I’m sitting here totally awestruck by Spore.  And I want to tell you all about it.

First, no there’s no Sporn here.  Second, I don’t even have the Creature Creator yet, so I don’t have some non-obscene thing to say.  I’ve got very little to say about tools I haven’t used or anything (although I’ve watched you youtube vids of people making things.)  I don’t want to talk about the DRM in Spore, either, except that I’m probably going to suck it up and buy it when things come out.

No, today I saw something technically awesome.  Something that made me look at the glorious obviousness of it, and know that I was in the presence of greatness.  Something so simple that no one had thought of it before.  I haven’t even read about this, but maybe I haven’t been sucking on the Spore Hype teat long enough.  But I still saw it today, and I’m stunned.  In a word, sporestruck.

Crystaltips, aka Alice of Wonderland blog, did some searching for her own name on Sporepedia. And someoen had made a creature with that name.  That was cool, and I was having trouble viewing it, so I went to the Sporepedia myself to see what was up.  I hadn’t been there yet.

I went, and was met with this absolutely wonderful amzing tip:

How do you see one of these Creatures in your Spore Creature Creator? Right Click on the thumbnail image of the creature. Save the image to your desktop. Drag the saved image from your desktop into the Spore Creature Creator. Voila! The Creature is in your game.

Okay, so I did that. What did it download? A .png file.  Not some bizarre .xml file.  Not a .spore (.spr?) file. No, just .png.  An image, just like it says.  Something I could put on my website.  Something I could print out, or set to my desktop.  Just that, an image.

Yet, I can drag that image into the creature createer and the creature is in my game. “Voila!” Indeed.

My first reaction was that they were using steganography to accomplish this.  That would be stupendously cool. Steganography is the study/practice of storing secret information inside of images. If you think of a computer graphic as an array of bytes, where each byte (or more) has color information for each pixel in the graphic, then you have more bits than you need to store graphical information (especially on a lower quality image, stored in a higher quality format).   You can then use these higher-order bits to store extra information in some pre-agreed upon code.  That would mean the image would be all that’s required to pass on the full info of the creature.

However, on reflection, I think they are using the filename as a key index to look things up in the Sporepedia.  That’s still pretty impressive, and allows for me sharing things, so long as I don’t change the name of the file.  I want to experiment some with it, as there’s a potential for exploitation with a filenaming convention.  The advantage here, is that Spore, and EA get to control what’s really available.  So, if I make a penis monster, and they don’t want to store it, then it’s gone from the shared universe.  And that’s why the steganography idea is so much cooler.

I’ll probably mess with this Wednesday night, and update how it’s working.