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Author Topic:   Some problems...

DerekM posted 03-31-99 12:29 PM ET
OK, sorry if some of these have been covered.
I'm playing on a Compaq Presario Pentium II 350MHz.
1) The sound has a nasty tendency to skip since I've installed the 3.0 patch. Before, it would catch up every once in a while, but now it is constant. I've turned the music off now, and am seriously considering turning off the voice overs, because they skip so much.
2) Sometimes in the unit designer, after I've made a number of changes, I will get the message, "Cannot rename default unit Scout" when I have made no attempt to rename it. If it is marked as obsolete, it will suddenly become current.
3) When moving units with the mouse, the cursor will change to a thick arrow as I drag it to the destination square. Sometimes, though, the unit will refuse to move, although the cursor is still in move mode. I have to click on the unit to get it to reset, and then usually I can move it.
4) Is there any way to turn off the redesign of all of your units when you discover a new reactor?
DerekM posted 03-31-99 03:38 PM ET
Um, if anybody has any idea about the sound, I would appreciate it. It worked OK before 3.0. Now it stutters so badly that I can't listen to it. The movies seem fine -- it is just the in-game music and voice overs.
BTW, the search for this forum doesn't seem to work. I ran a search for "SMAC" on all forms, and came up with 0 matches.
tfs99 posted 03-31-99 05:50 PM ET
DerekM,
I don't know if this will help your sound problem or not. It turns out that Win9x has a performance problem when resizing its virtual memory swapping file.
When I found out about this, I decided to set my swapping file to a fixed size of x3 my physical RAM (i.e, 192M). I set both the minimum and maximum size for the file to be the same. Thus, any resizing would never occur and thus no performance hit. I also defragged my hard disk after setting the permanent swap file size.
It seems to have improved performance and I haven't run into many memory related problems, which is what your problem sounds like it could be.
Take a look at this thread:
http://alpha.owo.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/002159.html
Especially look at the posts by Xentropy where he explains how to set your VM swap file. That is, if you don't know already.
Hope this helps and ...
SMAC n ... Ted S.
DerekM posted 04-01-99 09:08 AM ET
Actually, I finally found some posts suggesting that I set EAX and D3SD, or something like that, equal to 0 in alpha centauri.ini. I did that, and it seems to have fixed the sound problem.
I'm going to check my swap file and see if it is fixed in size, however, and see if it helps stop the game's drastic slowdown after long play sessions. I'll let you know how it goes.
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Author	Topic: Some problems...
DerekM	posted 03-31-99 12:29 PM ET OK, sorry if some of these have been covered. I'm playing on a Compaq Presario Pentium II 350MHz. 1) The sound has a nasty tendency to skip since I've installed the 3.0 patch. Before, it would catch up every once in a while, but now it is constant. I've turned the music off now, and am seriously considering turning off the voice overs, because they skip so much. 2) Sometimes in the unit designer, after I've made a number of changes, I will get the message, "Cannot rename default unit Scout" when I have made no attempt to rename it. If it is marked as obsolete, it will suddenly become current. 3) When moving units with the mouse, the cursor will change to a thick arrow as I drag it to the destination square. Sometimes, though, the unit will refuse to move, although the cursor is still in move mode. I have to click on the unit to get it to reset, and then usually I can move it. 4) Is there any way to turn off the redesign of all of your units when you discover a new reactor?
DerekM	posted 03-31-99 03:38 PM ET Um, if anybody has any idea about the sound, I would appreciate it. It worked OK before 3.0. Now it stutters so badly that I can't listen to it. The movies seem fine -- it is just the in-game music and voice overs. BTW, the search for this forum doesn't seem to work. I ran a search for "SMAC" on all forms, and came up with 0 matches.
tfs99	posted 03-31-99 05:50 PM ET DerekM, I don't know if this will help your sound problem or not. It turns out that Win9x has a performance problem when resizing its virtual memory swapping file. When I found out about this, I decided to set my swapping file to a fixed size of x3 my physical RAM (i.e, 192M). I set both the minimum and maximum size for the file to be the same. Thus, any resizing would never occur and thus no performance hit. I also defragged my hard disk after setting the permanent swap file size. It seems to have improved performance and I haven't run into many memory related problems, which is what your problem sounds like it could be. Take a look at this thread: http://alpha.owo.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/002159.html Especially look at the posts by Xentropy where he explains how to set your VM swap file. That is, if you don't know already. Hope this helps and ... SMAC n ... Ted S.
DerekM	posted 04-01-99 09:08 AM ET Actually, I finally found some posts suggesting that I set EAX and D3SD, or something like that, equal to 0 in alpha centauri.ini. I did that, and it seems to have fixed the sound problem. I'm going to check my swap file and see if it is fixed in size, however, and see if it helps stop the game's drastic slowdown after long play sessions. I'll let you know how it goes.