Alien DPC Bug?

[xobsidianx]

One of my favorite units is to put drop pods on a colony unit. However when I play either alien faction this causes the game to crash in a very strange way. This is what happens: I get line after line of "y" with 2 dots above each "y," and the game crashes. These symbols appear even where there is no text replaced.

I am not sure if it is the addition of drop pods that causes the crash or the upgrading on the reacter since I do both at the same time.

Not only is this bug in the original smacx, it is also in the newly released pack [forgot the name but it is the package that inlcudes smacx and other games].

Once again, it only happens with alien colony pods.

Has anyone else experienced this and is there a fix?

Thanks to all who resond.

[Darsnan]

Hi xobsidianx,

can you give a little more background on this bug? Is this happening at the beginning of a game where you have replaced the original CP's with your Drop CP's via an alphax.txt modification, or is this happening after you upgrade the unit to Drop status after discovering the prerequisite tech for Drop Pods? Reason I am asking is that I recently tried to give everyone a fast start in a PBEM game by giving everyone speeder CP's instead of regular CPs, and it crashed the game similar to what you are describing. As soon as I added just one regular CP to each Faction, the game was happy.
If this isn't it, then have you tried adding Abilities other than Drop Pods to the Alien CP's, such as Speeder capability, and see if the game will accept this? My thought here may be that SMAX simply wasn't set up to handle the graphical upgrades to the Alien CP icon, as are the human CP's. I never tried to upgrade/ modify the Alien CP's myself, and am now very curious as to if there is indeed a software problem with the icon! Please let us know, as we are very interested in finding out the answer!


D

[xobsidianx]

When it happens

The drop pods and fusion upgrade are added to the colony unit after the technologies are discovered. And yes, I forgot to mention, I try to upgrade the chassis to a speeder.

The only changes I have made in alpha.text are to prevent global warming. I doubt that would effect the problem.

[Darsnan]

Re: When it happens

Originally posted by xobsidianx
The drop pods and fusion upgrade are added to the colony unit after the technologies are discovered. And yes, I forgot to mention, I try to upgrade the chassis to a speeder.

You tried to upgrade to a speeder and what happened? Same problem?


D

[xobsidianx]

Yes

Same problem, but note, I upgrade to speeder, drop pods, and reacter at the same time. If I did each one individually, I don't know what the effect would be.

About the "new threads," my mistake. I know better. This one should end up in the right place.

[The Mad Monk]

Just to clarify: are you talking about changing a unit on the map into a different configuration, or just changing a design in the workshop? I ask because AFAIK, you cannot upgrade a unit into a different chassis type (in this case, a speeder).

[Mead]

I used to get the Terran.exe crash bug after I put drop pods on my Colony Pods.

It got so bad that I uninstalled the game and then reinstalled from the CD.


This happened to me a long time ago with SMAC. Since then, I have not used drop pods on Colony Pods (out of fear or superstition) even though I have upgraded to SMAX.


I will still make Colony Pods on Needlejet chassis, once I get fusion (and its cheaper). That doesn't seem to make my system crash.


Mead

[Mead]

Double Post