Topic: NEW spore patch. Start up your game to get it.

[Gorman Conall]

Spore Patch

The focus of this patch is to fix some bugs that have been reported and to respond to feedback we've been seeing from the community about tuning and stability. We managed to squeak in a few fun things too; there's a cool cheat that allows you to turn your creature into a blocky representation of themselves, a new "inspection" feature for the creature creator to browse the parts stats that you have applied to your creature, and the much-requested "evoadvantage" cheat - you'll now be able to start a new creature game with a more evolved creature of your choice!

To get the patch, launch the EA Download Manager to download and install it. If you didn't install the EADM when you installed Spore, you can get it from http://files.ea.com/downloads/eacore/eadm-installer.exe.

This is a PC only patch. Mac users should check back soon!
Features

* New Cheat: "evoadvantage". Enter this cheat when are starting a new Creature game to choose any creature from the Sporepedia. Start a new game with one of your more evolved creatures!
* Display part statistics when you are in Build mode. Rollover any part and hold down the 'i' key.
* New Cheat: "blocksmode". Turns creatures into their blocky representations.
* More style filters. Open the cheat window and type: "stylefilter -microscope" or "stylefilter -norainbows" or "stylefilter -nextgen" to see the new styles
* Added 70 new planet scripts with a low terraform score, especially of the "hot and high atmosphere" type

Graphics/Aesthetics

* Animation improvements
* Improved the planets fogging, blooming and lighting
* Fixed animation issues with tool handling, hand walking and some of the more oddly shaped creatures

Tuning

* Creature phase: Improved the pacing towards the end of the game, and increased the challenge in Normal and Hard modes.
* Tribe phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
* Civilization phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
* Space phase: Made Empires in Easy and Normal modes demand reasonable amounts of money in exchange for peace and adjust the level of punishment if the player doesn't pay
* Space phase: Made disasters less likely to occur in Easy and Normal modes and increased the time between each attack from the enemy empire when the player is at war.

Miscellaneous

* Creature phase: Improved the way posse members behave during threatening situations and fights.
* Space phase: Made finding your home world and colonies easier in the Galactic view.
* Tribe phase: Made it so that tribe members can travel on steep hills if they need to do so now, but their speed will be reduced a lot.
* Fixed an issue with attacks not working on some bigger animals and larger animals not dying correctly
* Fixed collect mission not completing correctly when all parts have been collected
* Fixed problems with the "Rolling Thunder" and "Déjà Vu" achievements not being awarded as they should
* Fixed floating parts not being deducted from the budget when loaded into creator
* Fixed an issue with the rotation rings not resizing correctly when a part was resized and improved their look
* Fixed an issue where the terraforming score of planet could differ when revisiting a solar system
* Fixed the keyboard controls for zoom & pitch in the Colony Planner not working properly
* Fixed a crash that could occur when watching an epic creature attack a city
* Fixed some issues where the game would freeze when using the Creature Tweaker tool or when capturing a planet in solar view
* Fixed an issue where not all tribe members would obey the raid order when a large group was ordered to raid
* Fixed an issue where banning a creation from one of your other saved games would black out the main menu

Sounds fantastic!. Except they did what i feared...

They messed with the space stage so that it now affects everyone. I play on normal so now i get screwed because my universe was never *broken* once...i knew that was going to happen.

Anyway most of it IMO is fantastic. Thank you Maxis Thank you!.

[Bios Revision]

Thanks Maxis!

Where do we report bugs? I had a bug where near the beginning of the space game the crashed ship I was supposed to find dissapeared.

[Yannick]

Spore Patch

The focus of this patch is to fix some bugs that have been reported and to respond to feedback we've been seeing from the community about tuning and stability. We managed to squeak in a few fun things too; there's a cool cheat that allows you to turn your creature into a blocky representation of themselves, a new "inspection" feature for the creature creator to browse the parts stats that you have applied to your creature, and the much-requested "evoadvantage" cheat - you'll now be able to start a new creature game with a more evolved creature of your choice!

To get the patch, launch the EA Download Manager to download and install it. If you didn't install the EADM when you installed Spore, you can get it from http://files.ea.com/downloads/eacore/eadm-installer.exe.

This is a PC only patch. Mac users should check back soon!
Features

* New Cheat: "evoadvantage". Enter this cheat when are starting a new Creature game to choose any creature from the Sporepedia. Start a new game with one of your more evolved creatures!
* Display part statistics when you are in Build mode. Rollover any part and hold down the 'i' key.
* New Cheat: "blocksmode". Turns creatures into their blocky representations.
* More style filters. Open the cheat window and type: "stylefilter -microscope" or "stylefilter -norainbows" or "stylefilter -nextgen" to see the new styles
* Added 70 new planet scripts with a low terraform score, especially of the "hot and high atmosphere" type

Graphics/Aesthetics

* Animation improvements
* Improved the planets fogging, blooming and lighting
* Fixed animation issues with tool handling, hand walking and some of the more oddly shaped creatures

Tuning

* Creature phase: Improved the pacing towards the end of the game, and increased the challenge in Normal and Hard modes.
* Tribe phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
* Civilization phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
* Space phase: Made Empires in Easy and Normal modes demand reasonable amounts of money in exchange for peace and adjust the level of punishment if the player doesn't pay
* Space phase: Made disasters less likely to occur in Easy and Normal modes and increased the time between each attack from the enemy empire when the player is at war.

