Can't use SMAX

[Supernaut]

Hi. I've got the GOG Planetary Pack and have been playing merrily for years on different PCs. But suddenly my copy of Crossifre has gone wonky. It loads OK but my cities and units aren't visible (which is kind of a problem). I have reinstalled and still get the same problem. SMAC seems to be working fine. I don't think I did anything to my PC so can't figure out what's caused it. Any ideas?

[MysticWind]

How did this thread get posted during the outage

[Buster's Uncle]

It appears the hacker went away -last active the day before the OP here- and then something happened to the server for a while...

---

-Stumped as to the OP's problem, but these things are often fixed by a reinstall.

[MysticWind]

How did the server recover, did your ISP resolve things?

[Buster's Uncle]

I do not know, and would only get an unhelpful auto-reply if I bothered to ask.  Those guys suck, and we'd have left iFast for Digital Ocean in 2013 if I had my way.

[Geo]

The forum is back?
It's a genuine miracle!
Let's travel forward!!

[Green1]

I do not know, and would only get an unhelpful auto-reply if I bothered to ask.  Those guys suck, and we'd have left iFast for Digital Ocean in 2013 if I had my way.

This is/was a legit problem happening around that time. A Windows 11 update makes SMAX crash when it loads up a map. Digging further, it's an ancient bug with SMAX brought out by the recent update. Vanilla SMAC is unaffected.

EA, Steam, and GoG are AWOL on this because the only ones with knowledge of the ancient texts were all on here and CFC. A few on reddits and various discords.

[Buster's Uncle]

I see I missed that the OP had already tried a reinstall.  I better ping Petek, king of installation troubleshooting.  I should have well before now, anyway.

[Green1]

Currently, according to various discords and reddit, the ONLY way of getting around it short of booting from a Win 10 or earlier computer is installing Thinker Mod and a bit of fiddling. But I may be behind on times.

[Buster's Uncle]

Well Petek pinged via email anyway.  You never know.

Supernaut, he'll ask what operating system version - example, I'm in Windows 11.  It would be great if a solution that didn't involve spending any money or pirating could be worked out for this crucial issue.

[Dio]

A user on Reddit produced an alleged patch for stock SMAX about two months ago. I have not tried the patch, but a potential solution exists for the stock game.

[Buster's Uncle]

Link please?

[Dio]

Link please?

The user provided updates on their patcher in the comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/alphacentauri/comments/1kazne5/another_windows_11_fix/

[Lord Avalon]

It was mentioned on Reddit, but I'll add here: it's Win11 24H2 where MS made a little change which caused SMAX to crash. Supposedly SMAC works, though (I'm still on Win10, so I am not speaking from experience).

Alternatively there's the Thinker mod, which of course changes the game. Then there's creating a virtual machine and installing an older version of Windows to run SMAX, or a Linux + Wine situation (VM or not).

[Green1]

Link please?

The user provided updates on their patcher in the comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/alphacentauri/comments/1kazne5/another_windows_11_fix/

You might want to mirror it.

A lot of people moved their stuff to github merely because github is stable and less likely to disappear if something happens to hosting. But even that can go away.

In the Cataclysm DDA community, there was a popular 3rd party tile set. It was so popular, 90 percent of the content creators used it and one of the first thigs people would do on install is get that tile set. It became iconic with the game and many would not play with default.

However, after years of drama between the developers and the maintainer of the tile set, the tile set maker erased everything. Drama that would be paragraphs to go over and I am sure those interested can go digging on Redits and Discourses. It was only because others had it hosted other places that others took over and you can still get that tile set and it's still updated.

Personally, I think GOG and Steam need to take action versus EA if they are selling a product that does not work with Windows 11 current version as is. If it wasn't EA, I guarantee it would have been taken off sale by now. Either that or say, "Only for use in Linux/wine, vintage systems, or Steam deck.

And as the game gets older, this will become more common. For instance, did you know because of ancient copy protection, the only surviving copies of the Commodore 64 version of Archon and Archon II are mostly pirated unless you have a bonafide, working Commodore 64 with 1541 drive that still works 40 years later?