random spore facts

(she/her) things about spore i found and want to get out there

[randomsporefacts]

main blog is zelenbug

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[randomsporefacts]

the february 19 build has noticeable ambient occlusion on material editor creations. you can see here with baking

here i made a test vehicle thats just an enclosed box. in the editor, you can see inside pretty clearly

(side note i had to save it but it was overbudget and didnt even show in the sporepedia, so i had to drag its png into the colony land editor again just to be able to edit it and remove the extra parts to show it in the sporepedia)

but once you view it in the sporepedia, not only does the inside of the box get encased in darkness, the texture is also much lower quality

it actually saves the texture into three .raster files, as can be extracted from GraphicsCache then reexported with sporemodder fx. this is with the opacity removed

and here i made another house with insides present, this time i have a door and a couple windows to see how ambient occlusion works. also a test to see if the animated parts cause ambient occlusion too. i put different paints on the blocks to see them in the texture more clearly

the light does seem to be coming out of the window! and some of the animated parts just break entirely and thus leave no ambient occlusion

and heres how that texture looks. you can see how the light falls on the floor! you can see where the door is clearly, and how the light comes off it. its actually remarkably sorta realistc lighting

also the ambient occlusion seems to mostly just express itself in enclosed spaces like this. you cant even see it here

if you load any of these creations into retail, they will no longer have ambient occlusion! but they do have higher res textures at least. i cant view the building because spore just trashed it and its not showing in the sporepedia LOL

however their textures still get baked and saved into GraphicsCache. where they DO still have ambient occlusion!!

this is the baking gmdl loaded from GraphicsCache with this texture

so the functionality for material editor ambient occlusion is fully intact, the game just doesnt seem to use it

[randomsporefacts]

i decided to compare the en-us and en-gb locales. from all i saw so far, en-gb seems to just be the same as en-us, aside from a couple early creature names and locakes for some things that were missing in en-us (the names for Squish and Kadents, the entire english text for the a town named prototype adventure)

i just gathered the locales from the basegame and ran a macro on all of them to even them out, so they will be sorted by hash, but the hash is removed. this is because the files will be sorted differently, and the hashes capitalized differently, and this evens the difference out

oh also trimming trailing spaces because that actually seems to account for most of the differences here

then i just ran the results through winmerge

first of all are a handful of files that exist in en-us, but not en-gb (i also renamed all files from .locale to .txt but this was. not necessary lol)

the first one is just this

Updates are available.~br~Log in with your email address and password to get the latest updates.

the second one contains names for exoskeleton parts

core_credits_na_only contains special thanks from the spore team, which are, i guess, exclusive to en-us for some reason

CSA_Credits_Names was all commented out, so its empty. not sure why this is here then

then theres eventlog_clg and eventlog_crg, which are also both empty, for the same reason, which is that "note: there are no event logs for Cell Game/Creature Game at this time." as defined in the comment in the file itself

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then there are the files that actually differ. which are only these (most differences amount to trailing spaces being present in en-us or en-gb but not the other one, but i trimmed those)

although some of these arent actually differences. TextPatch2, VehicleCreator_Template, keys and tooltips just have some extra character at the start of the file that i cant see in np++. it was probably caused by my macro for pruning the files somehow

Abilities, civ_main_menu, CreatureGame, CreatureRigblocks, event_raid_ally, all the mission files that differ, space_diplomacy, timeline just have leading faces on some strings. which in retrospect i should have also trimmed

TribeGame also has a leading space, but also a hash that. didnt get removed by my find and replace for some reason??

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the first one has creation names. Eee Monks was EyeMonkeygirl in en-gb, Evil Monkey was Evil monkey, and en-gb also has names for Squish and Kadents. en-gb is a slightly earlier localization so it reflects that

the second one has some wording changes (theres more than these examples), its sort of interesting that it says how many free bytes you need to free up in en-gb but not en-us??

