Spores Illustrated brings us news on the system requirements for the Creature Editor

OS - Windows XP/Vista (FAT 16/32 file systems not supported for Digital Download)

Processor – 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent

Memory – XP: 512 MB RAM / Vista: 768 MB RAM

Hard Drive – At least 300 MB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for created creatures. (600 MB for digital download)

Video Card – A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0*
For computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game
requires at least:
* Intel Integrated Chipset GMA 950
* Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent

Supported Video Cards

* ATI Radeon™ series
9500, 9600, 9800, X300, X600, X700, X800, X850, X1300, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950, 2400, 2600, 2900, 3650, 3850

* NVIDIA GeForce series
FX 5900, FX 5950, 6200, 6500, 6600, 6800, 7200, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950, 8400, 8500, 8600, 8800

* Intel® Extreme Graphics
GMA 950, GMA X3000, GMA X3100

News just broke that EA has relented and dropped the 10 day revalidation requirement for Mass Effect and Spore! Jay Watamaniuk, Bioware Community Manager broke the news on the official Bioware forums:

Q: Did BioWare and EA change their mind on requiring that the game be re-authorized every 10 days?

A: BioWare has always listened very closely to its fans and we made this decision to ensure we are delivering the best possible experience to them. To all the fans including our many friends in the armed services and internationally who expressed concerns that they would not be able re-authenticate as often as required, EA and BioWare want you to know that your feedback is important to us.

Q: If the game isn’t going to require an authentication every 10 days, will it ever require re-authentication?

A: Only if the player chooses to download new game content.

While this is a huge step forward, fact may remain that SecuROM will be employed, which is still nothing short of putting malware on our systems.

We’ve just received a mail from Caryl Shaw (aka MaxisLucky), online producer for Spore, on the SecuROM issue. It seems the community outcry is reaching Maxis’ ears. Below is the mail in its entirety.

Hey Spore Fans -

We wanted to let you know that we’ve been hearing your concerns about
the online authentication mentioned earlier this week.  I didn’t want to
head into the weekend without getting back to you with some information
about how Spore is planning on using this new system.

A few things we wanted you to know:

– We authenticate your game online when you install and launch it the
first time.
– We’ll re-authenticate when a player uses online features, downloads
new content or a patch for their game.
– The new system means you don’t have to play with the disc in your
computer. And if you are like me, always losing discs, this will be a
huge benefit.
– You’ll still be able to install and play on multiple computers.
– You can play offline. 

We do hope that players will play online - sharing creatures, buildings
and vehicles with other players is something that is unique to Spore and
one of the coolest features of the game. Every day, when I play the
Creature Stage, I get to see wacky and awesome new creatures from my
Buddies on the team coming over the hill at me and I can’t wait to see
what happens when our creative, passionate community starts sharing
their creations.

I’d love to write more - but I need to get back to work.  We’ve got a
game to finish. 

-caryl

===============================
caryl d shaw (aka MaxisLucky)
online producer
spore

What do you all think of this? Come on in and discuss it on our forums.

Also: please vote on the issue in our frontpage poll!

Disclaimer: The following is my own personal opinion and not necessarily reflects the opinion of Simphoni Networks, LLC

Yesterday a rumour hit the Spore community. As I am not in the habit of spewing unconfirmed rumours I didn’t bring it up here yet. But by now it has been confirmed. In an effort to decrease piracy of their games EA will implement SecuROM on both Spore and the game Mass Effect. What this entails is the following:

“After the first activation, SecuROM requires that [Mass Effect PC] re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez’d and gets banned),”

If customers do not come online after ten days, the game will cease to function. “

After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run,” added French. “..An internet connection is not required to install, just to activate the first time, and every 10 days after.”

This means a whole lot of potential troubles for everyone with legal games getting accidentally blocked. It also means it will be impossible to play Spore on a computer without an internet connection. And that while we have always been sworn Spore would be playable off-line. I think Simprograms says it right:

Let me get this straight. If you go on vacation for more than 10 days and have Spore on a laptop and would like to play, it sucks to be you! Because you are screwed! What if you lost internet connection for a month or visit/stay with somebody in a rural area with no connection? This whole idea of SecuROM spells out T-R-O-U-B-L-E in a huge way. The whole idea behind this is to stop pirates from pirating the game, yet don’t they know that this will increase piracy and reduce the number of copies the game will sell? It should not be right that the ones who buy the game legimately are getting the stick, while the pirates will have this cracked and running without DRM in no time.

In my personal opinion this is completely the wrong way to go. The whole re-activation thing Microsoft added to their operating systems shows what a hassle it is every time I change my hardware. And I hardly do that every 10 days. The potential for things to go wrong here is huge. I wonder whether EA is going to put up dedicated helpdesks for people to explain to people how to make the game communicate through their firewall even though they never wanted to play online.

We have been paid a visit by MaxisCactus, and as always he or she had some nice bits of news for us all:

Hey Everyone,

We’ve been keeping an eye on your fansites and the creature concept art many of you feature in forums and galleries has pretty much floored us.  The ingenuity of these creations is astounding.  We’ve had a lot of fun discussing your art and members of our development team have recreated a few fan concepts in our creature editor.  Renders of these have been uploaded to the site, as well as developer commentary.  We even sent off these creature concepts to NASA for evaluation from their Astrobiology Institute. 

