Buffer issues ??

[Flubber]

I have run into a little problem lately.

Sometimes when running Smax the graphics in things like diplo screens, base screens, social engineering tables and most annoying the game save screen are " incomplete". There is stuff just missing. I had not noticed any pattern except that if I rebooted my computer, the problem went away. Now I am noticing that it has happened a on a couple of occasions when I played a number of turns and had left the computer on. This NEVER seems to occurr in the first turn after a reboot and the complexity of what is going on in the game seems to have no impact.

Does anyone know what causes this? I recall once when this was going on, that I received a message about my " buffer" and the game crashed but generally I have just rebooted at the first sign of missing stuff.

I have a 1.2 gig athlon with a nearly empty hard drive ( and IIRC 512 k of Ram) so its not new but it should be able to handle this game easily. I'm generally not running anything else other that Internet explorer, winzip ( and all those cryptic program names that always seem to working away)

Any suggestions welcome-- I figure this is something pretty simple ( just something I do not know)

[Mongoose]

Maybe a problem with screen resloution? What res do you play at?

[johndmuller]

I used to get similar stuff. If I had any other programs running at the same time, killing one or more of them would often relieve the problem, at least enough to save and reboot if I took heed of the warning.

This seems to occur particularly with Win 9x operating systems (you didn't mention what you use), whose memory management degrades over time, and with smaller amounts of memory, like 128MB or less. With 512MB, I would have thought that it would take quite a while to degrade, but apparently it's still possible.

Since I've been using NT4 (and more recently Win2K) to play (with just 256MB), I haven't had that problem and I sometimes have other stuff and/or two games loaded at the same time - each one seems to need about 64 - 80 MB of additional space, although it might be able to handle more than you would think using virtual memory.

If you are not loading up the machine with multiple copies of the game and lots of internet explorer windows and random other programs and are experiencing this crash shortly after rebooting, then I would imagine that you have something loaded that has a serious "memory leak". Screensavers are often a likely culprit; so if you are using one, try turning it off. When I was using NT4, I had to disable mine or else it would blue screen within 24 hours doing nothing at all or crash even quicker or as soon as I resumed SMAC/X if it was loaded and the screen saver had taken over. I continued not using the screensaver under Win2k, so I don't know whther the screensavers would have crashed or not; nor do I know about XP, although it is not very different from W2k, so they probably behave the same.

[Flubber]

Thanks guys

I am using windows ME and will have to check my res settings when I get back to my home computer but they should be standard as I tend not to change things that apperar to be working. As for screen savers I only use the basic ones that come standard with the operating system.

I usually see this problem occurring if the computer has been left on for extended periods, even if the game is one of a few things I am actively running at the moment. As I said earlier, it NEVER arises immediately after a reboot, even if I open several internet explorer windows.


BUT if I am understanding correctly, multiple explorer windows will contribute to this. . . when I play I often have 3 or more windows open . . . poly , cgn, yahoo-- I thought of it as a time saver but not if its crashing the game


So memory degradation is an issue it seems . . . is rebooting the only way to reset this? It seems the solution may be as simple as rebooting regularly but is there a quicker way??

[Blake]

I would be inclined to think it is programs running (not-so-quietly) in the background. Press ctrl-alt-del and kill off most of the running processes, I dont have a WinME handy, but you should only need to leave explorer and systray (but don't quote me on that). If SMAC then runs normally then it's one of the programs which are loading automatically, then use a startup manager or somesuch (I know system mechanic can do it) to selectively disable those programs [from starting at bootup] until the problem goes away. You usually don't need those programs anyway.

[Jeremy Buloch]

Hey Blake have you got my e-mail on FreeAC. My username is Jeremy Buloch and my email is ace_5_@hotmail.com can you take a look at your inbox. Thanks.
-J.B.-

[big_canuk]

It used to happen to me often.

Since I installed a new video card, the problem went away.

I think it may have something to do with poor video drivers, whose sloppiness only affect the game when resources are approching getting maxed out.

bc