Anyone hear the status of the latest patch?

[Red Archer]

I was wondering if anybody heard anything concerning the latest (5?) patch for SMAC/SMAC-X. There was talk about the patch around a month or two ago but since then I have not heard or seen any information. Does anybody have any info?

I have no info at all, but I doubt we will ever see it...

[Helium Pond]

I've held out hope for a long time, but it's pretty depressing when even MarkG says that the outlook isn't good. Didn't the guy who's updating the SMAC webpage say he'd see what kind of answer he could give us? How come we never heard from him?

[Aredhran]

The last I heard (from Dan Magaha) is... There will be no patch. Actually, his exact words were:

quote: As far as any patches go, alas, I really don't know anything about that, unfortunately; as the sign on my door says, I'm just "the webmonkey".. =) I really couldn't speculate on the chances of any patch being released, to tell you the truth. Everyone seems very entrenched in the dino game and Civ III (which is really looking cool, by the way, I think it's going to really please the most die-hard Civ II fans), so I really don't know what to tell you =(

Aredhran

PS: Dan, I hope you won't mind me quoting you

[LoD]

"We here at Firaxis care about our customers." Yeah, right .

LoD

[Kinjiru]

In all fairness to Firaxis, take it easy. This game is quite old and not selling very many copies anymore. Firaxis has two major projects underway, and not terribly many staff to complete them. It just does not make very much sense for Firaxis to dedicate their talented resources to SMAC when they are trying to get Dinos and CivIII to market.

I do not like the idea that we will likely never see another patch, but I certainly understand the reasons. And in all honesty, I am happy with SMACX the way it is. If I had a choice between a v5 patch in a month or getting Dinos or CivIII a few months earlier, I would take the new games in a heartbeat.

[Aredhran]

Would you take the new games, knowing they will (of course) require patches of their own, which may never come either as Firaxis moves on to yet another game or three ?

Aredhran
-I want the patch AND Civ3 !-

[Alinestra Covelia]

Well, at least SMAC and SMAX were in considerably better final states than Call to Power was. Hell, even the original buggy state for SMAC was a lot better than the original state of CtP.

Not that I hate CtP or anything, but I feel that the present state is tolerable and we should count our blessings in actually having a great game.

Anybody buying CtP2 here? Anybody able to tell us whether Activision are doing any further patches for CtP1? Just so we can compare customer support between the two companies.

[LoD]

Kinjiru: Civ II was well over a year old when the last patch appeared. And Microprose had a lot of projects under way at that time.
We bought a product, nowhere on the box was it said that there be bugs, so it's the sole duty of Firaxis to fix it.

And I agree to Aredhran - in these cirucmstances, the probability of a good customer support for Civ III is very small. And, as he said, there is no way that it will be shipped bug free. Not with that much complexity.

LoD

[RedFred]

If Firaxis is reneging on their promised SMACX patch, that is bad news indeed. Firaxis asked us to vote on whether we wanted one all-encompassing patch or a patch ASAP and then one later to handle all the issues missed by the first patch. We voted for two patches because given the Firaxian track record, who believed that they could catch everything on the first go. Some people, zsozso in particular, worked hard at developing a bug list to expedite the process.

Of the hundreds of bugs identified, the most unacceptable to me are the crashes (air intercept and top/bottom of the world) and the fake drones bug.

Firaxis should think a little harder about the bad PR message that not providing the patch generates. Especially after working so hard to make us expect it was coming. This could translate into lost sales for Dino and Civ3. I can't share Kinjiru's enthusiam; I don't think I'll bother with buying either product until they get SMACX running smoothly.

Please don't think that I am critizing the game itself. There is a lot of imagination and hard work that went into SMAC/SMACX. It eats up tons of my spare time. I just wish that the game would work as they say it should.

CTP set new and disturbingly bad standards for an unimaginative and bug-infested release. Even though SMAC compared favourably to it, it has lots of room for improvement. For a contrasting example of a firm which actively seeks customer input into bug identification and incorporates their suggestions into patches, check out Homeworld.

[Garth Vader]

One of the main reasons I didn't buy SMACX was that the bugs from SMAC weren't fixed. I figured that if they wanted me to spend extra money for an add-on the least it should do is fix the problems from the original.

