Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)

Reticulating splines is a ripoff from Sim City. Whenever you create a new city or load an existing one, you see a loading screen with all sorts of status messages that really don't make sense. One of those status messages is "Reticulating splines". For some reason, that's the only one I remember because I really never knew what the heck that meant.

I think that's a joke. I remember that one game I used to play would put up crazy status messages as it was loading/creating a level for you. Such as "Dividing by zero" or "Calculating the Square root of -1"

However a quick google search turned up this gem
"Reticulating Splines: Constructing network based functions that are defined by divisible intervals while approximating said network and composing it of pieces of simple functions defined on subintervals and joined at their endpoints with a suitable degree of smoothness. "

I found this on one blog: Reticulating splines is the process of combining a series of short lines and curves into a longer spline or network of splines. It's a process used in the landscape generator in many computer games. Basically, the engine generates a few small patches of terrain and then interpolates between these.

And this on another: Constructing network based functions that are defined by divisible intervals while approximating said network and composing it of pieces of simple functions defined on subintervals and joined at their endpoints with a suitable degree of smoothness.

But I think in this case it is a cute reference to what you see when The Sims or Sim City is starting up...it always says Reticulating Splines at the bottom which apparently was a joke put in by the programmers since in The Sims games no terrain is actually generated.

In Sim City 2000, they even joked about that. They used a sound file with this woman in a sexy voice saying "Reticulating splines". This was wile creating / loading a city as well. I always thought it was funny.

Bet you didn't expect so many responses to this one ;)

I'm all for putting personality into messages, except...

During this "Reticulating splines…” phase, your PC will become unbearably slow.

Mozy implies that it works in the background, and is pretty non-intrusive, but its not true. It will make your machine dramatically slower, and so obscure messages like this are just annoying.

Mozy's priority should be

1) work
2) don't slow down my interactive work
3) if you must slow me down, tell me why
4) make up cute messages

and don't do #4 until you successfully do #1, 2, and 3

I'm just trying Mozy out - I have been pleased so far. I too wondered what this message meant, although I have to say that on my computer it only appears for a few seconds. I haven't found Mozy too intrusive yet. I haven't noticed the "unbearably slow" effect yet, and that's with 4.5 GB worth of stuff to be backed up. Maybe they've released a new version since your original post that performs better. There are several settings you can adjust having to do with how intrusive it is - I've set mine to use as much as possible in order to get the initial backup done quickly, and still haven't found it slowing my system down too much. However, this is on a computer I don't use a whole lot (I use it mostly as a file server) so maybe that's the difference.

A message that says, "Please wait while I Reticulate those Splines" comes up on the Wii Sims game. It appears after all 5 *star* levels have been reached.

Prior to this message it always gave tips 3 or so that would alternate.

Thanks for the info, I was wondering if it was some secret message that had be decoded! ;>)

I keep getting this message even after 9 hours the program started! Last time I just canceled. It did not do this when I first started using Mozy. Not sure if it is really doing the backup.

Mozy will work with VPN also - just need to configure the proxy correctly and it will work both and and off VPN

I believe that what MOZY is really doing is concatenating data sets, but into separate files, not one contiguous set.

Jeesh! I have just realized that I have been in I.T. for 40 years now!!! I just realized that.

And to think that I had some priority on the meaning of reticulating spines one minute ago.

SC2K played with the term. It was a joke to the Simulator guys.

Sims 2 continues the joke where it says "Re reticulating Splines" and I believe it also says "Re Re Reticulating Splines"

I always thought it had sometime to do with the encryption Mozy does before sending your stuff into the Etherworld. But I like the Sims explanation better. As a programmer, I always appreciate a bit of humor in the otherwise boring software we deal with daily.

It's also in the new SPORE game... but re-tweaked for humors purpose... Now they say:

"Reticulating Spines"

I'm pretty sure it appeared in Alien Breed on the Amiga before Sim City. Long time to remember back though :)

I blame Will Wright. It's been in like every sims game since I can remember. I just recently purchased the apartment life expansion pack for sims 2, and I think it says 'reticulating splines more quietly'.. I expect it in every game and expansion pack.. at least sim related, because it has always been there lol.

