3 New Prototypes for Spore: Crowd, Gaslight & NetCity Tuesday is another SporeDay, and what a great one it is! Maxis roles out 3 new prototypes for Spore:Crowd Crowd is a SimCity 4 prototype developed by the Spore prototyping team. The player controls a neighborhood of city blocks. Sims wander the city looking for residential, commercial or industrial buildings where they can work, rest or recreate. The player may zone the unzoned (gray) city blocks to attract sims of a given type. Zoned buildings also emit traffic vehicles, which can be controlled with traffic lights. Gaslight Gaslight simulates a process called stochastic, self-propagating star formation (SSPSF.) Interstellar gas and dust begin to collapse under the force of its own gravity. This gives rise to regions of dense material that eventually give rise to stars. When the stars ignite, they heat up the surrounding material, which moves away from the stars, creating more regions of increased density, which give rise to more stars, which moves more material, which creates more stars and so on. NetCity NetCity is a programmable simulator used to explore the evolution of complex behavior from simple components. User-defined nodes can be set to emit signals and move, or shrink and grow in when a signal is received. NetCity was inspired by the Soda Constructor (sodaplay.com) and by the book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg. All of these can be found on the official Spore website
