>>5668
> I think you would end with something similar to the lego blocks that can be glued together into something bigger.

The question is the manner in which they are glued together. It would be simple enough to have a 3D grid of cells into which cube body parts can be placed, but it's not easy to decide how big each cell should be.

For example, we might make the person's trunk 1 cell thick and 2 cells wide. A width of 2 cells nicely gives us room to attach 2 legs at the bottom and 2 breasts on the chest, but where does the head go? There's no middle cell in which to put the neck. So perhaps 3 cells wide, but then the body seems too wide since there's a full cell gap between the legs and between the breasts.

We might solve that problem by allowing part blocks to be attached between cells, so half the part is in one cell and half in the other, and that would allow a head to be centered on top of a 2-block-wide trunk, but there's a another issue that wouldn't be so easily solved by block construction.

In an RPG you want to keep track of each character's situation. For example, if a character loses an arm, the player should be notified of this clearly and concisely. To make this happen, the computer needs to understand changes in the body's structure. It's not enough for the computer to know what the body used to be like and what is like now; the computer needs to recognize the relevant differences between the two.

This is useful not just for telling players about changes to character bodies during play. It's also important for the computer to know the difference between a character's body and a ordinary body, so that the computer can highlight what's special about the character for the player. For example, if there is a human with horns on his head, then it's important for the computer to recognize that only the horns matter, so it doesn't bother showing a full list of all the parts of a perfectly ordinary human and bury the horns as a detail among all the ordinary fingers and toes.

Aside from Spore, there is another game that does something like this: Dwarf Fortress. It keeps track of character bodies down to extraordinary detail, like fingernails and toenails. Even I think that's overkill. Unfortunately it's not easy to discover exactly how it manages this, so it's hard to learn from it.