Oddball Unit Bug

[Petek]

The attached save file illustrates a bug that comes up from time-to-time. I can't remember whether the cause has been identified and/or fixed. Load the game. If you simply proceed to play, the game will crash after a message about sunspots appears. Now load the game again and open the scenario editor. At coordinates (32,46), 10,16), (19,13) and (24,12) you will see some non-standard units. These units cause the crash. Deleting them avoids the crash. Can it be determined what causes these units to appear and how to avoid them? I'm pretty sure has been discussed previously, but I can't can't recall the outcome.

[Yitzi]

Well, I've found part of your problem:
Somehow, most of the unit data for all the predesigned SMAX units got deleted.  So those units use image number 0 (which is that weird thing you see), and have unit cost 0 (which means that when the AI tries to divide by the unit cost for whatever reason, it crashes.)

As for why that data got deleted, I'm not quite sure.  If you could give me earlier savegames from the same game, that might help.  (Only ones where those units don't appear, though; the best would be if you could provide a savegame where there are SMAX predesigned units such as spore launchers, as close to when the weird units appear as possible.)  It also might help if you could provide your alphax.txt file.  Finally, are you sure you started the game as SMAX?  I'm not sure, but switching from SMAC to SMAX in the middle might also cause the problem.

[Petek]

Thanks for taking a look. The save game isn't mine, it came from this thread on GOG's SMAC forum. I'll post again if I can reproduce the problem or find other information.

[Yitzi]

Ok, let me know if you get more information.