Done some digging, at least one of the reasons for the crash is someone left a link to a file named "x86dasm.dll" in the code. This call to a non-existent file brought the whole house of cards tumbling down. The file (according to some people who are better coders then I) is a disassembly program used in debugging.

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/spore-technical-support/335369-dasmx86dll-dll-problem.html

I found it mentioned in my crashlog

[Instruction data]
013af444 => DasmX86Dll.dll not found.

There's a nifty little file called "exception report (stuff).txt" in:

C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\SPORE\Sporebin

(or something similar) that has .txt files that EA/Maxis may want to be paying attention to. They give stack dumps of the crash (for those interested in such things)

You are a sad, sad individual. I swear,

lol im sad cause i agree its spore? righty-o

Eh, probably because your listed specs are overpowered for any game that might come out in the next 15 years 's like.... dropping a bomb onto a sniper target. You'll probably run into a lot of bugs with that quad core Phenom. I wont touch hardware that fresh. Too many potential issues. I had a lot of bugs with older games just going to a dual core 2 builds ago. Nice bragging rights though.

Gikon wrote:Ever wonder why your spore is crashing?
Simple: YOUR COMPUTER SUCKS.

Spore has never crashed for me..EVER..and I play the crap out of the game, I play it on all High, and all the SPORE time.... How does my spore not crash? My computer is above the max needed requirements.

So please people, Stop talking about spore crashing when it is not the games fault.

Actually, Spore tends to fail on computers that are higher-end rather than lower-end. So if your computer doesn't crash, congrats, you have a low end computer.

Even so, Maxis is to blame. It's still a bug. "The Title shall function correctly under all configurations it supports" is an actual technical requirement from the publisher. From the box, configurations it supports:
Windows XP SP1 or Windows Vista (Vista 64 ultimate, check)
2.0 Ghz P4 Processor or Equivelent (2.9 ghz dual core 64 bit, check)
RAM: (XP) 512 Megs (Vista) 768 Megs (4 gigs, check)
128 MB Video Card /w 2.0 Pixel Shader Support (Geforce 8800: 512 MB, Pixel Shader 4.0 support, specifically mentioned in the supported video cards as the highest recognized of the Geforce series. Check.)

Crashes from time to time. Check.

So yeah, you don't know what you're talking about. If a high-end computer is "sucks" to you, you must have a million dollars or be the biggest moron in the world. Guess which one.

Gikon wrote:Ever wonder why your spore is crashing?
Simple: YOUR COMPUTER SUCKS.

Spore has never crashed for me..EVER..and I play the crap out of the game, I play it on all High, and all the SPORE time.... How does my spore not crash? My computer is above the max needed requirements.

So please people, Stop talking about spore crashing when it is not the games fault.

Eh if you say so... My laptop plays it just fine and its below the min specs for the game. Yes it does take alitle longer to load some stuff but oh well its not to bad ot be honest. I'm running on a intel celeron 1.6ghz 1.5gigs of ram and a 64mb(128 shared) 3d card. I know its not a great system but for a budget laptop thats 3 years old its not half bad imo.

It seems that a vast majority have submitted their transmissions. The software is unstable in general and needs to be kept an eye on. Those empires lucky enough to not have said stability issues are praised as their spice production will go un-interrupted.

shadrack wrote:Done some digging, at least one of the reasons for the crash is someone left a link to a file named "x86dasm.dll" in the code. This call to a non-existent file brought the whole house of cards tumbling down. The file (according to some people who are better coders then I) is a disassembly program used in debugging.

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/spore-technical-support/335369-dasmx86dll-dll-problem.html

MaxisAndrew posted about this on the old forums, and I quoted him about this in another thread before, and here it is again:

The missing DasmX86Dll.dll is just a red herring. It has nothing to do with any game crash, it just reflects that a development time DLL that provides disassembly in crash dumps is not present.

They have been trying to find and fix the actual problem (or problems) for some time, I think. (In the same post he mentioned that early investigations showed that it looked like the graphics card might be running out of graphics memory for some reason)

Gikon wrote:Ever wonder why your spore is crashing?
Simple: YOUR COMPUTER SUCKS.

Spore has never crashed for me..EVER..and I play the crap out of the game, I play it on all High, and all the SPORE time.... How does my spore not crash? My computer is above the max needed requirements.

So please people, Stop talking about spore crashing when it is not the games fault.

An overly simple explanation from somebody who obviously doesn't know squat about software.
It's crashing on plenty of high-end systems, and not very many low-end systems. Try again.

The missing DasmX86Dll.dll is just a red herring. It has nothing to do with any game crash, it just reflects that a development time DLL that provides disassembly in crash dumps is not present.

Hrm. (Good to know) I do wish the community reps would be a bit more proactive in the new forums and
let us know what they're aware of, and how we can help speed things along (if at all)

*rueful chuckle*

Suppose I should pull that poll down now, hrm? ;P

2.4Ghz Intel single core
512mb Ram (Generic)
256 MB X800 GTO Radeon Sapphire
75GB HDD
1.5-3.5 GB of HD swap file

I run fine, never had any crashes, and only have to reboot after 3-4 hours to dump ram of combat/planet zoom action.

"The Title shall function correctly under all configurations it supports" is an actual technical requirement from the publisher. From the box, configurations it supports:
Windows XP SP1 or Windows Vista (Vista 64 ultimate, check)
2.0 Ghz P4 Processor or Equivelent (2.9 ghz dual core 64 bit, check)
RAM: (XP) 512 Megs (Vista) 768 Megs (4 gigs, check)
128 MB Video Card /w 2.0 Pixel Shader Support (Geforce 8800: 512 MB, Pixel Shader 4.0 support, specifically mentioned in the supported video cards as the highest recognized of the Geforce series. Check.)

