Happenings in the Digital Wonderland - Reddit goes Open Source and Spore Creature Creator arrives
Two items not related to Open Access (at least in a scientific sense) today that I think you’ll enjoy.
One of the largest “social media” sites (an my personal favorite), Reddit, today announced that they would make about 95% of their code open source, including the algorithm which determines the stories that make the front page. They’ve got a Trac site set up at code.reddit.com interfaced with a Git version control system. The code appears to be largely built on Python. I could definitely see this being leveraged to create some interesting science-related applications.
The second item is completely for fun, although xenobiologists might enjoy it as well. Spore is an upcoming game from Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, and it looks like it’s going to be great. The player starts out as a single-celled organism in a pool and has to evolve up to a spacefaring civilization. The game has been in development for a long time, to the point that some people thought it might end up as Vaporware. Now, however, it has a release date for September. Even though the full game isn’t out yet, the Creature Creator portion was released yesterday, both as a free trial and (soon?) a $10 full version. At first I thought it was weird to release the character creation part of a game as a standalone product, until I got to play with it. It’s really amazing, but also hard to describe.
When you create a new creature, you start with a randomly shaped blob, which is the creature’s body. You can move it and reshape it, then start adding parts to make your critter. The parts you add and the conformations you place them in all influence how the creature acts and moves. I’m really shocked at how seamless and simple it is. Once you’re happy with your creation, you can easily upload it to the Sporepedia, a conglomeration of everyone’s aliens. You can also make a video and send it to YouTube with a few clicks. The quality of the YouTube videos could be better; I feel like there is a compression issue to work out. Nevertheless, here is one I made:
I can’t really describe how much fun it is to play, so you’ll just have to check it out yourself. If you make any creature videos, link them up in the comments :)
