infiltrator bug?

[curio]

After not playing AC for the last year, I reinstalled it (XP) the other day. Started playing (the game's as great as I remembered), but ran into a problem.

When I built Empath's Guild and got elected governor, the game told me I had infiltrators, but I couldn't access any of the info from the other factions. Could still access my ally's info, though.

Tried with and without the patch. Tried reinstalling the whole thing. No luck.

I was hoping someone out there would have some ideas.

[vyeh]

Could you post a save?

Petek might have an idea, but I'm sure he'll ask for a save.

[curio]

Here is a save file. Hopefully there's something interesting in there.

[curio]

And just in case, here's another save file.

[curio]

Of course, right after posting those, I tried again and figured it out. Wrong entries in ini files give me headaches.

Sorry and thanks.

[vyeh]

What was wrong in the ini files? (This could help someone else in the future.)

I opened the two games and was able to infiltrate all of the other factions.

[curio]

It's listed in the instructions from Firaxis for XP. It had confused me since I'm sure I hadn't needed to do this last time. Maybe something with the more recent XP service packs.

Anyways, in the file Alpha Centauri.ini, the default values need to be changed as follows:

ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=0

to

ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1

No idea why it affected the game the way it did, but making that adjustment fixed it. Hope this will be useful to someone at some point.

[vyeh]

Thank you for following up.

Once someone had a problem. Petek and I thought we had a solution, but we never received a response to our inquiry whether the solution worked.

Had we received a positive response, one of us would have added the problem and solution to this forum's FAQ, which is a useful reference.

SMAC is a great game. If you get tired of the standard version, try one of Darsnan's scenarios in this forum. In his latest (a SMAX scenario), the oceans produce -2 nutrients, 2 minerals and 2 energy (representing highly toxic mineral and energy source, a reversal of the standard 1/0/0).