Almost to the point of broken

[kain3883]

I've put this in the Spore forum and they've been no help so I figured I'd try here. Spore keeps crashing and I can't figure out why. Here are the details.

Spore was working fine since I bought it when it came out. I have Spore, the Creepy and Cute pack, and Galactic Adventures. All worked great. Three days ago the game started to crash after 10 - 30 minutes of play. It simply closes and the small window pops up showing that Windows is looking for a solution. Windows works fine, and I can restart Spore and continue working on my adventure, but it's really starting to get annoying.

It never happens at one particular time, but it seems to only happen when I'm working on or playing an adventure. Never for a particular reason that I've been able to find. It almost seems that it's on a timer.
Also, it seems there is an additional problem that just came up today. Creatures and adventures used to take 20 seconds MAX to load. It was usually instantaneous. Now creatures can take over 5 minutes, and with adventures I can leave the room and make a sandwich and when I come back it's still not loaded. By the time the adventure loads for me to edit or play, I'll have about 3 to 5 minutes before a crash comes.

I'm running Windows 7 on a desktop, and I have an Nvidia GeForce 480 GTX, 12 gigs of RAM, 3 fans and a water cooler. I thought perhaps overheating was an issue, but this system never gets above 24 degrees C, and the fans are all working fine. I've also updated my drivers, updated the Windows service package, and uninstalled all Spore related products, then re-installed them. It downloaded the latest patch when it was re-installed.

None of this has worked. It still crashes randomly, with no particular pattern. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm close to simply not wanting to play Spore anymore.

Thanks

[Davo]

i have had a similar problem lately with the release of darkspore. do you own darkspore?

spore is programed to download creatures every month or so to keep your random creation appearance 'fresh'
i've read about these problems before. there is an option to stop this from happening and it seemed to hellp me some. i am all about helping users with their issues as long as you keep it civil and dont post 'it dont work' and not have any descriptions. smilies kill me too. so try what i have said and see if it works. i have more solutions so check back with some feedback and we will do more troubleshooting.

[kain3883]

I appreciate the help. I'll try your method when I can. I'm on Pacific time and it's about 4:00 pm, and this is the first opportunity I've had today to check my email, let alone turn Spore on, but I'll update my predicament as soon as I can.

I do own Darkspore, but I uninstalled it and let Spore, C&C, and GA run without it, and it still happened. I also downloaded a creature from the 'Online Search' of sporepidea and once I put it into the adventure, the game crashed. However, I've used the same creature a few times to see if it was that creatures fault and I think it may have been coincidence that it happened just then, as It's never happened again.

What do I do to make Spore stop downloading creatures? Where do I go to 'uncheck' that in the game.

Thans

[kain3883]

Sorry, I need to clarify:

I said, "However, I've used the same creature a few times to see if it was that creatures fault and I think it may have been coincidence that it happened just then, as It's never happened again."

What I mean, is it never crashed again when I interacted with that creature, or any other particular creature. It still crashes, but it's still random as far as I can tell.

[kain3883]

Ok, So I've finally been able to sit down and play for a bit yesterday, and it seems that the issues that where plaguing me have stopped. However, I only played last night, so I'll still be crossing my fingers tonight when I give it a try. If anyone has ideas as to what happened, please let me know.