Spore Patch Released
It hasn’t even been a full two weeks since the launch of Spore and already a patch has been released for the game. A patch this soon can’t be a big deal. After all, it probably just fixes a few glitches, right? Wrong, in fact, the patch is extremely significant, and addresses numerous problems and balancing issues in almost every aspect of the game. The patch is, at this point, PC only, although a Mac version is coming “soon”.It should be noted, however that the Spore Creature Creator is also receiving a patch, and it is available for both Mac and PC versions.
A full list of features and changes in the patch are available after the jump.
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
Spore Creature Creator Patch
Patch Fixes
- (MAC Only) Corrected patch detection text to display in correct language. Once patched, subsequent patch detection will display correctly.
- (MAC Only) Re-mapped the @ symbol on the French AZERTY keyboard
- Improved thumbnail resolutions for saved creatures.
- Added five new animations, recorded when creating animated GIFs in Test Drive Mode.
- Fixed a randomly occurring system hang.
- Fixed a crash associated with EADM.
- Creatures no longer disappear from the Sporepedia when the save flow is interrupted.
- Corrected the Audio buzzing found on systems with nForce2 integrated audio.
- Updated Spanish and Polish readme files.
- Updated the EULA found in the installer.
- Fixed disparity between server and game complexity limits.
- Integrated the newest save creature PNG.
(This allows creatures PNGs made with Spore to be drag-and-dropped into the Spore Creature Creator. Spore Creature Creator players who do not patch will not be able to drag-and-drop PNGs created in patched versions of the Spore Creature Creator or Spore.)
- Improves overall stability.
To obtain the Mac version of the Creature Creator patch, simply start the game and make sure your internet connection is working. The PC version of both can be downloaded from the EA download manager.