Nathan Baggs' W11 patch

[Buster's Uncle]

Nathan Baggs' W11 patch

V1.2.0

AC2 management knows only that this patch is said to allow SMAX to run on Windows 11.  This is said to also be true of Inducto's Thinker mod -also hosted in AC2 Downloads- but it changes the game more.

https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=384

[bvanevery]

I've read Induktio's technical explanation of the flaw in Alien Crossfire, that the original game made some kind of mistake with an interface that could provide undefined results.  Microsoft just never happened to give undefined results until Windows 11 version 24H2.  I don't know why Microsoft felt it necessary to change something, and it does affect far more legacy apps and games than SMACX.  Microsoft has a long history of handling bug-for-bug compatibility, in part because of the amount of churn they did releasing versions of Windows.  If you had some kind of "insider track" relationship with them, you inevitably did certain incorrect things, because there was no realistic alternative to ship software that actually worked.  Sort of a case of Microsoft publicly cleaning up their act later.

I don't recall all the technical details, but they made sense to me as programmer when I read them.  You can be sure that they'll work in Induktio's own work, the Thinker mod.  He has control over his work and does a reasonable amount of testing for it.  I think his community would know if it wasn't actually working, and would report it.  I get some of his work "downstream" in Will To Power mod, a community I'm a part of, primarily in a playtesting capacity.  AFAIK Alpha Centauri Bear says it works, and that's good enough for me.  He'd know.

I don't know Nathan Baggs' track record, haven't tried his patch, and don't know how many others have been trying it on vanilla SMACX binaries.  I'd be interested to know what his input to Good Old Games is.  The ultimate goal would be for GOG to adopt a patch that actually fixes the problem.

I am still avoiding Windows 11 24H2 like the plague, every 5 weeks.  So far, their rollback mechanism has worked quite reliably.  Next time around, I could try the SMACX patch.  OR, I could go up a more thorough learning curve about what Microsoft changed, and what Microsoft's future is going to look like.  Will they quietly restore bug-for-bug compatibility?  Or have they made some major policy change and this is how it's gonna be?

This issue really irritates me because my own modding work is explicitly targeted at a vanilla SMACX binary.  Which now is the most broken one!  Go figure.  When I eschewed binary modding, I thought that meant I was future proofing.  No such luck.

[Buster's Uncle]

Petek tested the Baggs patch, and that carries the water for me.

My machine had to be replaced after Helene -probably no connection to that, just when- so I haven't been able to dodge the latest Windows, alas.