my only real gripe with this game that impacts my willingness to play it is the Freedom cheat.

here i am with this limitless potential, but there's a catch. i can't use it in-game. i spent over an hour making a finely tuned Metal Slug tank, but can never use it in-game (at least it uploaded to the servers...)

or the fact that i spent 2 hours on my replica of the Outlaw Star (seen in sig) but that won't submit to the servers and of course, i can't use it in-game.

doing some scrounging around, comparing file sizes to see if it was just too big or something i've found something that's interesting.

versus something that's almost full complexity and will easily submit to the servers and is usable in game, the outlaw star is a mere 0.3kb larger.

that's such a tiny fraction larger than other files. is it really that much for the servers/game to handle?

at least let me control if over-complex things show up in-game, via an option or only letting over-complex things in if i'm using them, i.e. over complex creature i control or detailed spaceship to explore the cosmos.

i just find it really discouraging that i spend all this time on something i can't even use. Stats aren't even affected by it either, since stats in creatures phase don't "stack" and in Civ, vehicles are always ruled by the portions of 100% and UFO's are merely floating cosmetic bricks.

gameplay isn't affected and i'm pretty sure processing doesn't take that much more of a hit when taking filesize into consideration.

please, can this be fixed eventually or explained why it could NEVER be possible (cuz then i'll stop using the Freedom code).

basicaclly:

tl;dr
Freedom cheat won't let me use creations, fix it.

thank you, oh so much in advance. and fantastic speedy work on the patch that came out today.

Bad things might happen if you were to load really over-complex creations and actually use them in your game. Like, imagine it trying to render out a city full of them. Heck, even having a bunch on the screen in creature phase, the sheer number of animation tweens and such involved would cause your machine to grind to a halt if it doesn't crash outright.

I would like to see an option to SHARE over-complex creatures and other creations, but I'm not upset they can't be used in the game.

it should be my choice if i want to use them in game though.


also, loading the spore card doesn't take any longer than any other creation's card, so that's why i don't think it's that big of a strain.

It can be a lot bigger strain. File size doesn't give a good depiction of how complex something is, that's designed to be small to make sharing easy. Believe me, having a lot of really complicated creations would create all kinds of problems, and I can understand EA wouldn't want to give the option of potentially breaking the game that way.

the spore cards load the creations in 3D. my point is in my previous post is that there isn't any time difference in loading the 3D model of the full-view of the card in the sporepedia in-game.

if it can load it at the same speed there, why not in-game while playing?

unicorn wrote:the spore cards load the creations in 3D. my point is in my previous post is that there isn't any time difference in loading the 3D model of the full-view of the card in the sporepedia in-game.

if it can load it at the same speed there, why not in-game while playing?

What they are trying to get through your head is having the option to make a decision in a game that was marketed as having basically no limits and full of you making decisions is a stupid request.

wait what? that last remark made no sense and was contradictory.

Complexity is based off polygon count. There's a reason it's there because likely it's to prevent the engine from having a heart attack and your computer from coughing up a lung.

You're right - it can load things quickly. That's not an issue. What is an issue is the unpredictability of everything else that may be loading as well. One object that has 1 million polygons is no problem. 100 objects with 1 million polygons each... that's a problem.

Let's put it this way.

You have a brick. It's a very awesome brick carved to look like a giant... pickle. It also weighs 1 ton. It's a big pickle. Now, your trusty pickup truck can certainly carry around your giant 1 ton pickle. But when you go to your friends house to pick them on your way to go bowling, they mention they too have a brick they want to bring along. It's a giant... cucumber-brick and it also weighs 1 ton. Okay, your truck can mostly handle that. The next friend you visit has a giant... banana. Your truck is starting to struggle. The next 3 friends just love giant brick... carrots. Well at this point, your truck's tire explodes, your axle crumples, and your engine overheats when you try moving your load of pickles, bananas, cucumbers, carrots, and vegetarian bowling-loving friends.

That is why EA/Maxis limits you to giant pickles made of aluminum foil that weigh 100 pounds each. It's a heck of a lot easier to deal with 5 giant pickles made out of aluminum foil weighing a total of 500 pounds than it is to deal with 5 giant pickles made out of brick weighing 5 tons.

unicorn wrote:wait what? that last remark made no sense and was contradictory.

That's the problem with texts, sarcasm is lost in the text.

yeah. too bad sarcasm can't be conveyed easily through text.

also.. what's with all the pickles and cucumber talk. in place of all the phallic things that really invade spore?

i still don't think it's an issue of that though. the filesize should convey that there's a larger chunk of polygons, but since the only information saved in the files are the algorithms by which to recreate objects.. maybe it'd take longer to crunch the problem out. w/e

i just want to use my outlaw star and other complex creations for personal use. haha

surely i'm not the only one that wants a detailed spore


plus my computer can handle it

As discussed already, but more to the point, it comes down to processing power. The complexity rating is not calculated for file size, but reder difficulty. This is why increasing the skeletal by polygon parts, ie the back/arms etc increases it alot more than simple spites like feathers and such. Being a graphics artist, only a few K of data can add alot more time to a render. The stored data is very simple, but calculating it out to make a visual image is where the system get's bogged.

well dang, you make a good case. and confirm the little devil dancing in the back of my mind. haha.

there's gotta be a way though. why give us the freedom if it's just the sporecard and in most cases you can't even send it to the servers?

The way is called "Wait until we're all got deco-core CPUs, the engine limitations are increased, and you have enough GPU horsepower to do a real time render of Wall-E."

Then you can worry about why your thousand ton pickle isn't available to play instead of your one ton pickle.

1st off, wall-e was awful.

2nd i have a high-end computer, so raw processing power isn't even an issue for me.

unicorn wrote:1st off, wall-e was awful.

2nd i have a high-end computer, so raw processing power isn't even an issue for me.

It is if you're trying to render something like Wall-E. Do you honestly think that movie was rendered on a single 4.0 Ghz quad core processor with 4 GB ram using quad SLI?

Here's another story. I'll make it brief this time. You have cube. A cube has 6 sides. If you take 8 cubes and make a bigger cube, you now have 24 sides. It's not a straight progression - it's exponential.

More than that, they're not going to remove limits just because you have the horsepower. There are usually other factors beyond purely hardware that come into play. Memory limits, engine limits, pipeline efficiency, blah blah blah pickles. You could have the biggest toughest meanest truck around... but if only 6 giant pickles fit in it, you're not going to get more than 6 giant pickles in it.