Is this fixed?

[Vanceone]

Does anyone know whether or not the Needlejet bug in SMAX was fixed? I have SMAX and know that for a while at least if you had an interceptor on patrol, when it was supposed to intercept it crashed the program. Now, I had seen stories about this before on Apolyton a long time ago (I have had the game for at least two years). I just recently downloaded the 2.0 patch, and now things seem to work--emphasis on seem. This bug was not mentioned as being fixed, and I have not heard anyone mention it in a while, so does it exist? CGN's bug list does not list it either, so I hope that the patch fixed it. If not, I will have to change my air defense strats. Thanks!

[Mongoose]

That phenomenon seems only to occur to some people with some system configurations. On my old computer, once I turned off my mouse wheel driver, I stopped having that problem. On my new system, it hasn't ever happened. If it doesn't happen to you, don't worry about it! If it does, try disabling the mouse wheel, if you have one.

[Method]

i heard somewhere it was caused by the no CD hack (???) and so i didn't download it for fear of crashes.

[RedFred]

TKG, I have never had the crack, but I often get the interceptor bug. It cuts in and out unpredictably.

[Googlie]

I have both the no-cd crack as well as an active wheelmouse, and occasionally get the freeze - but funnily enough, only in MP games (I've never had it in SP games, with any PC I've had)

Current rig is a P4 at 1.8G, with 512 MB RAM, GeForce2, and I've had the interceptor crash maybe 3 times (same PBEM) and the northpole freeze maybe a dozen times, all sorts of games. I have also been able to steer players thru the crash when they've sent me their turn before, and my rig has coped with the scramble, then I've saved and sent it back

Go figure!!

G.

[Vanceone]

Well, I don't have the no-cd crack; as I have both cds.... I do have a mousewheel, but I think I turned the driver off, and anyway I got this crash along time before I had a mousewheel. So this is only an occasional bug then? I seem to remember having it happen and trying to restart a save game and the same bug happening over and over (this was a few years ago). And I haven't played MP yet( Decided I wanted to be good enough to beat the computer before trying humans...), so I know it happens in SP as well. I do have an older system, so that might be it.

[RedFred]

Vanceone, check all available fixes and try them. With luck your problems will go away. The fixes should be added to the FAQ floating thread at the top. Briefly they include the already mentioned wheelmouse disable, changing the ForceOldVoxel line, freeing more memory, changing or disabling the game's music, the ever popular reinstall and there might even be one or two more fixes besides.

But if nothing works, play defensively. Keep Ironman=off so that you lose at most one turn. If you repeatedly crash at the same turn, go back to the autosave from the year prior. Try to eliminate the crash by moving your interceptor more than two tiles away from the unit the other faction is attacking. You can still stay close enough to manually intercept the following turn. You can simultaneously harden his target by either upgrading your unit or moving a strong defensive unit over top. This makes suffering the bug seem less 'unfair'. Besides, the AI usually goes for easy targets so sometimes just the upgrade will cause the AI bomber not to attack. Preemptively removing the target unit or the enemy attacking unit in the prior turn are other options.

I suspect Googlie only gets the bug when 'infected' by rigs where the bug occurs such as mine. Players, usually with newer, more powerful rigs like Googlie may be largely exempt from the bug. So if you must allow the game to continue without altering your play from the prior turn, you can try contacting them about loading up your game and 'playing through' the bug for you.