The Associated Press has managed to squeeze a comment on Spornography out of Will Wright:
“When you give players creative control, you have to expect they’re going to do the unexpected. Some of it’s really good for what they were shooting for. It’s amazingly explicit, especially when those creations are animated. We just have to make sure those people aren’t messing up the experience for others.”
Which, while not approval as such, certainly isn’t damning the monstrous penis-beasts and sodomy monsters the internet seems so fond of. Good on ‘im. Unfortunately they don’t ask whether he’s made any Sporn himself, which means we’re duty bound to speculate wildy that he has, and that it was unimaginably disgusting.
Wright also offers up some hints as to Spore’s future:
“From day one, we’ve been thinking about Spore as a brand… Spore is an intersection between science and creativity. You can apply that to almost any format. I don’t want to limit Spore to just games. There’s a lot of other activities including books, movies, TV or whatever you can imagine that we could take it in if we think of it as a brand. What that could look like is yet to be determined.”
Spore: The Movie, eh? Bet he just wants to see a horde of Penis-Beasts on the silver screen.
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Goodness.
Well, at least he’s okay with it.
Awesome, the last line cracked me up.
“I don’t want to limit Spore”
Then why are you limiting it to run at 30 frames per second?
Very out of context, that quote, but still, 30? That’s only half of a good framerate.
Can one of you superb blog-men please call Mr. Wright and tell him to double that? After all, you did convince GOA to change their minds, so I’m sure you can do it again :)
lol great terms, Sporn and Spornography
“When you give players creative control, you have to expect they’re going to do the unexpected.”
I have a hard time believing that anyone, let alone Will Wright, was not expecting sporn.
Will Wright needs to get his mind out of the gutter.
What else did you expect from a radical, atheistic chain-smoker!?
“Very out of context, that quote, but still, 30? That’s only half of a good framerate.”
A consitent 30 is a good framerate, I doubt you could tell the difference between 30 and 60 without the aid of fraps or whatever.
And unless you’re playing an FPS.
Yeah 30 will be a perfectly fine framerate for Spore, but you would easily be able to tell in an FPS
Television runs at about 30 FPS (depending whereabouts you live). It looks fine in the gameplay videos, and I’m sure they would have increased it themselves if it didn’t look good.
There will probably be console commands or something to increase the max FPS anyway.
people see the world at 24 frames per second and hence that’s what movies run at, as an aside you can drink heaps of robotussin (multiple bottles) doing something people call “robotripping” and it gives the illusion that the number of frames you a second is lowered. kinda like standing in a strobe light but with better lighting and more colour.
television also looks good at stupidly shit resolution though. You sit 8 feet or more away from it and every pixel in every frame changes all the time. That’s what lets them get away with it.
You don ‘t want to drag down game resolution to TV resolution I trust?
@Anonymousity: Just out of curiosity.. This robotussin is illegal, I guess? Or you at least need a doctor to prescribe it? Just asking..
Spore has been one long project to fulfil his personal fetish.
You dont see the world at 24 fps, thats just widely publicized bullshit
@Anonymousity
ehh naw they don’t! you have something like a 2 tenth of a second cool down on your photon reseptors in your retina, but the 10 million of them (or something can’t rememeber) all fire asycronously, assuming they’re all fireing out of sync you can tell the differance between changes in images 50 million times a second, just in one “pixel” at a time though
when you take mushrooms you can sometimes get a snapshot image effect where an image stays up for a few seconds then the next one comes up and stays for a few seconds, it’s brilliant
Games look worse than film/TV etc at the same frame rates because they generally lack motion blur, and what motion blur gets added in isn’t very good. Of course frame rates in games are directly linked to processing overhead and motion blur in real time rendering is a post effect rather than a natural product of the rendering. So, with every increasing graphical requirements in resolution and scene detail, such extras are easier to lose, since most people are used to what games look like anyway.
Maybe Spore has extra boss motion blur and no one will notice.
The human retina ‘refreshes’ at something like 80 times a second (which is why you want your CRT monitor refresh rate high). The bandwidths and framerates of television and film were chosen as the lower threshold of continuous vision as aided by those special ‘errors’ given by shutters and cameras. There’s been a few higher framerate cinema technologies attempted over the years (60fps and even 100fps from memory) but the precision and power of the gear you need is considerably increased; ie 60fps cameras and projectors would be bloody expensive and bloody big. The current ones are bad enough. Digital cinema doesn’t yet escape this problem.
