (how many times people failed it) and how well rated it is. Try making short, hard adventures (so people can try it several times until they finish it), but make sure you have some plot and don't make it so hard it's frustrating for the players.


I'll add more answers whenever I remember more frequent questions.

CreatorTip: Fooling around with 3d spore models

As everyone should know by now, the latest Spore patch added several new features to the game, such as the possibility of riding vehicles in adventures, in-built asymmetry for all editors, and a cool cheat that exports 3d models of your creatures in a format readable by most 3d modelling programs.

You can get more detailed info here, but to make it work you just need to enter the creature editor, go to Paint Mode and type "ctrl+shift+c" to enter the cheat "colladaexport".

That saves a collada file of your creation in the same folder your creatures are saved. You can then import it into a program such as Autodesk Maya. For those of us that don't have the skills to use or the access to Maya, I highly recommend a little program called FX Composer, that can be downloaded here.

The FX Composer isn't as good as Maya, but it does let you do some cool stuff, like changing lighting effects...

... switching textures ...

... and placing several models together:

I'm still learning how to do the most basic stuff with the program, so I'm not sure if it's even possible to animate or to export a movie, but at least you can create some cool pics such as these:

Creator Tip: How awareness works with buildings

DVDMaster at the official Spore forums has made a discovery about how the awareness system of NPC creatures works with buildings in the adventures. Check the picture above. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 are buildings created separately. As should be expected, most of the creatures on the picture are able to see one another, with exceptions: A can see only B, because the buildings are on the way, for instance. But let's move to another example:

Here the building 4 is only one building, despite having the same shape of the two buildings from the previous example put together. There should be no change, right? Wrong!

Now the creatures B and E can't see the C and D guys, and vice-versa. In fact, C and D can't even see each other, despite being side by side!

DVDMaster has thought of an explanation for that, and his finding has been confirmed by the developers:

Imagine there's an invisible box around each building, and that these boxes actually hide stuff that's behind them or inside them. It would explain why the C and D creatures are practically blind in the case shown.

This happens because the game computes a bounding box that encases each building and uses it to determine awareness. The line-of-sight checkings are expensive, and Spore uses this solution in order to avoid taxing the machine's processor.

This means that if you're planning to build interior spaces, you should create floors, walls and ceilings separately, or any creature put inside it won't be able to interact with objects or other creatures.

Creator Tip: a few tips on making adventures

1.
There's more to goals than just "kill N creatures". Make sure you experiment with the different kinds of goals. Extermination missions can get really boring, especially if there's no challenge, or if it's too challenging. No way to defeat that big boss other than getting all upgrades for the captain? Then your mission will be left aside until the player gets the upgrades, by the time he'll probably have forgotten it.

2.
If you want to make your mission hard, make it short. That way, the player can try a few times before getting bored. It's highly frustrating to play a mission for 20, 30 minutes, and then be killed by an overpowerful NPC.

3.
A longer mission can be hard, as long as the player can figure out a solution after playing and failing. Just making the enemies epic, with high attack and health points is pointless, unless you also give the player the tools to finish it, and ways to find out how to do it.

4.
Remember that gameplay objects can be disguised - in other words, replaced by buildings or vehicles. This allows you to disguise a gate as a UFO, and have a parked spaceship, for instance. Also, remember you can set any object to appear/disappear only in certain acts, allowing for story development as the adventure progresses.

5.
You may want to use the first act for a "talk to" goal. That way you can have a character explain what the mission is about. You can also give tips by the speech boxes on the behavior panels. This allows for some cool detective work, where the player clicks on an object on the groun and gets some info, without having to sacrifice a goal for that. It's very rewarding for the player when he can put together the pieces of a mystery.

6.
Finally, remember to tag your adventure creations GAprop! That way they won't show up in the stages of the core game. It's really annoying to meet alien species called "The Mayor Bob Empire", and even worse to find cities made of wall parts and giant keys. Also remember that you can change the name of the creation in the adventure editor, without really affecting the creation outside the adventure. That way you could get one of your alien species and rename it to "Mayor Bob", for instance.

Well, that's it for now, folks! More to come soon!