"y"?

[xobsidianx]

One of my favorite units is the drop colony pod. However, when I play either alien faction and add the drop pods to the colony pod on the unit construction chart all the text changes to line after line of the letter "y" with a dot above each of the arms of the "y," and the game crashes. This problem does not exist when I design drop colony pods for the human factions.

Reloading smacx did not help.

I discovered that some of my microsoft word files were ruined when the text was replaced by line after line of the 2 dotted "y."

Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone know if there is a fix for this.

I ran 3 up to date virus programs and no virus was found.

Thanks.

[Patashu]

Have you patched it?

[Chaos Theory]

That "y" is a character that frequently exists in places that memory hasn't been allocated or initialized. I still can't tell you exactly what's causing the problem, but the symptom's direct cause is access of invalid memory.

[Flubber]

Your response reminded me of having a similar thing happen--I had had my computer turned on for a few days straight and I had a bunch of "y"'s appear and then I strated to get incomplete graphics in pop-ups while playing smax--I could not even save as the " save" button would not show up-- I rebooted and all was well again-- I was told that I might have overfilled my " buffer" ( whatever that means)

If you reloaded smax, you probably would have rebooted as well so I don't know the solution for you-- I have never had this problem be specific to a specific unit-- I would simply say to reboot, run a virus scan and then try reinstalling smax and all patches again. The game does not NORMALLY do this but I don't know what your specific problem is.

[Petek]

I used the scenario editor to design a drop colony pod while playing as the Caretakers. Worked fine--no odd symbols.

xobsidianx--What reactor do your drop colony pods have? I used fission. Were you using fusion or higher? If so, what happens if you design a fission drop colony pod?

[Alex]

If it is something related to memory leaks, you could try to get a little program to free some RAM. It might help.