en-us | The wizard was interrupted before ~string~ could be completely patched.~br~~br~To fully patch this program at a later time, please run the patch again.~UNINSTALL_INCOMP~ en-gb | The wizard was interrupted before ~string~ could be completely uninstalled.~br~~br~To fully uninstall this program at a later time, please run the uninstall again.~UNINSTALL_INCOMP~ en-us | Insufficient disk space - please free up more disk space to apply the patch.~PATCH_ERROR_DISKSPACE~ en-gb | Insufficient disk space - %d free bytes are needed to apply the patch.~PATCH_ERROR_DISKSPACE~

the building creator template difference is for the spore guide, here it says The Basics, but it en-gb it says Basics. for the other strings it still says The Basics so this is probably along the lines of a typo fix

the changes in the civ cinematics amount to en-gb having extra line breaks and duplicated spaces between sentences. some similar changes happen in some other files

the only actual dfference in the space cinematics is at the very end of the file, where they fixed a missing word in steve's monologue in en-us

en-us also fixed a missing period in tribal cinematics

PatchManager has an extra line in en-us

Updates are available.~br~Log in with your email address and password to get the latest updates.

settings also does, which just says "Fit To Screen", which can be found in the original file in Game options for Graphics, after the strings for full screen mode and windowed mode. the actual game only uses the text for full screen mode, which is a toggle! so heres some unused strings i guess!

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spacegame_commodities i had to fix in en-gb because i accidentally didnt remove the hashes from it or anything, but this one actually has a few interesting differences. first of all theres a hash that has 7 characters after the 0x, instead of 8. is that normal???

anyway en-gb has these strings that en-us doesnt

more typo fixes and doubled spaces, also en-gb had "recreatonal" instead of "summertime" beverages in the description for yellow spice, so this is the first actual word change in the game itself!

and Oogie capitalized in en-gb, but not en-us strangely

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sporepedia has an extra string in en-us, which is "Advantaged Creatures". what is that for?

test is just, like, entirely different

TribalAccessoriesRigblocks has a few different part names! Beam Helmet was named Beam Me Helmet, and Snokelicious was named Smokelicious. i guess

ui_space has a few extra strings in en-us

and thats it! none of the changes are actually to reflect british vs american spelling, its more like do you want english localization or a slightly older english localization?

see the spellings are all still just american lol

en-gb just has no reason to exist, i would assume they intended it to have different spellings but it doesnt and they never prioritized it during development, i guess. im glad they left it in though just for more early things to analyze

[randomsporefacts]

some creature part names changed between the february 19 build and retail (or, technically, between the february 19 build and the creature creator, which already has final part names, at least in english)

the parts that got renamed are Wallygator to CrocKisser, Avis Canto to Cantovis, Gatorhawk to Snapgator

Bulgeye to Ocubulge, Eyebis to Eyebissed, Scrutineyes to Scrutineye, Superfl'Eye to Eyelien

Floralescent to Springle, Gaudite to Jemite, Stickhead to Branch Deco

(on an unrelated note you can also see the cursor for hovering over a part changed to a grabby hand at some point)

...curiously theres another one in this build in english, Rancor to Grumpeye, but specifically in en-gb! this part seems to have gotten renamed right before this build, and only in en-us, as the name in every other language seems to reflect its earlier name of rancor still

although. i booted into the feb 19 build with -locale:en-gb and it still seemed to use en-us, as it says grumpeye, but i assure you its real. here it is in SPORE\Data\Locale\en-gb\text\crg_editor\creaturerigblocks_0x325440a2.txt

in the feb 19 build, its named Rancor in danish (still Rankor in danish final!), italian, mainland portuguese, swedish, and thai; Rencor in spanish, Rancoeur in french, Rancuner in dutch, Rankor in norwegian, Rancoroso in brazilian portuguese, and it also transliterates to Ransoa in japanese (renamed to Guranpuai which matches grumpeye)

in fact i gathered all creature part names in all languages in both the feb 19 and final builds, and marked which ones seem to have changed. the parts that got renamed in english also got renamed in most other languages, but there were a bunch of other changes too, including to unused parts interestingly enough

(image 1, image 2, image 3; after clicking on the link, right click and open the image again in a new tab to view it in full)

the parts in thai was entirely untranslated in feb 19, danish and swedish were pretty incomplete in feb 19, and greek changed most names even though they were translated already. also some languages reflect the early part names even into final (like you saw with grumpeye in danish)

side note, the only difference between en-us and en-gb part names in both builds (aside from the rancor thing) is that floralescent/springle has a space at the beginning of the name in en-us, but not en-gb. this is not visible in the game itself, its possible the game just trims the spaces here