I am reasonably happy with SMAC. I have spend more than enough time on it to make it worth my money but this kind of performance makes it tough for me to support the company in the future.

[Q_tip1976]

I want to start off by saying that SMAC/X is probably one of my favorite computer games of all time and I spend alot of time playing it. Unfortunately I'm NOT inclined at all to buy future Firaxis products.

The reason is an unnaccptable number of bugs! I mean some of these bugs (i.e. the fake drone bug in SMAX or golden age bug in SMAC) are so obvious it makes you wonder if they even playtested the games. The PBEM engine (Wich was advertised with the original release and not even abailable at first!) seems retrofitted at best and doesn't handle key aspects of the game (probe teams) in a way that's close to satisfactory. On top of all this it doesn't even appear they are going to continue to support the game. The fact that after fivepatches there are still more bugs than we can count is unfortunate the lack of an attempt to repair these flaws is unacceptable.

If Firaxis does the honorable thing and contiues to support SMAC I'll give CivIII a try if not I'll probably check out ctp2 and see if Activision gets it right this time.

[Adam_Smith]

People here are way too hard on Firaxis. There are no perfect games. Smacx actually have reletively few minor bugs compared to other games (ok maybe CIV2 was less buggy). Anyway, from my experience the remaining bugs are only a minor inconvenience. I know there are some people who get crashes, but those are specific cases. CTP1 is crap from what I hear and it can't even be compared to SMACX. I really don't want a patch if it means that CIV3 will be delayed.

[Mongoose]

For the record, PBEM was NOT advertised with the original release.

It WAS retrofitted, at the demand of the playing public. (on the old boards at alpha.owo)

[Garth Vader]

Games shouldn't be this buggy. Before internet and easy patching most games were basically bug free. Look at Blizzard games. I had a crappy computer that crashed on everything including freecell. It never crashed once while playing Warcraft 2, I don't know how they did that. Starcraft is as close to a perfect game as I have seen.

I love SMAC but think of how much better it would be if everything worked! Things like the energy maintenance bug and the right click paradrop bug appear to me as a programmer as simple to fix, yet they are not. This is a slap in the face to the purchasing public.

[Adam_Smith]

Those are RTS games. I don't know much about programming, but it seems to me that those games would be much more simple since there are less aspects to the game.

[Garth Vader]

To me as a programmer RTS would seem harder as you have to worry about timing. While in TBS everything is user driven. I have worked on both timing critical industrial programs and office type user programs and timing can be tough especially if it has to expect periodic user input.

[Q_tip1976]

Mongoose and others,

I just checked my SMAC box and you are correct. I guess when I bought the game I had the mistaken impression PBEM was included. For that false accusation I am very sorry.

I admit perhaps I am being hard on Firaxis. I still feel many of the complaints conveyed here are valid, however. Bugs are not an unavoidable phenomenon. I have seen many complex console games that are a virtually bug free. On the rare occasion there is a bug the problem will be fixed and the defective copies of the game replaced. The Internet has provided the computer gaming industry with a crutch (in the form of patches) that allows them to rush software to market before it's ready to be released. Many consumer goods are very complex. There are few industries where the production of defective products and poor customer support (EA did not do a good job. Ever been to their costomer support page for SMAC?) are rewarded with customer loyalty. The only way the quality of computer games will improve is if companies that don't produce buggy software are rewarded with repeat customers and ones who do are not.

I cought some of the bugs in SMAC the third time I played the game. I mean companies should at leat make an honest effort to ship programs as bug-free as possible.

quote: Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia on 06-20-2000 05:21 PM Well, at least SMAC and SMAX were in considerably better final states than Call to Power was. Hell, even the original buggy state for SMAC was a lot better than the original state of CtP.

please define the "original state of SMAC". the first demo? the second demo? the game in the box? or the game with the first patch that came 2 days after?

[Basil]

MarkG: I wasn't around for the first version of SMAC. But I did buy CtP when it first came out, and sold it as a used game after 3 or 4 attempts to play it, simply because version 1.0.0 - and I emphasize v. 1.0.0 - was so buggy (so many random crashes) that I found it impossible to play.

