http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7772962.stm

Will Wright's evolutionary epic video game - Spore - has been named the most pirated PC game of 2008, according to the TorrentFreak weblog.

The site used data provided by the peer-to-peer sharing protocol, BitTorrent, to compile a list of the 10 most downloaded PC games in 2008.

The site reported 1.7m illegal downloads of Spore since the game was released in September 2008.

Electronic Arts (EA) said it sold nearly 2m copies of the game.

Will Wright's other big-selling title - The Sims 2 - came second on the list with 1,150,000 copies downloaded.

Well...

...

...

That's almost half. That is say, almost half of the people who have played spore have not payed for spore. I don't care if you think the game is worth it, or if any anti-piracy measures by a company is worth downloading the game. This is sick.

We will either see much more anti-piracy stuff in the future, or game developers will stop making PC games because they are becoming unprofitable. I'm pissed right now. Not for Maxis. Or EA. I am pissed because I am worried my favorite gaming platform will continue its decline because of greedy bastards on BOTH sides.


(Hey! For those of you here who may have missed the sig, I am...was... Fledgeling. I had a screen name change)

*Disclaimer*
I have not tested this as much as I would have liked to. In fact, although this has consistently worked for me, I have no idea if it will work for you. Furthermore, if this was already known then just disregard this.

My game specs that may or may not be significant:
Unpatched game
DD’s cell part morph arrow mod installed (Doubt this matters, but do not know for certain)


So… I have been able to make and share over complex spaceships without cheating in the conventional sense… however, you absolutely need the ASYMMETRY MOD for this. But not at first,

How I did this:

- Make a spaceship the normal way, to max complexity. MAX. Non-max might work, needs to be tested (I cannot test for now)

-exit and install the asymmetry mod.
- go back into your game and open your saved spaceship (or an old one, I guess)

If it worked the complexity meter should have gone down to below max by a few notches. One time I had it go down by ~25%. How much it goes down seems dependant on what parts were used. The expensive space parts seem to make it go down the most.

-   fill in the remaining complexity while on the asymmetry mod. Recommend that you complete all the major symmetry work before hand.
-   Save
-   Share while on the asymmetry mod. I have been successful in sharing spaceships well over the complexity limit. [it will say so on the card if it is too complex] Its so easy I cannot believe that I have not heard it before.

If this works, you should now have shared a spaceship that is too complex, like so

(lots of little detail parts, not that obvious in the thumb)

So... just what you normally do, sort of.

Catch- the game will not let you select spaceships to play yourself over the complexity limit. They do not appear on the screen when selecting one for game play. You CAN, however, still play those ships.
You must start a new race with a ‘my creations’ (or whoever’s creations have the ship) theme, then select RANDOMIZE when selecting your spaceship. When it will show up is… random… and difficult if you have many ships. However, the randomizer WILL select ships over the complexity limit. It just takes a few tries. I got mine on the 4th randomization. You can then go back and select what theme you want to play as.




This worked for me, consistently. I hope it will work for you too. If anyone tries this, please note your success/failures. If it turn out this was just something that was unique to my game I will ask the mods to remove this to avoid confusion.

I have been trying to figure out just how grandpeep has been able to make his asymmetrical creatures with the ultimate goal of re-creating the noog from way back.

I have been taking apart this


It has two different hands and each arm has a different thickness.


How?

I dont know, but I was playing with it and managed to switch one of the hands by combining/dividing the arm they were on, removing the small one and adding another that immediately cloned itself to the other side. I combined both arms into a single limb then. When I split it after many tries, the new hand floated. I picked it up and moved it, then added it to the limb without a hand. That hand will not clone to the other side now, so each arm has a different hand.


The thing is, I dont know how he was able to manage to get the first hand not to clone in the first place.

So I tried replacing one hand with one of the spike weapons, so I started a new arm because I had not figured out how to place a asymmetrical piece at the limb’s end. Eventually I came up with this


Where the glitches hand is attached to another joint on the arm that is not the end joint. It looks cool but the game will not save the file (a good thing probably) so I took this picture.


Eventually I figured out how to add the asymmetric weapon onto the end of a arm, something that many already know... anyway, I want to add feet to the old set of limbs, and look what happened


the feet float! Hah, no the game will not let me save this either.

Thing is, as of yet I still dont know how to create a asymmetric hand and limb from scratch but I just wanted to show everyone the glitches I found along the way.

I found a couple of guys who consistently make “wow” creatures that are very well done. My favorite is ‘theJark’ because his creations constantly stun me with the quality! Look at some of his things:




Its just, wow. Top-quality,


Who are the non-gamingsteve creators you think we should know about?

This is a ROUGH list of the creatures that have been deleted from sporepedia *prior* to the public release of the CC. There are a few missing but for the most part they are here.

Use at your own risk, there is no way for us to tell why they were deleted, or for what reason, if any. Some may be inappropriate, broken, etc. Hard to tell at this point the reason most are gone.





( <<<< This is only slightly different from an existing one.)


If anyone knows what ones I am missing, please share so we can add it to this list.