[randomsporefacts]

building and vehicle editor concepts from spore: the evolution

this one actually the be_editor_base_mockup.rw4 that can be found in the cc demo (and feb 19)'s files! including this specific colored building, actually in a different place too, and for some reason it was baked onto the mockup model??

paint mode stuff

background and ui mockups. ui is evident from the fact that its literally just edited from the creature editor

theres also the vehicles themselves. some models are recognizeable from early builds!

vehicle renders. not really an editor but its related enough

actual vehicle editor bg concepts

attempts to use creatures with vehicles??? unexplained

[randomsporefacts]

civ concepts and early screenshots from spore: the evolution

im not sure why the creatures here are all this but its rather appropriate to post on disability pride month!

mockups

more 2005 screenshots

this one looks more like a prototype, though not GonzagoGL or anything

[randomsporefacts]

i found where all the chat bubbles are used (in retail at least). for reference, here they are, including all the cut ones from the february 19 build and the creature creator demo (i actually found names for some of the cc bubbles' hashes, and some of the retail bubble effects! theres only one remaining bubble i couldnt find a name for)

here are all the ones that will appear when chatting randomly, sorted as they were in civ_chat_random.pfx, plus the three bubbles (representing the tribal socialization tools) that only get used in tribal stage

you will notice two things, one is that theres a bubble texture that is ENTIRELY absent from all builds we have and i have no idea what its name is, other than it sorts between clothing2 and crown

the other is that the file in retail still references bubble_cube, which is absent from final, but still exists in the february 19 build

i think its a portal reference lol. anyway not sure what happens when the game happens to roll either of these bubbles with nonexistent textures, i assume the creature just doesnt get a bubble above it and thats it. they all have the same probability even unused ones

then theres the bubbles that arent used in the random chats. they still get used in other effects, mostly in the tribal to civ stage cutscene

the effects tribe_chat_icon_churn, tribe_chat_icon_city_hall, tribe_chat_icon_econ_vehicle, tribe_chat_icon_economic, tribe_chat_icon_rel_vehicle and tribe_chat_icon_unicorn seem unreferenced in any animations (the rest get used in animations relating to the tribal to civ cutscene), although it doesnt mean theyre unused

in fact heres bubble_city_hall right here lol

that said i dont remember seeing the unicorn icon or the churn

anyway now are bubbles that were removed from the game and dont get referenced in retail

most of them are these tribal bubbles, describing interacting with other tribes

then the cc demo has a few extras. could NOT find what the name for this one was or what it was used for. its probably also related to the tribe to civ cutscene though?

theres also a distinct bubble_cityhall, not to be confused with the final bubble_city_hall. and bubble_fruit is just in a completely different style from the rest of the bubbles

then theres bubbles from an early version of the tribal to civ cutscene, with duplicates of the waffle icon for each archetype

final condensed the waffles into just the one effect of tribe_chat_icon_trg2civ_religious_silly, used for all archetypes (contrary to the name), and now featuring a pie icon instead

[randomsporefacts]

happy 3rd anniversary to this blog!!! heres early tribal screenshots from spore: the evolution

this is obviously the gdc 2005 tech demo, but it seems to be an early version of even that? all the creatures here look rather strange

compare to this screenshot. the environment seems to be the same as this though, and the rest of the graphics!

particularly, the hoppers match the models found in the feb 19 build (HerdSmall.rw4 from ArenasMisc.package, shown here) and retail (for the black cloud). so turns out this model directly was from 2005!

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theres this screenshot that seems to be from around the same point as the feb 19 build. i recognize these debug displays immediately, and the window title that says StopCurrentCinematic here

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theres also these screenshots from earlier builds. i dont even recognize the top right one here

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another page. must be a build from 2007

curiously it actually has fensters (which is the name given to evolved screebles in the comic book creator), so they still were in the game as of that point. theres also tex, and the tribe here consists of singtwees. plus theres a few more harder to identify creatures

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more early tribal screenshots. this epic here has weird missing legs

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more of that unknown build

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and more 2005 screenshots, with underwater tribes. and more evidence that aquatic was not a stage!!

