GameSpot – Spore Galactic Adventures Q&A – New Improvements and the Adventure Editor

Woooo!  A new Spore Galactic Adventures article has appeared, coming from GameSpot.  They’ve interviewed lead producer Kip Katsarelis and software engineer Shalin Shodhan on what to expect from the new expansion pack.

GS: How do these adventures lend themselves to capturing media? We understand that the team has come up with a way to capture 360-degree screenshots. How does this work?

Shalin Shodhan: The adventures made by the studio are really impressive. There’s a lot of action, beautiful art and effects, so we came up with a way to showcase them by taking panoramic screens.

The 360-degree screenshot technology works by taking six pictures inside the game where the camera is pointing in the six canonical directions. So, we take a picture of front, back, left, right, top, and bottom views at an interesting point in the adventure. These are then mapped onto the insides of a cube and presented inside a Web browser using Flash. This tool is not available in the shipping game, but we might consider making it available to players in a future patch.

There’s a number of other capturing media supported by Spore Galactic Adventures as well. You can capture videos of the gameplay you create and share them to YouTube from within the game itself. You can also take screenshots of up to twice the resolution at which your game is running. Every time you save a Spore creation in any editor, including the Captain Outfitter, a 36 (or less) frame GIF file containing a summary of your edits gets saved in your Animated Avatars directory. You can also capture GIFs in the test-drive mode of the editor.

Oh what a pity…I cannot wait until we get that patch!  And awesome news for higher quality screens, sounds cool!  The article also came with 2 new screens (well, actually there are 4, but the other two are in Flash 360° format)

Article here