When I launched Spore this afternoon I was prompted to patch my game. I allowed the patch to download, and the iPatch application started up. The progress bar got to about 95%, and then it appeared to freeze - it stayed there for a long time, and the Spore icon on the dock was flagged "Not Responding."

Leaving it like that, I searched on the Internet and found a few posts from other people who seemed to be having the same problem. In most cases they are talking about killing the iPatch process and then having problems.

DON'T KILL THE IPATCH PROCESS.

If you wait long enough the patch will finish. Really. And then you won't dork up your game.

How long did you wait? I'm waiting for 30 minutes now and it still seems to hang.

I have been waiting over a half hour as well. Guess I'll just keep it running in the background if it has eventually finished on other people's machines.

My computer just froze completely. I rebooted and had to reinstall Spore. My savegames seem fine. For now I will just ignore the update and wait for a solution.

Mine took around 20 minutes. I don't know what causes the "hang" so I can only speculate about why some machines would take longer than others. But so far pretty much every post I have seen where people killed the patch, it resulted in a damaged installation.

Well it was worth a try. Fortunately, reinstallation went smoothly and I can continue to play.

OK, my Mac update took about 8 minutes in total. But since the progress bar is only so long, it does stop for a while now and then.

I allayed my fears by opening the Activity Monitor with All Processes sorted by CPU usage in the top bit, and Disk Activity in the bottom bit. When the iPatch progress bar appeared to freeze, I could still see lots of complicated patterns of disk activity occurring. Gave me piece of mind and helped my patience.

It will likely use up one of your installs too. Isn't that nice?

I left mine to patch while I went to class.

I'll edit and update on how it went when I get home, *hopes*

Edit: I left it to patch while I was at class, screen was black when I got home but I reset my computer and then things were working fine.

Thank you very much for the info. I was tempted to force quit the patch, but I guess I'll just wait it out. Very annoying!

Too late for me, I killed the hanging process and reported the problem to Apple via the OS's auto-report feature.

Guess I'll need to re-install when I get home.

Me too, I checked the Activity monitor and it was not responding, now its broken, it says it cannot find necessary files.

Does anyone know what to do to reinstall and not lose my save files? I did a spotlight and i couldnt find anything that looked like save files.

Thanks

Yeah I force quit the ipatcher tool. Is there anyway to remove the patch and try again, so I don't have to reinstall my game?

tunktunk wrote: I allayed my fears by opening the Activity Monitor with All Processes sorted by CPU usage in the top bit, and Disk Activity in the bottom bit. When the iPatch progress bar appeared to freeze, I could still see lots of complicated patterns of disk activity occurring. Gave me piece of mind and helped my patience.

dstreelm wrote:... I checked the Activity monitor and it was not responding ...

Yes, while my update was running, and the progress bar froze, the Activity Monitor flagged iPatch as "Not Responding", but this was when its CPU usage was very high, so I just assumed the patcher was "thinking". Eventually (after several minutes) CPU usage went down, the "Not Responding" tag went away, the the Disk Activity started going crazy. In the end it worked fine (although I haven't yet had a chance to encounter the 'missing ocean texture' glitch yet).

tunktunk wrote:

dstreelm wrote:... I checked the Activity monitor and it was not responding ...

Yes, while my update was running, and the progress bar froze, the Activity Monitor flagged iPatch as "Not Responding", but this was when its CPU usage was very high, so I just assumed the patcher was "thinking".

I checked activity monitor several times while iPatch seemed to be frozen, and CPU usage was extremely low. System wide 5-10% was being used. I don't deny what happened to you, but at least for me, there was no indication that iPatch was really doing anything.


I gotta say, this is the first time in my life where an update or patch has only one chance to work. It seems like asking for trouble even if you don't have a really oddly behaving patching-app.