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All Articles for Wired News Feed: Computers
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: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
EMERYVILLE, California -- Spore is an ambitious game, years in the making, from Sims designer Will Wright. It lets players create creatures, then influence the beasties' evolution from single-celled organisms to space-exploring monsters.
Wired.com got a look at Spore's Creature Creator component, which will let players design the beings they'll interact with and share with the world, during a Tuesday night press event at Maxis Software's studios. Aside from the official presentation, an array of cardboard cutouts, colorful posters and other items spied in the Maxis offices all hinted at things to come when Creature Creator is released June 17.
Spore is scheduled for a Sept. 7 release.
Left:
One of the many brutes greeting us at the door as we trickled into the EA office Tuesday evening -- the yellow chap made of cardboard, not the Maxis employee. Both were probably amused at the horde of journalists stumbling about their office space.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
If this bulbous monstrosity is any indication of things to come, the Creature Creator will not be for the faint of heart. That gaping maw, those cold, vacant eyes ... surely the spine-chilling product of some severely twisted imagination. Or promo material for Electronic Arts' The Simpsons Game.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Spore invades Earth! Community is central to the game's experience, with a great deal of the content spewing from the minds of those who get their hands on the Creature Creator. This poster, spotted on a wall at Maxis, offers a time line of events past and things to come in the Spore development cycle, and provides insight into the ideas driving the creative process.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
An onsite 3-D printer crafts little ceramic models of creatures that the folks at Maxis have been coming up with. Eventually, the Spore Store will offer the option to have a model of your own little monster created and shipped to you.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
A sneak peek at possible planet sketches for the final game. Only the Creature Creator was revealed during Tuesday's press event, but hints and glimpses of the full experience were strewn about the Maxis office.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
This poster, tacked on a wall in the Maxis office, offers suggestions of the evolution or growth of a particular creature. Details about Spore were sparse, but you will be able to guide your very own creation from its first cell, to shambling beast, and finally through the air and to the stars.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Spore will ship with the Creature Creator, a Vehicle Creator (for land, sea, air and space) and a Building Creator, says executive producer Lucy Bradshaw (pictured). Players can tinker with these tools and share their creations with other members of the Spore community. Mac and PC versions of the game will be released simultaneously, and players can swap and share with whomever they like, regardless of the operating system they use.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Here's a tip: Your creature's "front" faces toward the arrow on the podium on which it stands. Be sure to orient your camera in the right direction -- or not. A pair of eyes on either end might lend your creation an extra advantage.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Once you're facing in the right direction (or not, depending on the look you're going for), you're free to add all manner of limbs and details to your creation, and morph them as you please. The mouse wheel scales the size of body parts, so if you're into large feet and small hands, your dream date will be ready in minutes.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Legs are optional, as this wheeled chap illustrates. The limbs you tack on to your creature will affect various stats, helping or hindering your speed, attack power, dancing ability and more. This particular monster may not be able to bust a move, but those teeth and claws probably aren't built for hugging.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
With the Creature Creator offering complete control over bone structure, body morphing and limbs -- plus a robust color palette -- it's impossible to predict what the Spore community will come up with as players create content before the game's September launch. There should be enough claws and scaly beasts to go around (like this Toucan Sam on Wheaties, for example), but there will probably be plenty of cuddly creations, too.
Call it the Tom Sawyer approach to selling CPUs.
VIA Technologies, the self-proclaimed No. 3 maker of Intel-compatible processors, has unveiled a new "reference design" for ultra-portable computers based on the company's own low-power chips.
Making a reference design is common fare in the high-tech industry. Chipmakers like Intel have been doing it for years as a way of proving the technical viability of a product concept. What sets VIA's approach apart is that the company is posting the computer-aided design (CAD) files for its OpenBook PC under a Creative Commons license. Anyone with design skills and a burning desire to get into the PC business can download the files, modify the design and go into business selling ultra portables.
Taiwan-based VIA will even help aspiring Michael Dells find Asian manufacturers to do the hard work of turning those CAD files into real, plastic-and-silicon products.