(edit: here it is)

[randomsporefacts]

something i found while gathering all creature part info for an html is the mouthPriority property. its specifically defined as an audio rigblock tag, so its sound stuff for parts

the mouthPriorty values i found all are only 1, 2 and 3 (not even floats even though this value supports floats)

and whats strange is they actually correspond to the sounds the creature will make in tribal stage onwards!

so all the ones that get MamA have a mouthPriority value of 3, BirdA is mouthPriority 2, and InsA is mouthPriority1. naturally all cell mouths (which make mandible carnivore noises normally) also have a mouth priority of 1

and all mouths added in creepy & cute and bot parts have a mouth priority of 2! which corresponds to bird mouths! but they dont actually make bird noises!! the sound type used in tribal onwards is just some other entirely separate value, which is actually found in Spore_Audio2.package\audio_mouthmap~\base.audioProp, where it defines the sounds to use for each mouthtype

anyway what mouth priority seems to be used for is for tribal/civ/space creatures with multiple mouths of different types

to test, i made one with insect and bird mouths, one with bird and mammal mouths, one with insect and mammal mouths, and one with a bird mouth and a mammal mouth with the same priority of 2

and indeed it seems to prioritize the mouths with the higher mouthPriority values! the first one makes bird sounds, and the rest make mammal sounds

its interesting in the fourth one's case, with different sapient voice types but the same mouth priority on both (and it selected the mammal one anyways). there could be other factors im unaware of that determine what it uses

i dont know why they didnt just hardcode (or also have it defined in an audioprop file) MamA to have priority over BirA and that over InsA, instead of having them in the creature_rigblock~ files, but i digress

[randomsporefacts]

for some reason, in gonzagogl, if you enter the free camera mode and zoom into the planet, you will see a strange aggregation of creatures in the center consisting of cyan and blue creatures, and you can see some white ones too

strangely it differs in different save files! this above was predators, here in creature2 it has a green cube??

this is in herbivore. upon closer inspection this DOES have copies of all other creatures too. the purple and green and yellow ones etc dont show in predators, so it seems like it only has the creatures that the save actually has

if you input an invalid save file and generate random nests, it also just has the green cube

if you add creatures with the creature game edit mode, they do get copies spawned in the center of the planet!!! here i spawned some purple ones in predators, which shouldnt have purple ones normally. oh and you can see the green cube too, so i guess its just always there

i assume the game either clones all creatures to the center of the planet, or moves them there when theyre offscreen. very strange

[randomsporefacts]

the trails on planets in the solar system view in space stage get longer the longer you stay in a system, which can be most easily seen on a new save file (just after exiting the planet for the first time) as you wont get alerts about pirates or anything

it was a struggle to find the effect, but i found the sg_planet_trail_ribbon texture. its used in 6 effects with hashed names

which is colored by these bitimages

theres 2 slightly different effects for each of the three types of trail. the latter three files have a width of 5 instead of 8, 250 segments instead of 300, and are less opaque. they seem to be used for planets' moons

my best idea for why they stay is that that, possibly, they just dont start out at their max length and just take a really long time to get there. notice how they have 300 segments of length 2.5, that makes for a length of 750 units (whatever the units may be)! that seems really long!

this is especially evident from the fact that the length does cap at some point. this is from half an hour of recording. you can also see the planet stopped moving at some point?? it did resume afterwards so no clue what that was about

and yeah see, theyre not getting any longer, this is after leaving it here an hour

[randomsporefacts]

im two days late but we are at the point where the anniversaries for timestamps for maxis creations' pngs keep coming up! for example, these were the creatures from june 4 / june 5 (the timestamp converts to june 5 but the ingame date is june 4 for some reason)

the timestamps are seconds counted from the year 0

june 5 / june 6 (todays birthday creatures by the converted timestamp!!!)

