Help with game freeze

[KevinLancaster]

I was playing SMAX from GOG with scient's Unofficial Patch 1.0 and in the middle of my game it froze after I ended my turn. I tried the game without the patch and the same thing happened. I was wondering if anyone could help; I attached the save file.

Also, why does scient's patch add a "Welcome to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" message box when starting the game?

[Petek]

Hi Kevin,

Welcome to alphacentauri2!

I can reproduce your freeze. It occurs right after the Gatling Infantry outside Ironholm completes its turn. Usually a freeze (as opposed to a crash) means the game has gone into a loop that doesn't terminate. I couldn't figure out the cause. Yitzi or kyrub might be able to look at your game in a debugger and see what's going on. This may be an unpatched bug.

The "Welcome to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" message is generated by GOG's version of the game. If you want to suppress it, open the Jackal.txt (found in the main SMAC folder) in Notepad and find the following section:

Code: [Select]

#FILEFIND_NOCD
#xs   320
#caption Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Welcome to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
Add a semi-colon at the beginning of each line and save the file.

[KevinLancaster]

Yeah, but the message doesn't show up if I don't use the unofficial patch; it just goes straight into the game.

[Yitzi]

I reproduced the freeze; it's due to a loop at 4B8455-69; unfortunately, with no idea of what that code segment is supposed to do, I have no idea how to fix it.

[Petek]

Yeah, but the message doesn't show up if I don't use the unofficial patch; it just goes straight into the game.

Yes, that opening message behaves oddly. After installing and uninstalling GOG's version multiple times, sometimes I get the message, other times I don't.

[Lord Avalon]

I don't know if this is the issue, but there are two places in jackal.txt with a no CD message:  the section starting with #FILEFIND_NOCD and the one with #CDNOTFOUND.  Comment out both.