VIA's design is on the commercial end of a growing spectrum of "open source" hardware. On the other, more noncommercial end are hackable hardware kits like the Arduino platform, which was used by many exhibitors at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California. Open source aficionados were also buzzing last week about the release of the OGD1, a development kit that could be used to create open-source graphics cards.
If VIA's idea takes off, it could help add more juice to the already-humming market for ultra portables. That market, which had long foundered on the impractical aspirations of a tiny minority of mobility-obsessed hardware geeks, took off in earnest last year with the success of the Eee PC, Asus' $400, Linux-based ultra portable.
For industrial designer Scott Summit, VIA's move is part of a gradual shift toward more highly-customized manufacturing, in which small companies and even individuals are able to design and build their own products, thanks to the decreasing costs of fabrication.
"The idea of open source manufacture is taking shape, and we're going to see more of it because the barriers (to highly customized production) are really starting to evaporate," says Summit.
VIA's design calls for a 2.2-pound PC with an 8.9-inch screen, a webcam, up to 2GB of RAM, an 80GB or larger hard drive, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (or, optionally, WiMax or 3G cellular data). It's not wanting for ports, either, with an Ethernet jack, three USB ports and an SD card slot.
The design is aimed at smaller design-manufacturers and upstart PC companies rather than big PC manufacturers like HP or Dell, who create their own designs (like HP's new MiniNote) from scratch.
"When we look at reference designs, they're helpful, they're insightful, they give us an optimal layout from an engineering perspective -- but they don't target what we're aiming for," says Stacy Wolff, a notebook design director for HP.
VIA's hope is that its design will encourage new designers to make ultra portables that are a little less ugly than the usual fare. It's a bet that the PC market will soon follow in the footsteps of the cellphone market, where what's under the hood is less important than how it looks.
"It's not really about the components inside at all," says VIA vice president Richard Brown. "It's personal jewelry."
Almost makes the idea of starting your own computer brand sound a little sexy, doesn't it? And for the chipmaker, it's not far from the notion that if you want to get a fence painted, start painting it yourself and try to make it look fun.
The Vaio VGN-FZ180E resembles past Vaios only in its absurdly long product name -- FZ is impressive with a writable Blu-ray drive; at $1,600 without it, the laptop is a bargain. Pound for pound, the Vaio's feature set is peerless.
The supercomputing conference in Reno satisfies even the fiercest lust for processing power. Check out the server muscle behind some of the biggest science in the world.
Switching to a Mac is not as easy as just buying one, but Apple has brought the two platforms closer together so it's not the minefield it once was. We point the way to a smooth migration of data, e-mail, apps and games, and show you how to navigate the OS itself, which can seem alien to longtime PC mavens.
Collectors gather 'round an eclectic selection of early computer history, from the first hard-disk drive to old TRS-80s. Our gallery shows some of the most-noteworthy hardware at the Vintage Computer Festival.
Everex's TC2502 gPC is the first mass-market $200 desktop computer, featuring a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux and headed for selected Wal-Mart stores.
Even though we're custom-design fanatics, we recognize a fine line between the good and the gaudy of DIY creations. Take a tour as we turn our noses up at some of the most tasteless PC mods out there.
Computer makers have discovered that good industrial design sells -- and some, like Dell and Hewlett Packard, are making well-designed products a priority.
PCs become more powerful, but their cases seem to get uglier. Check out these DIY and commercial enclosures you don't have to hide under your desk.
From oil-submerged circuit boards to liquid nitrogen cooled CPUs, check out the most extreme PC-cooling methods on the planet.
It's a gaming PC that spares nothing in its devotion to speed, style and luxury features. Does a kick-ass liquid cooling system, over-clocked hardware, secret compartments, tons of ports and hidden Allen wrenches tempt you? We've got the details in our hands-on review.
Too many Skype customers attempting to reboot after downloading security updates from Microsoft caused the phone network to shut down, Skype officials say.
