PRACX v1.10 Release

[PlotinusRedux]

You are mistaken. I am Good Spock, aka Cool Spock. ^_^

Sorry, it's a universal law of alternate dimensions and twins that goatee = evil.  Not to mention the whole asking for my "agonizer" thing...

[Lord Avalon]

Isn't that a Punishment Sphere you're building over there? It seems similar to our agony booth.

[Mart]

Mart--I'm not able to reproduce that, and offhand I can't think of anything I changed that might cause that.  If you find a pattern that seems to make it happen or can think of anything that might help me reproduce it, please let me know--that's the kind of thing I have to be able to reproduce to track down.

It may be my mouse driver issue. It is, that it just happened around this time I started using one of the patch versions. I will have to check the driver and stuff around it.
I have Mad Catz RAT-5 at the moment (for fast text editing, which I had to do on some exam... software engineering is more demanding than a shooter game I played some such games occasionally, but never needed a mouse like that...). Sadly, having MSI machine does not help. Their support for Win 8.1 is lacking a bit. Yet still, this is my favourite type of hardware, having the second one from them and maybe another in the future. They just do these few little things so well, it's difficult to find anything better for medium price.

I installed 1.04 and map works smoother - this is my impression. The default zoom was below 20 (not 21) and it was 19, cause I set it so before, I think.
And wheel scrolling was 0? I do not remember now.

[PlotinusRedux]

Mart--I use the RAT 7 myself--it's the most adjustable (to fit my hand) mouse I've seen.  So I don't think it would be the RAT driver, though I'm using Windows 7, not 8.

[Mart]

Mart--I use the RAT 7 myself--it's the most adjustable (to fit my hand) mouse I've seen.  So I don't think it would be the RAT driver, though I'm using Windows 7, not 8.

There must be something in my hardware/software combination, cause I also noticed now such strange behaviour in firefox. So I am going to look for the problem over there.
... or is it nasty adware?

[Yitzi]

I noticed that the scroll wheel for zooming is not properly disabled/transferred to the menu when there is a scenario editor menu (e.g. create unit or modify techs) open.

[Mart]

I tried to play on map 180x360, but zooming by the wheel crashes the game.
Maps up to 256 size seem to work ok.
Is it expected?

There are large maps in download area:
Link

[PlotinusRedux]

Mart--what screen resolution?

[Mart]

I tried some more settings, it crashes at resolutions:
1600x900
1360x768
1024x768

and it is not the zooming by wheel, buttons "z" and "x" crash the game the same.
I could, however, flatten the view by <shift>+<ctrl>+<z>, also <TAB> worked, I could get a windowed game, play some unit moves, then return to full screen and play further.
And the game works, it seems, as long as zooming is not attempted.

I have also zoom levels set to 19, let me check other levels...
===
I tried also zoom levels: 7 and 3,
and turned off "details when zoomed out"
they crash when zooming the same.

Can it be, that some of the variables have problem with values above 256? Some 1-byte?
===
Maybe not... game works with such large maps.
I checked map dragging with right mouse button, and it works ok.

=========
I have more finds:

These work:
199x256
200x256

these does not work:
201x256
202x256

Then thinking, that it is connected to number of tiles, I tried other map ratios, that all do not work:
48x512
49x512
50x512
51x512
100x512
101x512

and there is a catch - to make such maps, they must be declared in alphax.txt, what I did, cause otherwise in "custom size" when you enter a value larger than 256, game defaults to 256.

[PlotinusRedux]

v1.05 released, fixes zooming with very large maps (the issue Mart found above) and a minor issue with calculating the lower scroll bound of the map.

If you're curious, Mart, I hadn't considered that maps could be large enough to not fit completely on the screen at any zoom level given rounding the game does when zooming.  In such cases, the attempt to find a zoom level at which the entire map map fit led to a zoom level so low that the pixel size of each tile rounded down to 0, leading to a division by 0 fault.  To fix, I just honored the game's existing clamp at 1/8th zoom.  If you're trying to get screen shots of a very large map, note that the higher your resolution, the larger the map you can completely fit on the screen even with the 1/8th zoom clamp.

[new2ac]

I can not apply this patch with 32 bit Windows XP.  I know it is a somewhat older unsupported OS, but it is still in use by many.  I have 64 bit OSs on the same PC, but I installed this on 32 bit Windows XP because this is a Win98 game and have many old apps I use with 32 bit Windows XP.  I would prefer not to have to reinstall this on 64 bit XP or 64 bit Win7.

I had to go into 64 bit Win7 just to manually apply this patch using pracxpatch.exe at the cmd command line prompt, as pracxpatch.exe is not a valid Win32 application.  However, this patch's DLLs are also 64 bit, as I get an exception about not being able to use GetTickCount64 with Kernel32.dll when starting SMACX and loading this patch's DLLs.  I verifed that the DLLs are the problem with WinDbg.

Therefore, I need 32 bit versions of the EXEs and DLLs in this patch.  Worst case I could compile the source for 32 bit, but I found source code for version 1.04 of this patch, not this 1.05 one.

[PlotinusRedux]

This was all  compiled as 32-bit, new2ac.  I've been up all night, I'll look into this more once I've slept.  In the meantime, if you would, turn off your anti-virus, re-download the install, and run it, and tell me if that solves your issue or not.  If you're not comfortable doing that, I understand.

GetTickCount64 refers to the return value, not the library--it is supposed to exist in Kernel32.dll.

[new2ac]

No automatic anti-virus scanning was enabled, and this patch I downloaded does not seem corrupt.  MD5sum of what I downloaded from this post is:

06680cd830c0d6b4a575197535ef4b7d  PRACXv105.exe

Also, there would not be a GetTickCount64 message from a 32 bit DLL.  I remember a posting by Microsoft that recent Visual Studio compilers can not create code for XP, or if that is not the problem, then you may have just mistakenly configured your compiler for 64 bit when you thought is was otherwise, then posted that 64 bit patch.  Remember, pracxpatch.exe only worked in 64 bit OS for me.

[PlotinusRedux]

Also, there would not be a GetTickCount64 message from a 32 bit DLL.

Like I said, the 64 refers to the return value, not the library, it's a function in kernel32.dll.  If I compiled it as 64 bit it wouldn't work at all as it is merged with the 32-bit SMAX code without a processor mode switch.

Googling GetTickCount64 shows the problem though--the function only exists on Windows Vista and later.  I'll switch it to run time loading with an OS version check later today--that should fix it.  I must sleep now.

[DrazharLn]

@new2ac,

Function reference for GetTickCount64: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724411%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Definitely in kernel32.