Interestingly on a Mac (tried 2 so far), reticulating the splines takes only a few seconds and doesn't slow the machine down noticeably (true even for my mom's eMac with a 500MHz processor.

In the Sims expansion packs, they often change the messages. When you add Makin' Magic it says "Reticulating Unreticulated Splines", along with "Ensuring Transplanar Energy" and other such nonsense. It makes it slightly more interesting to read when the thing is booting up.

Actually Splines are very real, and very useful, reticulated or not :-)... it is the bases of JPEG or MPEG compression where a large quantity of data is approached by a combination of curves (the splines) and the mathematical parameters of the curves functions take less storage then the data they are trying to approximate.
Obviously when doing an approximation, you always loose accuracy, so that is why all jpg creation programs will ask you an % of accuracy.

It is also the reason why jpg compression works very well with "natural pictures" such as landscapes or faces, because the colors vary smoothly from one tint to the other, and hence are easier to be approximated by splines. If you try to compress a cartoon or drawing, however, jpg will be a disaster because it will try to approximate very drastical color changes such as a harsh black line on a yellow face by a curve. It will fail obviously and the cartoon line will become blurry after the compression. Splines cant handle step functions.
Imagine your bitmap as a plane with an x and y axis, but the colors on a z axis. Smooth pictures will be like a smoothly curved landscape, while a cartoon would be all jaggy and with steps and pits.
Gif compression works better with blocks of same colors as it looks for patterns. A natural picture in gif however will look a bit blurry as the smooth color nuances will be lost in finding block patterns.


Does this make sense ?

The big limiter for Mozy is your upload speed. This is often much slower then the download speed. If you look around you will find several sites that will check the upload and download speed of your connection.

thanks for the info. i wondered about those splines. must say, mozy works perfectly for me. amazing. if you have zonealarm, it seems to conflict and cause the system to freeze up after a few hrs. it could be unrelated. i replaced za with comodo and things are back to normal. running mozy at full blast, doesn't seem to slow down my system at all.
- gm

Reticulating splines is a non-sense created by Will Wright, one of the authors of Sim City 2000. Splines are mathematical functions for interpolation and smoothing but it makes no sense to reticulate them (reticulation is a sort of inverse action to splining). Moreover SimCity 2000 did not use splines at all. It is just a wise excuse for time wasting :)

And now, EA SPORTS game Tiger Woods ´09 is also Reticulating Splines... You get the message during a 10 minute wait while the game is generating a face for your golfer based on a picture of yourself... Other nice messages during this time: 'Making mountains of molehills', 'Antagonizing pedestrians', 'Stop watching this, go make a sandwich' and lots more :)

Sim City 2000 actually did have a terrain generator and it did use splines. You could select how hilly or flat you wanted the terrain. Each spline was a horizontal cross section of the terrain. Retculating is defined as forming a network so "reticulating splines" referred to "forming a network of splines" which is a pretty descriptive of their terrain generation process. Other than that, it is fun to say and quickly became a campy joke in the Maxis games.

Oops, the other posters were correct, is was just a cruel Will Wright joke. They must have just been doing a simple fractal generator. I'm so disillusioned ... at least it's still fun to say ... "reticulating splines" ...

Reticulated or not, the latest version 1.14.0.6 seems to have a problem with open files.
After getting "Snapshot Error1", they tell me to go to Options and click "Support for backing up open files". This was already clicked, and failed again. So, I unclicked it, saved, clicked it, expanded my quota by 1 GB, but none of that worked. I have a support call in and will keep you posted.

Till then, I'm REallyTICked off.

Don't expect much from their support. I've always been EXTREMELY dissappointed. I'm a programmer by trade, and I spent an hour today debugging the behavior of a problem I'm experiencing with really large files -- I emailed them a detailed explanation... I got back a canned answer saying "it seems you have a problem with backup speed..."

I was reTICKed myself.

Michael