Well, of course sports cameras shoot at a VERY high frame-per-second ratio continuously, so that they can provide slow-motion replays.
Cliffski,
Yeah, I’d be fine with tv resolution games, but like you say, it would have to be a constantly moving, quite organic sort of image. CoD4 ran at some stupidly low resolution, I believe, but looked fine because there was a lot of vague spoofed detail and it did end up looking quite tv-like.
Proper slo- mo cameras don’t really shoot all that high, probably 120 tops, and they don’t operate for more than a few seconds at a time. If they don’t get enough coverage they just use more. If you look, most sports replays aren’t spectacularly crisp, no better than 50 or 60 fps and often are just regular footage slowed down (thanks to the highspeeds having a hard time keeping up anywhere away from goal or in fairly regular sports like cricket or tennis).
Well, give or take some recent changes no doubt.
Some thread derail!
But at least it’s more interesting than the original subject. :)
“people see the world at 24 frames per second and hence that’s what movies run at,”
In which case, setting my LCD TV to 100Hz interpolation should make no difference to movies.
But it does (the famous “soap opera” effect (http://shepherdsons.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/hd-ruins-movies-120hz-1080p-fake/).
Therefore, this “factoid” cannot be true.
The reason 24 frames a second became standard is simply because that was originally pretty much the fastest speed at which you could spool the film through the camera.
More detail here:
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
P.
People used to believe that 16fps was the minimum required for persistance of vision to kick in, but in actual fact the human brain will interpret the difference between images as motion at even lower frame rates that that. This of course does not mean that the quality of the impression of motion is as good as it can get at 16fps. As has been said above, there is nothing special about the 24fps number, and it is certainly not the maximum number of discrete frames per second that human sensory apparatus can detect. The upper limit is probably much higher than that, but varies quite a bit from person to person so afaik a specific threshold hasn’t been determined. From my own experience I’d guess that, like many PC gamers, I can’t detect framerate variations at some point over 60fps.
The only reason they get away with low framerate in movies and television is that each frame has motion blur, so they blend together better at low speeds than the detailed frames in games.
AlexW got it right, in fever words than the novel-sized monologue I was preparing :)
Robitussin was sold in two variants in Ireland, and presumable the UK, a few years ago. If you were so inclined, the one with dextromethorphan would mess you up good (and the additives would hospitalise you in bottle-sized doses) ;)
The real framerate of the universe is what we perceive as the speed of light. When there is lag, the speed of light changes.
(Can we derail it further? CAN WE?)
I heard that Maxis was afraid to go more than 30 fps because at higher rates Spore began to simulate the universe. This could be a problem, especially since the virtual reality in which we are almost certainly living wouldn’t necessarily have the power to run a simulation within the simulation…
Wright and Ocean were on a 3 day spornicating robotrip when this became clear to them…
(I was going for a simultaneous rerail/derail with that one)
Actually, it doesn’t have to be Robitussin, it can be anything that contains enough codeine, which produces the effect.
30 fps is fine for a strategy game. My antique laptop runs TA and freeciv at <10 fps so I can clearly see the refreshes and they’re still playable.
edit: or maybe there’s codeine in the water here or something.
If you can’t tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps i’d get glasses. Or actually look at your monitor.
I was going to give everyone AlexW’s answer; he’s totally correct on this, Muzman said it first though.
Will Wright? More like willywright. As in someone who makes willies.
I have a friend who played DeusEx all the way through at about 10fps and he said he quite liked it because it gave him more time to aim.
I played through quite a bit of half life at about 10 frames a second when I bought my first pc. I thought “So this is what pc games are like, great graphics but really stuttery, its wierd but I guess I can live with it”. Then I bought a voodoo2 a couple of weeks later and realised no, thats not how its meant to be played.
With high speed photography, like filming bullets in flight, the frame rates go up into the thousands of frames per second. Then they play the film back at 24/30 fps so what took 100 frames in a 10th of a second now takes about 4 seconds to watch. Also, epic derail.