Regarding SMAC, I'm surprised by what people are saying in this thread. Like most of the rest of the people here, I'd like a patch to fix the remaining bugs. But I find the bugs a nuisance, not a game-killer: if it were just the bugs I wouldn't much care about another patch.

The thing that I really want, that I think should have come in the original game and whose lack I think greatly reduces the quality of the game, is better AI. 4 major faults in the AI (that the AI doesn't know how to terraform effectively, that the AI doesn't know when to build facilities, that the AI doesn't know how to run an air war, and that the AI doesn't understand that effiency in SE settings is more important when you have more bases) mean that solitaire games basically end when you get Doctrine: Air Power. As a result, everything past that is just SimCity Centauri. It's as if you bought a chess program that had no idea how to play once you got out of the opening moves. And the really frustrating part is that they did 99% of the necessary work, but just didn't put in that last 1% which would have made a very interesting game into a very interesting and challenging game. And that there's little to nothing you can do about it.

Now I can see why it makes commercial sense for Firaxis, and other companies that produce closed-source games, to spend far more time on the art than they do on the AI. They get their $whatever whether you play the game for 3 hours or 300, the art does more to make the sale while the AI just makes for better value to the customer - which in the closed-source game model doesn't bring the developer any money. But this conclusion doesn't make me any likelier to buy Civ III, which I expect (given the trend line of Sid Meier's games) to have an AI that's completely out of its depth. Instead, I'll go to FreeCiv when the time comes.

What I dream about (I hardly dare say this because it's just my dreams, not in any way connected to reality), would be Firaxis making SMAC open source after its commercial life is over. Not likely! But that would be much better than any patch.

- Basil

[Ned]

Basil, As to the AI, making it more "thoughtful" could quickly make the game unplayable. With most chess games I have played, after the opening moves, the AI seems to play all possible moves to a varying depth depending on skill level, etc., and give each resulting position a score. If the SMAC AI did something similar, the game would quickly bog down while the human player waited minutes, hours for the AI to complete its turn.

In my view, there are only two things that can make the AI better and keep playability. The first is to have the AI continuously calcuate "strategy" while the human is playing so that it can add the current game situation as a whole to the rules-based decisions when it is its turn to move.

The second is teach it how to provide a coordinated attack. For example, I rarely see the AI land more than one or two, usually inferior, combat troups as its invasion force. This mimics its land combat pattern of uncordinated individual tatics. The AI needs to know to "wait" until it has amassed sufficient resources to prevail against a normally prepared opponent.

I still fondly remember CIV I. This game seemed to have a much better AI from this latter point of view.

[Helium Pond]

Do you think it would be effective to press for a very, very limited patch? Like, what if we came up with the top five bugs, and made a valiant lobbying effort to Firaxis? Do you think we could get them to do it? I mean, they did promise "a quick incomplete patch, and a later patch that fixes everything else". Well it's pretty obvious that was an outright lie, and we'll never see another major patch. But if we made a really small demand--c'mon Firaxis, just these five bugs, just fix these teeny little bugs for us, pleeeeeeeze? do you think we might be able to sway them? Surely five bugs couldn't take more than a month?

What would be the top five? We would have to make them actual fixes--nothing like "better AI" or "more balanced factions." Off the top of my head:

1) Disappearing factions. I've never had this happen, but I've seen people report it, and it's a doozy of a bug.
2) Fake drones.
3) MP: Probe team notifications sent to wrong player.
4) MP: Demanding withdrawal from a human player via a right-click menu gives the request to the AI instead of opening the diplomacy screen.
5) The crash that happens during automatic aircraft interceptions (this also doesn't happen to me, so I hope I've described it correctly; it also seems pretty major).

It's farfetched to hope they'll ever look at the huge bug list. But what if we sent them a really really tiny one? Is it too much to hope they might do a mini-patch, of just the most game-breaking bugs?

[Ned]

HeliumPond, Good idea on a limited list. Since I am affected by the Terran.exe crash, I would keep this on the list. I would add the right click airdrop bug. I would drop the disappearing factions. This does not seem to be a major problem. Finally, I would consider dealing with the extra energy one receives when Stockpile is expressly or implicity in the queue.