june 6 / june 7 (todays birthday creatures by the ingame date!! which technically should be more accurate)

june 7 / 8

june 8 / 9

june 9 / 10

june 10 / 11

june 11 / 12

june 12 / 13

june 13 / 14

june 14 / 15 and 15 / 16

june 16 / 17

june 17 / 18

june 18 / 19

june 19 / 20 through 23 / 24 (plus some vehicles i didnt bother cropping out)

june 29 / 30, all cells are here!

july 1 / 2 and 2 / 3, the grox are july 2/3!

july 3 / 4 also a random air vehicle

july 4 / 5

and thats it for the basegame creatures! however heres the most notable dates for creatures that people tend to like the most:

burpee - 2008-06-05 07:11:26 (burpee is personal bias but. also we just missed this one) bean - 2008-06-14 07:22:12 payer - 2008-06-14 07:30:37 (same day as bean!!)

knot the grawx - 2008-06-23 07:15:43 the grox - 2008-07-03 07:17:12 brish - 2008-07-05 01:05:32

and notably, as of this post's date, it also lines up with time flies' timestamp of 2008-06-07 07:11:30, which should be june 6 ingame, so happy birthday to time flies

you can also ask me (in the replies) about the timestamp for literally any maxis creation including ga and feb 19, i have timestamps for all of them (aside from literally 2 ga creations that were too overcomplex to fit in the asset tool)

so if you wanna know the timestamp for. like. diamond balloon its 2008-06-12 07:07:59, for feb 19's CRE_InvalidTextures its 2007-12-21 23:52:38 etc. just ask me about any darn maxis creation

[randomsporefacts]

miscellaneous findings i found while making a javascript converter for all hashes that can be found in a creation's xml

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i was trying to find names for all morph handles, and found that one of the parts (ta_symbols_02) defines specifically DfeormAxisLeft [sic] in its prop file

it even separately defines its own sounds in the part! normally parts would parent a template that does that itself

however the handle appears at the front of the part, as DeformAxisForward would be

i tested this by quickly making a creature with just this part, to see what data about the morph handles gets stored

reading its png data, i can see that indeed it does only use DfeormAxisLeft!

it was just not correctly set to the left. but its nice that they tuned it to actually have sounds. a bunch of creepy & cute and bot parts parts dont actually have sounds for some of their morph handles, but they didnt overlook that in the base game

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one of the flora part files is pe_eye_01.prop. it defines little more than the lod0 model, which doesnt exist

the ACTUAL flora eye part, used by rapunzel, sylvisteenz and occuvental, is FE_leaf_28, which does have a proper model in feb 19 in Arenas_Editors.package, as well as textures (also found in retail)

its description of "fruit 01" is also used by fe_fruit_01.prop, which is also a really short file but it at least parents the fruit template AND its model exists

it doesnt seem like the part itself is used though, and it doesnt have any textures

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another curious flora part is pe_vertebra, its the only other flora part thats prefixed with pe instead of fe

it has a model in feb 19 but with no apparent morph handles. its just a flat cylinder

the plant vertebra is rather incomplete compared to other vertebra parts, compare to ce_vertebra here

and its of course unused. plants are composed entirely out of limb parts, which are attached to a little dummy root (which is a cube)

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another thing is that i also defined this in the html. these hashes are used for folders that contain the prop files for each part. theyre all pretty self explanatory (though tool_rigblock~ is used for outfitter parts, im not sure why its called that)

you may notice that its missing 0x40656000 and 0x40676000! neither of these hashes convert in sporemodder fx

A-xeseya informed me that 0x40676000 was used for the hut editor!

and, strangely, 0x40656000 seems to have been originally used for ufo parts, which are all in vehicle_rigblock~ in final, she says its because "0x40656200 is ufo_editorModel~". and also that information about it being hut rigblock also comes from some hashes from the game's exe

i looked into it. apparently feb 19 lists some information about these hashes in "resource -listGroupScheme" cheat. these hashes are composed of entities, and then kinds. so indeed this was hut_rigblock~!

i will make a more proper post about these group schemes later because its really interesting

[randomsporefacts]

continuing this post, viewing lights in the feb 19 build

example, GGE2CLGOrbit, ggeImpostors

grove, ModelViewer

planet, PlanetPlus

RGBtest, RGBtestSh

skybox, SolarSystem, space

swatchdefault, TerrainEditor, VehicleEditor

interestingly the vehicle editor lighting in test drive doesnt seem as bright as it is in retail (which you can view by just viewing a vehicle in the sporepedia while having test drive open)

