Tribal Mode

[DiskJunky]

I'm trying to get into the Tribal stage but the game keeps hanging. Well.. I 'say' hanging but in reality it goes so slow as might as well be hanging. I know that it's doing stuff as I can see the screen updating every now and again but I don't think that I need to be waiting 1 hour+ for the darn stage to load. And yes I HAVE waited long.

My pc spec is;
Windows Vista SP1 (plus all recent updates)
RAM 2GB (page file and additional 2GB)
Graphics card 256MB Nvidea 7900 SLI
Intel Duo 2.6GHz
30Gb free disk space (after install)

Not exactly a low spec machine. I also have the latest patch for Spore available via the EA downloader (spore is now at v 1.100 if memory serves).

Is there any way to resolve this? I've noticed a game play lag if my creature has long arms/legs but I've reduced this to one short arm and one short leg to no great effect as regards loading the Tribal stage. The creature that I DO create seems to be uploaded to the Spore server as I've had the creature download during a subsequent test. I've also tested offline mode but I get the same delayed result.

Help?!

[WorMzy]

If you haven't already done so, disable SLI in the nVidia Control Panel.

[DiskJunky]

That didn't work - I didn't really expect it to either as SLI has nothing to do with the running of the game, only the display. I don't have any display issues. As soon as I exit the creature creator when going into the Tribal stage, the first few headings appear and then the screen stops updating unless I [ctrl/alt/del-task manager-alt tab] back to it a few times. Then the following headins seem to cycle every 10 minutes or so (10 minutes to cycle through them);

Scrubbing animations
Smoothing face normals
Phase shifting paradigms
Distributing cognitive abilities
Filtering social constraints

Each update seems to take about 2 minutes or so. CPU usage is at 50% total (100% for one cpu core), and RAM was at a fairly constant 521,244Kb at the last attempt for the entire time after the creature editor.

This appears to be a game bug rather than a setting but is there any 'safe mode' I can go into until I can save the game in the Tribal stage just so I can actually GET there?

[WorMzy]

That didn't work - I didn't really expect it to either as SLI has nothing to do with the running of the game

Heh, you won't be saying that after you get to Space Age.

Have you tried setting the process affinity to CPU 1?

[DiskJunky]

ha! *getting* to the space stage would be nice! :-)

No luck with setting the processor affinity. I've also tried turning off DEP but no luck with that either. I've put in a support ticket with EA but it'll be a while before they get back. It's really annoying getting a game only to find that it doesn't work

[DiskJunky]

actually, I think I've found a way around the problem. If I run the program in windowed mode (alt/return) before entering the Tribal stage, it'll load. I haven't yet run it all the way through as it hung again when exiting the tribal clothes editor but hopefully it'll work...

[DiskJunky]

hmmm... spoke too soon - I can't replicate it. Must've just got lucky :-(