Regardless of what you could dream up, the game would find a way to make it work. Top-heavy characters would bobble along awkwardly, creatures with branching networks of a dozen legs would learn to walk, and animations for fighting and eating would be generated on the fly.

The editor was what Wright called an 'artist in a box.' It automates all the grunt work of modeling, skinning, and animating a creature. It's a "creative amplification of the player," allowing gamers to totally customize the experience even if they don't have any artistic skills. Moreover, because the creatures are defined simply and animated using these procedural techniques, the data files are incredibly small -- as small as 1K each! This makes creatures easy to move around, store, share with friends, upload to databases, etc.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:02 AM  |