ok, having the drum music play in creature stage when an epic is right next to you is not warning enough when godzilla is standing next to you and you can't see him. it's not very much fun when your creature is picked up, eaten (killed pretty much instantly) and you can't react to it because YOU CAN'T SEE IT. WTF. can you not cache it prior to your creature encountering it?

luckygreentiger wrote:ok, having the drum music play in creature stage when an epic is right next to you is not warning enough when godzilla is standing next to you and you can't see him. it's not very much fun when your creature is picked up, eaten (killed pretty much instantly) and you can't react to it because YOU CAN'T SEE IT. WTF. can you not cache it prior to your creature encountering it?

I know what you mean I have had this happen. For me though an epic can kill me without even touching me. I see it bearing down on me go to run and its still far enough away but I simply drop dead.

I have found that "invisible creatures" is not an "EPIC" related bug but a generic problem which I solved simply by reducing the graphics settings in game on my machine. There is a topic about this which may be found via the master help thread.

i didn't have this problem in the 1.00 patch and i had my graphic settings on medium.
i now have this problem on all patches 1.01 and higher (well haven't tested it on 1.03 yet) on low.
my graphics card is an nvidia 6600 (I think) with 256 mb of ram.
it's obviously not the card because it worked in 1.00.

luckygreentiger wrote:it's obviously not the card because it worked in 1.00.

Just because you didn't have it in 1.00 doesn't mean it's not the solution. The 1.01 patch appeared to do something which caused many people to get invisible creatures. It may be that some "settings" were not working correctly but thats pure speculation.

luckygreentiger wrote:i didn't have this problem in the 1.00 patch and i had my graphic settings on medium.
i now have this problem on all patches 1.01 and higher (well haven't tested it on 1.03 yet) on low.
my graphics card is an nvidia 6600 (I think) with 256 mb of ram.
it's obviously not the card because it worked in 1.00.

I think it has something to do with the drivers for the various cards. I tried to find the link to the explanation but didn't fee like spending ages searching for it. I have an nVidia AGP 7300 GT with 512 MB RAM and the most current drivers available on the nVidia web site. And I am running WinXP and the game ran great until I loaded patch 1.00. Then I had invisible creatures all over the place. It really was annoying getting the stuffing stomped out of my creatures by a giant invisible milking stool and not being able to do anything about it.

I tried downgrading the graphics settings but found the only solution was to hop in and out of the Sporepedia so that the game would actually download all the data for the creatures. I uninstalled / reinstalled and avoided the first patch like the plague. I waited two weeks after patch two was released to see what would happen and finally dove into the deep end of the pool and installed the patch, and to my surprise the game actually ran a little bit better for me. And no invisible creatures or audio lag. I installed patch 3 after a few days wait and didn't get any change in performance.

well the way it worked for me is...

version 1.00, game on medium settings, no invisible creatures
patch 1.01, got invisible creatures all the time, even on low -- go to sporepedia to fix and come back
patch 1.02, got invisible creatures, load time is much faster but going to sporepedia fixes the problem
patch 1.03, same as 1.02 but less frequent

my point is this: why does something that worked out-of-the-box now not work? patch 1.01 was a horrible patch. yes i got attacked by pirates a lot less but it FUBAR'd much of the rest of the gameplay. patch 1.02 fixed a lot of broken stuff in 1.01 but i still have the problem with invisible creatures even with 1.03 (most notably an invisible epic i didn't know i was standing next to until the music played, and i didn't see until i was dead after he ate my creature). having your creature eaten by an invisible godzilla is not fun.

I haven't been eaten by an invisible one yet but I have had the music play and been unable to see it, so I'm sure it could happen. Is it the Nvidia cards becasue I have an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT.

Davianti wrote:I haven't been eaten by an invisible one yet but I have had the music play and been unable to see it, so I'm sure it could happen. Is it the Nvidia cards becasue I have an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT.

could be nVidia. Unfortunately their drivers seem to break games sometimes. They did an upgrade to their GeForce drivers that caused the Windows version of Crimson Skies to stop working all together. So it would not be surprising to me to find out that there is a bug associated with nVidia cards / drivers. I have an AGP 7300 GT w/ 512 MB Vid RAM.

Invisible epics are fun. It's like having a T-Rex with a cloaking device.

The suspense is great.

I played around with my video setting in game and now I'm not getting invisible epics or pop up anymore, I just increased the video setting a bit.

This happens to me, but it tends to happen to any creature. I just pause the game for a few moments (about 20 seconds) and the creatures start appearing.

Jackuul wrote:Invisible epics are fun. It's like having a T-Rex with a cloaking device.

The suspense is great.

I agree. It's like the same feeling I get when rushing to a planet to eradicate diseased creatures, and all of them, including their trails, are invisible.

In those cases I pretend I'm a dolphin using eco location.

PacoPaco wrote:

Jackuul wrote:Invisible epics are fun. It's like having a T-Rex with a cloaking device.

The suspense is great.

I agree. It's like the same feeling I get when rushing to a planet to eradicate diseased creatures, and all of them, including their trails, are invisible.

In those cases I pretend I'm a dolphin using eco location.

Cloaked animals FTW!

I just Planet Bust that particular world when that happens...

TDOONAN wrote:
could be nVidia. Unfortunately their drivers seem to break games sometimes. They did an upgrade to their GeForce drivers that caused the Windows version of Crimson Skies to stop working all together. So it would not be surprising to me to find out that there is a bug associated with nVidia cards / drivers. I have an AGP 7300 GT w/ 512 MB Vid RAM.

i doubt it's the drivers -- i don't have stuff randomly disappearing in other games.