I still have to wait until Wednesday but, the SporePedia is now up. Just seeing the different creatures is enough to get my attention, but I found a nice tip on the side -
“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.”
What’s that? Evidently (after digging a bit) the image itself stores the entire creature. So your creature you create, with texture, shape, behavior, and everything is stored there. I checked one of the images and it came out to be 28,123 bytes that renders to a 128×128 picture. So thumbnail, config, behavior, textures, skins, everything comes to you in a package you already know how to deal with. Now THAT’s an incredible feat of functionality that procedural generated content has allowed. Leave it to Will Wright to bring a fascination with mathematical functions back (after a generation of Mandlebrot sets) with Spore providing a visualization tool for this particular solution set. 
Oh, and did I mention there are already more than 13,000 creatures for you to meet in Spore already – before the creature creator even gets into the hands of the public. I really need to figure out what’s going on around Sept 7th – the day after San Antonio Barcamp of all days. That means I’ve got to really get some sleep before that – I’m going to be camped out for whoever does midnight launch, and then play for the next straight week or so.
