Spore Space Freeze

Ok, this is really driving me insane. usually I can search the internet and find at least 1 other person who has this problem but apparently i'm the only one?

Here's the problem, I played spore all the way threw to space with no problems whatsoever, I was on the beta nvidia 177.92 driver at the time. Once I got to space it was ok for a little while, but after space started getting big and all the planets getting taken I would go down to the planet and do something, but on my way back out of the atmosphere it will freeze! Sometimes it will be the first planet I try to get out of, and sometimes it will be the 15th or 20th planet. It will freeze and the only thing I can do is crt alt del, and kill it.
now i am not a complete moron, I know games crash and the beta driver can suck, but I have tried everything I can think of.

I tried setting the gpu to single, i tried turning sli off, the in game settings to low, compatible for xp, admin rights on, windows firewall has it as an exception,

then i went back to the nvidia 175.19 driver and tried it all that again, also tried modifying the config file so the game would accept the 175.19 driver and allow the sli to work, but still froze. It will always freeze when exiting the atmosphere and of course you cant save the game unless you are in space already!

All my drivers are up to date, and all my other games work perfectly, including crysis. I am asking here and not going to ea because here I might actually get an intelligent answer.

is there anything else worth trying? or just wait for more patches/updates to come out...

here are my comp specs,

Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit sp1
Pentium XE 3.75ghz
2 8800gt 512mb in sli
250gb hdd
dvd/cd rom
4gb ram
creative xfi-fatality gamer
on an evga 680i sli mobo


edit: found more of the same problems on the spore forums, no real answers though

thanks for replying,

by freezing I mean the game locks up, its kind of hard to explain, Its a lot like the glitch that many people have where you have to push ctr alt del and the esc to resume playing, but when I get back in the game its still froze.

i fly out of the atmosphere and it will freeze, but the sound and everything will still be fine, its wierd, the game continues to play but only my ship is frozen, i cant move it at all, the camera is frozen, like its still trying loading space but it wont take me there ever.
am i making any sense?

I can even push esc and change the settings and click on communications with the planet i am on, but my ship wont move no matter what i try.

I would think its my hardware causing some problem, but i have zero problems whatsoever on any of the other games i play...

its never an easy problem with ea...


EDIT: I found that if I use the paint planet option it allows me to fly around for a little bit while the planet is being painted, but as soon as its done I go right back to not being able to move.

Yea mine happens mostly on home planet also, but it also does it when I get done destroying an enemy planet.

Also reinstalling the game does nothing so don't bother wasting time.

I guess I will have to wait for them to patch the stupid game...


There is nothing I love more than to buy a game and not play it...

I've installed the SPORE update patch as a first attempt to get rid of the game freezing. But unfortunately it didn't help much.

If you're on Vista 64 and the freezing occurs in space stage (eg. when zooming out from planet to star system), try deleting the following files from the folder
c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\SPORE

(make sure to make a backup first for these files, just in case this doesn't work for you)

GraphicsCache.package (and any other GraphicsCache.*.package if present)
Planets.package
Pollination.package
RigblockInfo.package
Temp\*.*


Don't delete any other files (don't delete EditorSaves.package)
The above files will be recreated when you start the game.
The actual game progress seems to be stored in the "SPORE\Games" subfolder, so by deleting the above files you won't loose your gameplay progress. But again, make sure to BACKUP the files you're deleting, just to be safe!

For me this seemed to do the trick; I haven't had a game freeze since I cleaned those files.

My comp specs:

Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit sp1
Pentium E8400 core 2 duo @3GHz
video 8800gt 512mb
4gb ram

Game video settings: the graphics cache is set to default (1024MB) and all graphics details are set to highest level.

problems like freezing at a specific point that are not attributed to vista 64-bit user files can be traced to a corrupted Spore_Audio1.package or Spore_Audio2.package, many of the game disks released had these corrupted files and cause freezing when the game tries to load a sound that it doesn't have, mostly when advancing through stages, this is almost the only cause for freezing on xp computers. Extracting the files directly from '(cd drive)\Spore\Data' may work but the best way to solve this is with a new disc or disc image.

Happy Gaming!