Multiplayer and SMAX crash problems

[Lelle]

Hello. I posted this question originally on the civfanatics forums for SMAC, but I was told that i probably would be able to get more help here, so here it comes:

Me and some friends have desperately been trying to play SMAC over the internet for maybe a week now. It works for three of us, but when the last one connects to a game it gets a lot slower. We haven't really felt like waiting for a game to start, we can start a game, but the loading time is not that nice and we get no messages to drop the last player. He's even tried forwarding all ports to his computer so this is not the problem either.

Today we discovered hamachi, a program to emulate a lan over the internet. But this hasn't been too succesful.
We all use the same version of directx (9.0c), SP2 and everyone has a router (no software firewalls, sp2 firewall unactivated).

Another issue is that I can't start SMAX games, SMAC games work fine and also SMAX quick start, but when I try to customize a game it crashes when I have to choose what rules to play with, doesn't matter if i play with current rules or so.

We can't seem to find any solution for these problems, all help would be appreciated.

[Petek]

I'm not all that familiar with multiplayer issues, but here's a thread that deals with hamachi:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=142291

Regarding your SMAX issue: It could be that your Alpha Centauri.ini file has a problem (since that file would be modified whenever you try to customize a game). Rename this file, then start a new game (which will recreate the .ini file). You might have to add back in certain modifications (such as forceoldvoxelalgorithm=1) to the new .ini file.

If that doesn't help, try playing around with various options on Terranx.exe shortcut's Compatibility tab.

Let me know if any of this isn't clear.

[Lelle]

Thanks for your reply. I got smax to work!
Although I didn't check this thread until now so I reinstalled the game to make it work, but atleast I'll know if this happens again.

Update: We got this to work through a very simple solution, he just reinstalled SMAX. The wierd thing is that single-player games still worked.

Feel free to delete this thread, problem solved.