What are the details of the interceptor crash?

[Kajak]

The subject says a part of it all, as
i'm trying to get nailed down the difference between the interceptor crash and and the usual mid game game problems with xp. Since they occur at about the same time in the game , I wonder if they are the same bug, since they appear to be related to have a lot going on in the game. .

[MariOne]

Never experienced it personally, but allegedly it was a very specific crash, triggered whenever one of your interceptor scrambles during the AI turn, regardless of game situation & complexity. Also, I figure that it was reported before XP came out at all, thus it outta be totally unrelated.
Some players were immune from it tho, always regardless of complexity...
Some players reported that disabling wheelmouse support solved their problems, but for others this was uneffective...

[Kajak]

Thanks Marione, but what I was looking for was what happens when it crashes, does it freezes, messages,ect.

Sorry I should have been more clear.

[MariOne]

IIRC they said the game just instantly aborted. I think the system was still functional after that, but as I said I never experienced it myself, to my recollection.

Of the active players here, I think that Googlie, after a long immune period, has seen a few of those crashes recently.

[Googlie]

Yeah - I never used to get them with Win Me - in fact, players used to send me their turns for me to play thru the crash and pass the save back to them.

Since I got my new rig with Win XP I get it fairly frequently. The game just freezes on the screen, the mouse can't be moved, and the "Do you wish to advise Microsoft" message comes up in a box.

I have to ctl/alt/del to bring up the task manager, and it shows SMAX as "not responding" - when I end it then it reverts to the desktop.

I'll sometimes go back to the last saved turn and then just move all my interceptors out of the way, accepting the loss that might ensue, or I sometimes use the scenario editor to change factions, let the turn run out, then change back to my faction after the enemy AI has been intercepted by my (then) AI.

I believe from the boards that one or two early XP users did in fact send the notice e-mail to Microsoft, but got the return message that it was Firaxis Games issue, and not a MS issue.

G.

[Kajak]

Googlie, thanks for your reply.
I have a ,perhaps somewhat lacking in proof or to be frank a lot of proof, speculation that interceptor crash was an "early" fore- runner of the more generic crash that us xp users see more often in the mid game at all kinds of places.
I avoid the crashes by cutting down on the tile carry over requirements, patrolling. interceptor defence, long build lists, fog of war, ect.
I did plot the size of save files in several games and found that the crashes did occur at the max sizes. However the max sizes did not much exceed the other sizes by more than 10 percent or so, but they did occur at the the mid game positions.

My speculation is that there is some deep level in the game that limits how many things a tile can handle. As an example , interceptors on alert can create a tile requirement for checking of large numbers, 8-range, 4-out, 4-return, pi- 4 squared= roughly 48 plus the multible for all the other units involved, tiles to overcheck for each fighter. Seems triviale in terms of our currnet computer capabilities.
However, I find that ( patch 4 seems to help) with keeping tile load carry over from one turn to the next tends to avoidhe crashes.
Googlie,
In your game saves for others , How did you get around their crashes or problems???

Googlie,,Palm Springs, indeed, on vacation two weeks ago , We had dinner at Mortons with my very grown up kids, great steaks.

[Ned]

Kajak, in 1999, IIRC, I had the problem of interceptor crashes with Alpha Centauri until the version 4 patch came out. When I was trying to debug the issue, I noted that everybody or seemingly everybody that was experiencing the problem had a Dell desktop computer. I had a Dell Pentium II desktop.

The problem re-emerged with the introduction of Alien Crossfire. The problem was fixable on my and many other computers by stopping a program called mswheel.exe related to the wheel mouse. With this program stopped, I was able to play the game with very few crashes even with very large world sizes.

The problems continued when I upgraded my computer my Dell Pentium IV with Windows ME. I still had to disable mswheel.exe to play Alien Crossfire.

When I upgraded to XP last year, the interceptor crash problem reemerge. In XP, there was no mswheel.ese program to disable.

However, I discovered that the crashes occurred only in games larger than "huge." If I ran the game on huge worlds and smaller, I had no crash problems at all. The game was the most stable I never experienced.

However, something has happened since I upgraded my graphics card to a Radeon 9700. The late game now reliably "locks up." I have isolated the lock up to the end-of-movement of particular units. I have been able to bypass the problem by either eliminating the unit or by upgrading it. It is interesting to note that the the control-alt-delete application screen indicates that Alien Crossfire is "running" even though it appears to be locked up.

Going back to original crash problem in 1999, I was sometimes able to avoid the interceptor crash if I changed resolutions. For example, if I was only running at 1024 x 768, I could continue to game if I restarted it and played it through the interceptor crash on 800 by 600. I lost this ability, IIRC, with Alien Crossfire.

The reason I tried changing resolutions in the first place is that I noticed that the game seemed to zoom in when it launched an interceptor. I thought, correctly it seems, that if I began the game in the same resolution that the game is trying to switch ("zoom in") to, there would be no crash. Well, it worked.

Just a question to you, are your experiencing interceptor crashes when the game is run at world sizes at huge or less?

[Willem]

Re: What are the details of the interceptor crash?

Originally posted by Kajak
The subject says a part of it all, as
i'm trying to get nailed down the difference between the interceptor crash and and the usual mid game game problems with xp. Since they occur at about the same time in the game , I wonder if they are the same bug, since they appear to be related to have a lot going on in the game. .

You are aware the Firaxis has released a patch that is supposed to resolve any conflicts that occur with XP? Youi can find it at their website.

[Kajak]

Yes , I'm aware of the parch 4 from fireaxis have installed and played with the game a number of times since. You'll note in the release lit. that the problems fixed remain un-numerated.
It has helped, ( quite a bit as far as I can tell) but not eliminated the problem, so my seemingly very hard question remains, what happens to the drat macmine when your interceptor scrambles, freezes, goes to the desk top with what error message ???
My reason is simplistic, I guess, but the closer we can nail these bugs perhaps were can get the powers that be to fix them.
Ned ,I've Aways played at huge, since I've discovered I'm a 'builder" by nature. I really hate when someone starts shooting at me when I'm still trying to find out where I'm at. I've only ever had a crash once associated with an interceptor, and it was on defend alert and launched. I've had the crashes in all sorts of actions , all at the mid game level. Please review for a few moments some of the last couple months xp problem threads, other than the poor old voxel up and running problems.