The requirements say nothing about motherboards, chipsets, sound cards..., and even if it did, what that statement means is that the software "supports" what's listed, and this is the stuff they recommend. It says nothing about how that stuff should be configured. Support does not mean compatibility. It's impossible to make software that runs on every PC out there, it's simply impossible to do. Someone somewhere is gonna have a configuration that just doesn't work. If your PC does not run the game, even if you have what few things are listed on the box, there is a very real possibility that the game does not support your PC configuration. That is why gaming on a PC is often difficult. You can't just buy a game and expect it to work. There may something you can do to make it work, might be as simple as putting your sound card in a different PCI slot, or removing a firewire card... or putting your RAM in different slots, maybe a BIOS setting... you just don't know until you figure out what's causing the problem. The game works just fine and there are people out there can attest to that.

shadrack wrote:
Shame on me for having a laptop that runs it at 1440X900 with AA and 60 fps.

Aye, I'm running a non-standard config. (Read: Laptop) It's probably
something they didn't bother to check against in their labs when they
were debugging. The fact I see a lot of people reporting similar problems
makes me wonder if there's a underlying pattern to the crashes.

(survey says: Probably)

[ ...and I doubt it's that we're all running well-geared laptops ]

While the video card of a laptop might be a little different (often integrated) there isn't anything inherent about a laptop that would make the game not work.

for the record I'm playing on a Dell m1710:
Core 2 duo 2.0 ghz
2 GB Ram
200 GB Hard drive
512 MB Geforce 7900GTX
1920x1200 resolution
most or all settings high

I haven't crashed in about 25 hours of space game.

That is why gaming on a PC is often difficult. You can't just buy a game and expect it to work. There may something you can do to make it work, might be as simple as putting your sound card in a different PCI slot, or removing a firewire card... or putting your RAM in different slots, maybe a BIOS setting... you just don't know until you figure out what's causing the problem. The game works just fine and there are people out there can attest to that.

This hasn't been true in a long time. Things like directx, directsound, etc eliminated the majority of these issues, if not all of them. I can remember having to set the port of my soundblaster card and information like that in old games, the games no longer interact directly with the hardware. If there is a hardware problem with your PC, its on a driver level or its damaged.

I can get the game to consistently crash. And its not an os issue.

I have Xp home (32bit), and xp pro (64bits). And it crashes no matter what os i boot into. The save doesnt matter either.

Got a decent rig, 9800, q6600, 8gb of ram (though cant use it all for 32 bit)

stevenmc wrote:

"The Title shall function correctly under all configurations it supports" is an actual technical requirement from the publisher. From the box, configurations it supports:
Windows XP SP1 or Windows Vista (Vista 64 ultimate, check)
2.0 Ghz P4 Processor or Equivelent (2.9 ghz dual core 64 bit, check)
RAM: (XP) 512 Megs (Vista) 768 Megs (4 gigs, check)
128 MB Video Card /w 2.0 Pixel Shader Support (Geforce 8800: 512 MB, Pixel Shader 4.0 support, specifically mentioned in the supported video cards as the highest recognized of the Geforce series. Check.)

The requirements say nothing about motherboards, chipsets, sound cards..., and even if it did, what that statement means is that the software "supports" what's listed, and this is the stuff they recommend. It says nothing about how that stuff should be configured. Support does not mean compatibility. It's impossible to make software that runs on every PC out there, it's simply impossible to do. Someone somewhere is gonna have a configuration that just doesn't work. If your PC does not run the game, even if you have what few things are listed on the box, there is a very real possibility that the game does not support your PC configuration. That is why gaming on a PC is often difficult. You can't just buy a game and expect it to work. There may something you can do to make it work, might be as simple as putting your sound card in a different PCI slot, or removing a firewire card... or putting your RAM in different slots, maybe a BIOS setting... you just don't know until you figure out what's causing the problem. The game works just fine and there are people out there can attest to that.

Even so, it's considered a bug by the publisher and the testers. If they can make the game not work, it's a bug. If you can make the game not work (without, you know, fudging the executable or other essential files) it's a bug. We testers do test these things on a variaty of hardware configurations because if it doesn't work IT'S A BUG. There's even a test we do where we take a save file, fudge it in a hex editor, and see how the game reacts. If it crashes, that's a bug. If it does things incorrectly, that's a bug. It's supposed to recognize a corrupted save game and react correctly. Just because game testers didn't find the bug doesn't mean it's not a bug, nor does it mean it's not Maxis's problem. If the game ever does not act correctly, IT'S A BUG.
The reason is that if it doesn't work on a particular system, it's a part of the game code that does something odd that the system just doesn't like. It can be fixed, and you will see it fixed eventually. You can't just blame the hardware unless it is an actual, hardware fault, like the video driver crashing, a library acting funky, or actual hardware failure. Even then, you can work around it. If it's something that cannot be worked around, it's still a bug, just a bug that's waived by the developers as a "Library Issue".

Sadly, Gikon has no idea what he is talking about. No matter how good or maintained your hardware is, a game or software in this matter can never really be optimized for all kinds of hardware combinations and configurations.

Specially sins Dual core, Dual Core Gpu's, Quad core and such are pretty new and therefor pose new problems within other pieces of Operating systems. specially in vista.

Though that doesnt take away that an occosional virus or something can also crash software, but most crashes are game and hardware related. I have a decent end system, a degree in IT and i can keep my computers stable easily. Just, even I get software that crashes once in a while, or software that doesnt crash at all. Older games can cause a BsoD all the time etc.