Miscellaneous

* Creature phase: Improved the way posse members behave during threatening situations and fights.
* Space phase: Made finding your home world and colonies easier in the Galactic view.
* Tribe phase: Made it so that tribe members can travel on steep hills if they need to do so now, but their speed will be reduced a lot.
* Fixed an issue with attacks not working on some bigger animals and larger animals not dying correctly
* Fixed collect mission not completing correctly when all parts have been collected
* Fixed problems with the "Rolling Thunder" and "Déjà Vu" achievements not being awarded as they should
* Fixed floating parts not being deducted from the budget when loaded into creator
* Fixed an issue with the rotation rings not resizing correctly when a part was resized and improved their look
* Fixed an issue where the terraforming score of planet could differ when revisiting a solar system
* Fixed the keyboard controls for zoom & pitch in the Colony Planner not working properly
* Fixed a crash that could occur when watching an epic creature attack a city
* Fixed some issues where the game would freeze when using the Creature Tweaker tool or when capturing a planet in solar view
* Fixed an issue where not all tribe members would obey the raid order when a large group was ordered to raid
* Fixed an issue where banning a creation from one of your other saved games would black out the main menu

Sounds fantastic!. Except they did what i feared...

They messed with the space stage so that it now affects everyone. I play on normal so now i get screwed because my universe was never *broken* once...i knew that was going to happen.

Those in bold consist of epic win

[WeatherMAN]

Big love for Maxis ... Now I just have to wait to get home from work... and do my "honey-do" chores

[Yannick]

EVOADVANTAGE ROCKS!

Finally a way to play the creatures I made with CC.

[SiestaGuru]

Spore Patch
---

Those in bold consist of epic win

You forgot to bold those animation fixes   Great, great, great job maxis! Lets see if civ is actually hard now

[Crowster]

See? There's the Maxis I know. Second bit of good news from the Maxis team in two days. 

[WeAreLegion]

Great news unless you are a Mac user.

Way to hose us when you stated yourself "Play it on a Mac" Maxis.


Oh well...still excited about it.

[GrapeFruit]

You forgot to bold those animation fixes   Great, great, great job maxis! Lets see if civ is actually hard now

They way I got raped in civ on hard kinda told me it was already hard enough. Hell, it was simply impossible to win.

Good thing they released a patch, but they'd better get some more diversive missions for the space phase. Those very few standard ones get old really fast.

[Moogie]

Great, a patch! Many good fixes in here. I did notice something pretty big is missing though...

No terrasculpting planets fix (they reset themselves when you zoom out)?

Oh well, perhaps it was too difficult/time consuming to fix for the first patch, but I hope to see it included later.

[eleazar]

Great news unless you are a Mac user.

They just came out with the patch for the Mac version of the Creature creator about a week ago, so i'm certainly not going to start holding my breath now.

Graphics/Aesthetics

* Animation improvements
* Improved the planets fogging, blooming and lighting
* Fixed animation issues with tool handling, hand walking and some of the more oddly shaped creatures

Hand Walking?!?

[Jaleho]

Thanks Maxis!

Where do we report bugs? I had a bug where near the beginning of the space game the crashed ship I was supposed to find dissapeared.

Yes, I've had that happen MULTIPLE times. I've also had the big where I start out creature in the middle of the ocean, and (are we still marking spoilers?) the sea monster eats you as soon as you go on dry land -- where all the other creatures are. Serious game-breakers.

[Crowster]

Wow. I can't skip the black hole screen at the beginning anymore. It used to be that I only had to wait until the EA exploded and then I could hit esc and skip to login. Now I have to sit through the whole thing.

Anybody know exactly what animations were improved?

[Jaleho]

* Fixed animation issues with tool handling, hand walking and some of the more oddly shaped creatures

Hand Walking?!?
[/quote]

Yes, that also caught my eye... I HAVE seen bipedal tribe members doing pushups while bored in the village.... maybe they mean creatures whose feet are located closer to the front of the body than their graspers (like Sebulba the Dug from Star Wars). Maybe they biased the animations to creatures built more like humans/raptors or mantis/centaurs and they fixed something for the crazier designs.

I remember one of the devs mentioning that once CC was released and sporepedia began filling out, they'd have a much wider range of creatures to test in Spasm, so I'm guessing that's what happened.

[Conflict]

This patch made EADM finally recognize that I have installed Spore, now I hope my ingame sporepedia starts working correctly. If thats the case two thumbs up from me for this patch Maxis!