Spore Message Board  

I downloaded and installed the 1.01 patch and now it's not working properly on my laptop, whereas the original version was perfect on it. I no longer see the playable planets on the galaxy screen; I have to relogin several times to finally see it. Also many objects seem to remain invisible in other screens and modes. I haven't bothered to install the patch on my desktop for this reason. Is there a way of reverting back to previous version without reinstalling from scratch and possibly losing my saved games?

You will not lose your save games if you chose the option in the uninstallation. Aside from that, you need to uninstall, there is no way to do it otherwise.

Well, I reinstalled. I assume that I haven't lost my saved games. I assume this because I'm not able to play the game anymore. Looks like now the game won't even start after the reinstall. It's probably something to do with the licensing, so I'm on the phone with EA.

i hate to tell you this....but the following (after about an hour of trying all sorts of crap) is the only thing that worked for me.

when patching, i had to:

uninstall original game, making sure to allow it to remove all my saved games, player data, etc.

uninstall EA downloader.


reinstall original game, making sure to allow it to install downloader during install



run game, log in, download patch

install patch

the game launched fine then.


i had to start over with my planets/save games though-

good luck-

best,
Cal

[Edited by Caliber, 9/24/2008 2:28:28 PM]

Ah crap! I believe you, I just spent a nice useless hour or two on the phone with EA tech support trying to explain to them that this game worked perfectly fine the first time I installed it, and they went through every pre-scripted answer in the book to try and convince me that first my processor wasn't fast enough because it wasn't running at 2.0Ghz; because they say the minimum requirement is a "2.0Ghz P4 or equivalent", since it's an AMD Turion processor running at lower Ghz, but higher actual performance (they seemed to have ignored the "equivalent" requirement. Then they tried to blame it on my video driver being out of date. This despite the fact I told them they all worked fine, just a week ago.

Is there some kind of way to save the saved games in a different directory and copy them back? This was the machine where I had already made it into space.

your savegames are stored there: D:\Documents and Settings\[Username]\Application Data\Spore
i think copying the "Games" folder in there to some other place on your HDD is enough, but if you want to be sure, copy all of the stuff in there so a save spot.
but be warned: its rather big. its about 1.2gb on my version of the game. ~=)

hope i could help. =)

I was able to figure out what was needed to make the game work again. I needed to delete a file called, Pollination.package, within the C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\SPORE\ folder. After deleting that it gets recreated by the game when it later restarts, but it is a clean copy this time. Also while you're in that folder, you might as well delete the file called GraphicsCache.package: this seems to be one of those files that just keeps growing and growing but never gets cleaned up -- ever. It also gets recreated when the program restarts, but it won't have any extraneous crap in it anymore so it'll probably save you a couple of hundred megabytes!

thanks for the info.
the mentioned 1.2gb come from the GraphicsCache.package, wich has the size of 1gb . . .

i wonder if EA changes the management for those files in future updates.
i cant think of any reason to keep clogging up the harddrive with stuff thats not necessary.