>>5642
Good thinking! Spore is an amazing game. The way that it allows such freedom to design creatures and then smoothly animates them is a wonder. In a way it is both less and more than what I'm hoping for.

The way that Spore allows you to drag parts around and precisely position them amazing and fairly unnecessary. If we want to give a person an extra pair of arms growing out of her sides, then there's really no need to worry over whether they are an inch too high or too low. The ability to add parts literally anywhere just makes the system more complicated than it needs to be.

Of course, Spore also has serious limitations. It has no system for amputations or bizarre non-biological parts like prosthetics or limbs made of inanimate materials like water, glass, or stone. There are a whole world of features I would want to add to Spore.

>>5644
> Breaking and reassembling model is not really possible because 3d models are just hollow surfaces they have nothing inside.


Specifically, a 3D model is a mesh of edges and vertices. What we'd want to do is take that mesh and cut along its edges. For example, to make a centaur, we'd could take a model of a man, find a line of edges that run horizontally around his waist, then remove all the mesh below those edges. Next we take a model of a horse and do something similar around its shoulders. This would give us two partial models with roughly circular holes. We just need to line the holes up and adjust them to exactly fit with each other, and there we have a model of a centaur.

We can do the chopping up of models by hand, and then let the computer select the appropriate parts from the pieces we've made and fuse them together based on the body plan we give it. Mostly we'd be taking human models and cutting many holes in them so the computer can re-assemble them later as needed.

> Determining character capabilities is practically impossible because you can't even tell what kind of behavior will be optimal for that character.


That sound more like an interesting challenge than an impossibility. RPG games always tend to simplify things, so if we can't make the system totally realistic it still wouldn't be a total failure. For example, for speed we could simplify by simply counting the number of legs and assuming that more legs means faster, even if one of those legs happens to be sticking out of the top of your head. Of course, more realistic is always better, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.