[randomsporefacts]

the lights cheat in the feb 19 build can set the current lighting to any lighting you want. you have to pull the actual name of the light instead of the hash though, the lights names can be found through smfx in Other.package/lighting_properties~

otherwise its just gonna set to this shiny light (second image) and refuse to change

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this light is just pitch black, with a million apparent duplicates though they will actually differ in the files themselves usually. used by AmbientOcclusion, black, BuildingAmbientOcclusion, CreatureAmbientOcclusion, DefaultHighlight, FloraAmbientOcclusion, GGE2CLGOrbit2, ShadowLight, ShadowLightBuildingEditor, ShadowLightCreatureEditor, ShadowLightFloraEditor, ShadowLightHutEditor, ShadowLightTemplate, ShadowLightUFOEditor, ShadowLightVehicleEditor, TestSh

AnimViewerLighting and beach are pretty similar, just with different speculars

BuildingEditor, cathedral [which is really interesting!]

CellEditor, CellEditorPaintMode and CellGame are also similar aside from speculars

CommScreen, CreatureEditor/CreatureEditorDefaultBackground/creatureeditorpaintmode [they all seem to look the same], CreatureEditorSpaceBackground

CreatureEditorLavaBackground, default/EffectsViewer, EditorDefault/GGE2CLGOrbit3

i hit image limit so im gonna continue in another post

[randomsporefacts]

the feb 19 build has a bunch of older ui layouts for the galaxy game entry screen, as well as dev cheats, so i can actually load them!

here i input "uilayout -load GlobalUIGGE-6", although there doesnt seem to be a way to unload the normal gge ui (says "UI layout 'GlobalUIGGE-7' not found." when i try to unload it)

anyway you can click on the buttons in the bottom left but they dont do anything and make no sound. and you cant access anything from here

sporemodder fx shows that the editor selection was entirely different, and also that the dev button on the right was already present

then theres also other stuff like GGEGameStarUIv2 but it doesnt show if i load it. here it is in smfx with "show all" toggled

GGEGameStarUIv3 shows in the smfx preview without me having to click "show all", so it also shows in the game. but doesnt quite work

its also not centered properly, but heres the other windows. the ui doesnt display properly in sporemodder fx either

i would assume that these windows were going to switch into one another, and the planet was gonna be there. sort of like this

show all also shows some more buttons

uiv4 is a bit closer looking to final

then we have GGENewGameFlowUIv1.spui which is what the game actually uses. it is rather different looking here from retail though! and has you select your identity color here. it also uses dropdowns for selecting your difficulty and archetype in the stage

strangely this choose your empire identity tab, with the military/religious/economic tabs, is still in space stage

it also has this for the identity color selection for some reason. just reused text from the editors but it doesnt work here

and you actually have to select a cell to play as, instead of the game handing you a random one based on the food type you choose

[randomsporefacts]

textures used by every type of gas giant in the game, based off the effect files from Spore_Graphics.package\gameEffects_3~\games.effdir.unpacked

heres a full example of one of the effect files. each one just differs from one another by just changing the material

the textures include some sort of red and green cloudy texture (probably used for warping the gas giant clouds), two normal textures for the gas giant itself (one opaque, and one transparent overlay), and some sort of gradient texture

2026.06.25 edit: these textures in order are the uvdistort texture (so yeah its for distorting the clouds), the base and cloud textures, and a scatter ramp texture

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SG_gasGiant_01~.pfx, 02 and 03

2026.06.25 edit: actual filenames. these are respectively quasijupiter, quasiuranus, and deeppurple

04 and 05

2026.06.25 edit: actual filenames. these are respectively icewater and liquidmars

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the rest are just duplicates

01 = 06 = 11 02 = 07 = 12 03 = 08 04 = 09 05 = 10

they all technically have a different model from the gas giant they were duplicated from, but its identical in practice and uses the same materials

and also theres SG_gasGiant_test_mtl.pfx, which references textures that dont exist in the final game