Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => The Theory of Everything => Topic started by: AlbertV13 on September 18, 2012, 11:23:06 AM

Title: [SMAC]Citizen gender glitch
Post by: AlbertV13 on September 18, 2012, 11:23:06 AM

Hello! I tried to run SMAC on various machines including Pentium I with Windows 98, but there's the same glitch: all citizens faces are female. I'm not sexist, but it ruins all the realism. Can you help me? Patch 4.0 doesn't.

Title: Re: [SMAC]Citizen gender glitch
Post by: Buster's Uncle on September 18, 2012, 03:42:03 PM

This is hard to believe.  May I see a screeny of a planetary council?

But you're not talking about the leaders are you?  Is it possible you're running a mod?

Title: Re: [SMAC]Citizen gender glitch
Post by: Buster's Uncle on September 19, 2012, 02:04:09 AM

...To be clear, you're talkng about in the base screen, yes?  You're getting:
(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=645)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=645)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=645)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=645)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=645)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=647)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=647)

Instead of:
(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=645)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=646)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=646)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=645)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=646)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=647)(http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2280.0;attach=648) at the bottom?  If so, you're probably best off doing a re-install; something loaded wrong the first time.

Petek?  What do you think?

Title: Re: [SMAC]Citizen gender glitch
Post by: AlbertV13 on September 19, 2012, 11:15:32 AM

Yes, exactly. Btw, SMACX is free of this glitch, but I hate studying alien tech when playing without alien factions.

Title: Re: [SMAC]Citizen gender glitch
Post by: Buster's Uncle on September 19, 2012, 01:52:53 PM

Petek is looking into this...

Title: Re: [SMAC]Citizen gender glitch
Post by: Petek on September 19, 2012, 07:10:24 PM

Well, I don't recall ever looking into this aspect of the game before. I found the following behavior in both SMAC and SMAX: Each time you open a base screen, the citizens are (seemingly) randomly assigned as either male or female. That is, if you repeatedly open the readout for a specific base, the assignment of male/female citizens changes. The difference between male and female Talents is obvious. However, that's not true for regular workers. At first I thought that all workers were the same gender. I had to magnify the screen to see the difference. The lower part of a female worker's face is slightly narrower than that of a male. I see both male and female workers in the base screen.

So, AlbertV13, that does that resolve your issue? Or are you seeing only male Talents and Workers in SMAC?

@Buncle -- Do the citizen icons come from the file newicons.pcx? That's where I found them. Unless there's another corresponding file for SMAX, I would expect the behavior to be the same for both games.

HTH

Petek

Title: Re: [SMAC]Citizen gender glitch
Post by: Buster's Uncle on September 19, 2012, 07:38:46 PM

Yes they do; I just checked, and afaik, they appear nowhere else. 

This has to be some strange code hickup, where the randomizer that tells the program to go to the second slot half the time isn't working, so it defaults to the (surprizingly) second slot for workers/talents in newicons.pcx.  If it's worth the trouble, Albert, I recommend googling for a SMAC crack to download and install in place of the faulty copy you have - having installed and found the same problem on multiple systems.  If you own a legitimate copy, I take the position that using a crack is completely ethical.

Title: Re: [SMAC]Citizen gender glitch
Post by: Davyboy on October 01, 2012, 07:36:55 AM

'Scuse me for putting my 2 €cents in but I remember seeing this YEARS ago and I think I know what it is happening.

I played SMAC at length - who didn't - and that's exactly how SMAC basescreens look - 'sexist' if you're so minded. If I could just lay my hands on my original SMAC disk .... but it seems well archived atm.  :-[

However, (and this is the interesting bit) from the PP pov, both games use a common directory for gamefiles but use a combination of methodology in drawing from them. I think this ('sexist') thingy is hardcoded into terran.exe, similar to the weapon effects for SMAX not being available for any flavour of SMAC.

@AlbertV13
I'm afraid you'll have to live with this when playing SMAC. Could you do me a favour? If you ARE playing from a SMAC install patched to V4.0 -- upload a copy of "alpha.txt" from the disk I've got a hunch about something......