Procedural Programming basis of Spore

Spore is a game I am really looking forward to. Interesting article on how they are making a game that is so open ended.

Spore is a game of editors. In each stage of the game, you will spend your points to change and improve different aspects of your society. You start with the cellular editor, followed by the creature editor, object editor, building editor, vehicle editor, until eventually you become able to terraform planets. The best thing about these editors: their sheer flexibility. Any number of body parts, with any number of joints and features can be stretched and pulled to any number of sizes and shapes and attached almost anywhere on your creature. The same thing goes for the tiny cell bits at the cellular stage, and the interacting material parts for buildings and vehicles. The key to making all this work? Procedural programming.

But Procedural Programming is not what the game is doing. All programs are procedural programs unless written as one big block of code. Procedural Generation is a better description. The program generates for example a tree dynamically instead of storing each individual piece. If done right, you can end up with no two trees exactly the same.