SIGGRAPH Conference Videos

SIGGRAPH, an annual conference attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals, has recently been held in San Diego and Spore developers were in attendance where they delivered four seminars detailing various technical aspects of Spore’s development. Videos of the talks have been made available and, besides providing some insight into the inner workings of Spore’s procedural elements, the videos also showcase a few developer tools and, perhaps most interesting, the creature, building, and vehicle editors. Definitely worth a look, even if only to scrub past the boring technical bits and get a look at the editors in action.

Creating Spherical Worlds
Planet generation scripts — Demo near the middle.

Player Driven Textures
Procedural Texturing — Some screenshots, As well as creature and building editor near middle.

Player Deformable Objects
Metaballs and Rigblocks — Creature and Vehicle editor.

Fast Object Distribution
Halton Sequences and populating worlds — Mostly technical, no demo.