It’s all up here: http://www.spore.com/screenshots.php

Also, we’ve been receiving more and more questions about the game, and have updated our FAQ section.

http://www.spore.com/faq.php

Finally, we have a couple new movies for you to check out.  See the developers discuss procedural animation or the new Yuri’s Night movie here:

http://www.spore.com/screenshots.php

Check back to Spore.com this week for more updates.

I definitely urge all of you to go over to the Spore site and check out the concepts and resulting Spore Creatures. The resemblance between the concept art and resulting creatures is a testament to the Creature Editor’s versatility.

As announced yesterday on our forums the Creature Editor is now available for pre-order for North Americans at the EA Store.

IGN reports that the Spore Creature Editor will come out in June. According to EA’s Patrick Buechner:

A trial version of the Spore Creature creator will be available for free through a variety of sources including as a download from Spore.com and in The SimCity Box. There will also be a version of the Creature Creator available at retail. The free Creature Creator has about 25-percent of the creature making parts from Spore. The retail version will have 100-percent. It’s up to the players to choose which version they want, but they’ll all be available at approximately the same time.

The SimCity Box will include SimCity Societies, SimCity Societies Destinations, SimCity 4, SimCity 4 Rush Hour and The Sims Carnival SnapCity, and retail at 40USD.

Buechner goes on to say that the creatures made by the stand-alone editor can be shared among users, and directly imported into the game once it ships.

So what’s your take on this? Are you going to get the full-version, or make do with the free one? Let us know in the forums!

Last night when us in Western Europe were in deep sleep MaxisCactus slipped into my mailbox and left us and some other Spore sites a note. He (or she) or promises that there soon will be some Spring news sent out to the fans. Our friends at Maxis receive tons of questions on the game:

We’ve received a number of questions from you all about Spore and we want to address as many of these as we can. To make it easy, you can now check our new FAQ site to find out the answers to some of your most common questions. Going forward, we’ll be compiling more of your questions and updating the FAQ regularly. We can’t guarantee we’ll get to them all, but we’ll do our best to get you as much information as possible.

The FAQ page can be found at: http://www.spore.com/faq.php

Maxis has also prepared a special Spore fansite kit with all kinds of graphics that all of you can download for use in your own fansite projects. If you put any of those up, let us know!

Before sneaking out of the mailboxes again MaxisCactus leaves the tip of keeping an eye on Spore.com the coming days. Sounds like something is up people!

CVG reports that people might be getting a chance to play Spore on the upcoming geeky filmfestival Sci-Fi-London. Apparently EA is one of the main sponsors of this event, and they will be showcasing big upcoming games like Spore, Dead Space and Mass Effect PC. According to CVG:

It’s not been nailed down which games will be playable yet, but upon picking up the blower an event spokesperson told CVG “most of them” will be available for hands-on time. We’ve already played Spore and Dead Space, so it sounds likely.

EA’s Gary Booker explains how films and games tie in with eachother:

Great story-telling isn’t limited to the big screen and we’ll be at the festival to show that video games offer a fantastic way of telling and interacting with these stories at the same time.

Anyone of you living near London can visit the festival for 10 GBP. If you do: we expect pictures!

The Sunday Times had a teleconference interview with Lizbar the Horrible:

Now attending . . .” says the bland, female computer voice welcoming me to my San Francisco conference call. “. . . Lizbar the Horrible,” groans what sounds like a drooling space monster, probably with a horned helmet and a quantum destructo-gun.

It turns out Lizbar the Horrible is actually Will Wright, who admits he currently spends “several hours a day” playing Spore. Bryan Appleyard, the Sunday Times journalist who interviewed him was lucky enough to be given the possibility to play the game at EA’s UK headquarters in Chertsey. Mr. Appleyard starts out with a short overview of Wright’s life and work on The Sims. He makes a sharp analysis of its appeal:

As with hundreds of soaps, the primary setting of The Sims is American suburbia. This made it, perversely, universal, in that everybody knew what it looked like from television shows.

Wright says they learned a lot of the way people interacted with The Sims, and how they let their Sims interact over the internet. All those lessons went into Spore. A new tid-bit on the start of a new Spore game:

Spore begins with a comet impact on earth. It thus borrows the theory of pan-spermia – the idea that life on earth was seeded from outer space.

It looks like the journalist had fun trying the game out:

It is, to say the least, engrossing.

I created my own animal, a vaguely dinosaurish beast called Bryan, with a rather pathetic squeak and an extra pair of eyes on its haunches to look out for predators, or, indeed, editors.

Sadly the interview does not come with pictures, but it’s a good summary of the ideas of Will Wright behind the structure of Spore.

We have heard earlier that there would be some kind of interface between Spore and YouTube to make posting movies easy. Electronista, in an article on YouTube APIs makes the following comment:

Electronic Arts’ upcoming life game Spore will let users capture video of their species and upload them directly to YouTube without having to leave the game, YouTube explains.

So it looks like you will be able to upload your movies directly from the SporePedia, making it much less of a hassle than saving your movie, exiting the game, and having to upload it through the YouTube frontpage!

UPDATE: the same news is also on the Official Google Blog

The YouTube integration will be there from the release of the Creature Editor already:

The creature creator is core to the Spore game experience, and seamlessly integrates with YouTube. It will be released within the commercial game and as a standalone free download for PCs prior to the game’s launch. We anticipate that millions of creatures will be created, many of which will be cropping up on YouTube.