Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire PBEM

Having become re-hooked on Sid Mieir's Alpha Centauri, I was wondering if anybody would be interested in trying a game of Play By Email. It's built into Alien Crossfire, though I haven't used it before. If someone would be interested, drop me a PM or sound off below!

P.S. It was a serious pain to get working for years, but it's now up on GOG.com with Mac support! http://www.gog.com/gamecard/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri

I haven't played AC in forever and funny, haven't touched Alien Crossfire yet despite owning it from GOG. I'd be very interested in doing a PBEM game if we could get it working.

Shall we run a couple of turns with a simple 2 player game to work out the kinks and then post instructions?

You have my confusion. I mean my sword. You have my sword.

Seriously, I'd love to play this game with others. Sign me up whenever you start a three-player match or more.

I have the game but it isn't installed. I don't mind installing it and playing a game.

Brilliant! Parallax, would you be up for trying it this evening? I can try creating a game and sending it over.

EDIT: For people playing on a Mac with the GOG version, the savegames are at this location:

~/Library/Application Support/GOG.com/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/saves/

Cool.

Strangeblades wrote:

Cool.

Likewise if you'd like to give it a shot just for a quick test run, let me know, we can try it this evening. I think I have a handle on how it works, but best to do a few dummy turns.

I'm good for anything. [email protected] is my email

I'm up for giving it a shot. I'll PM you my e-mail.

Thanks Parallax and Strangeblades - I've got that in motion, hoping it works smoothly.

Pfft. This is pc gaming son. Making stuff work is half the fun.

Ha, a bunch of us here tried to play this about eight years ago. It didn't take long for reality to set in: a full game of SMAC needs hundreds of turns, each of which requires one move per player, which means thousands of laborious email attachments in all. Even if each player sends out out a move per day (an optimistic rate), you'll still need a week per turn, and you won't finish for years to come.

Best of luck to you bunch, though. I suggest you post your progress updates here in-character, as we did. After all, you'll need to do something fun while everyone else is moving.

Lobo wrote:

Ha, a bunch of us here tried to play this about eight years ago. It didn't take long for reality to set in: a full game of SMAC needs hundreds of turns, each of which requires one move per player, which means thousands of laborious email attachments in all. Even if each player sends out out a move per day (an optimistic rate), you'll still need a week per turn, and you won't finish for years to come.

Best of luck to you bunch, though. I suggest you post your progress updates here in-character, as we did. After all, you'll need to do something fun while everyone else is moving. :-)

Finishing a match or not never bothers me. For me the journey is the fun.

Bursaar wrote:

Thanks Parallax and Strangeblades - I've got that in motion, hoping it works smoothly.

Hey Bursaar. You on Twitter? No biggie if you don't but can you PM me your Twitter handle?

Strangeblades wrote:
Bursaar wrote:

Thanks Parallax and Strangeblades - I've got that in motion, hoping it works smoothly.

Hey Bursaar. You on Twitter? No biggie if you don't but can you PM me your Twitter handle?

No worries - threw it into my sig (http://twitter.com/bursaar)

UPDATE: Looks like Dropbox with symbolic links makes this a lot easier.

Like others, I haven't played that in forever, but love the idea. Let me see if I can track down my CD's...

Ooooooo! Count me in, if there's room. I have the gog.com version

I just piced up the GOG version as well. After spending an hour looking through various closets, I just figured to heck with it and got it at GOG.

Give me a day or so to get reacquainted and then I'm in!

Brilliant! We've been working out the best way to do it, it's a bit awkward, but Dropbox looks to be the easiest.

Add DirectDraw=0 to the ini to make it look better on today's computers.

If anyone is playing on the Mac and wants to use their numpad to move units around, I put together a fix last night. The problem is that the game treats the numpad just as numbers and instead uses the arrow keys + Home/End and PgUp/PgDn as the movement keys. Turns out Wineskin has support for a custom xmodmap configuration. So, what you need to do is open up X11 (/Applications/Utilities for me). In the terminal, type:

xmodmap -pke > ~/Xmodmap

That will create a file, 'Xmodmap', in your home directory. Open it up in a text editor and alter the configuration to fit your needs. For me, I changed this section:

keycode 89 = KP_Equal NoSymbol KP_Equal
keycode 90 = KP_0 NoSymbol KP_0
keycode 91 = KP_1 NoSymbol KP_1
keycode 92 = KP_2 NoSymbol KP_2
keycode 93 = KP_3 NoSymbol KP_3
keycode 94 = KP_4 NoSymbol KP_4
keycode 95 = KP_5 NoSymbol KP_5
keycode 96 = KP_6 NoSymbol KP_6
keycode 97 = KP_7 NoSymbol KP_7
keycode 98 =
keycode 99 = KP_8 NoSymbol KP_8
keycode 100 = KP_9 NoSymbol KP_9

Into this:

keycode 89 = KP_Equal NoSymbol KP_Equal
keycode 90 = KP_0 NoSymbol KP_0
keycode 91 = End NoSymbol End
keycode 92 = Down NoSymbol Down
keycode 93 = Next NoSymbol Next
keycode 94 = Left NoSymbol Left
keycode 95 = KP_5 NoSymbol KP_5
keycode 96 = Right NoSymbol Right
keycode 97 = Home NoSymbol Home
keycode 98 =
keycode 99 = Up NoSymbol Up
keycode 100 = Prior NoSymbol Prior

Save the file and move it to the /Contents/Frameworks directory inside of the SMAC app. For me this is /Applications/Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire.app/Contents/Frameworks. Rename the file to '.Xmodmap' (without quotes) and you should be good to go. Start the game up and the numpad now works like it should.

We gonna Google Hangout this Saturday game? It'd be coooool. All the kids are doing it. C'mon, you know it would be cool. C'moooonnnnnnn.

I would be provisionally up for that, but I will probably be working - I've a deadline on Monday evening. Even if I'm not, you guys should go ahead and play anyway!

billt721 wrote:

If anyone is playing on the Mac and wants to use their numpad to move units around, I put together a fix last night. The problem is that the game treats the numpad just as numbers and instead uses the arrow keys + Home/End and PgUp/PgDn as the movement keys. Turns out Wineskin has support for a custom xmodmap configuration. So, what you need to do is open up X11 (/Applications/Utilities for me). In the terminal, type:

xmodmap -pke > ~/Xmodmap

That will create a file, 'Xmodmap', in your home directory. Open it up in a text editor and alter the configuration to fit your needs. For me, I changed this section:

keycode 89 = KP_Equal NoSymbol KP_Equal
keycode 90 = KP_0 NoSymbol KP_0
keycode 91 = KP_1 NoSymbol KP_1
keycode 92 = KP_2 NoSymbol KP_2
keycode 93 = KP_3 NoSymbol KP_3
keycode 94 = KP_4 NoSymbol KP_4
keycode 95 = KP_5 NoSymbol KP_5
keycode 96 = KP_6 NoSymbol KP_6
keycode 97 = KP_7 NoSymbol KP_7
keycode 98 =
keycode 99 = KP_8 NoSymbol KP_8
keycode 100 = KP_9 NoSymbol KP_9

Into this:

keycode 89 = KP_Equal NoSymbol KP_Equal
keycode 90 = KP_0 NoSymbol KP_0
keycode 91 = End NoSymbol End
keycode 92 = Down NoSymbol Down
keycode 93 = Next NoSymbol Next
keycode 94 = Left NoSymbol Left
keycode 95 = KP_5 NoSymbol KP_5
keycode 96 = Right NoSymbol Right
keycode 97 = Home NoSymbol Home
keycode 98 =
keycode 99 = Up NoSymbol Up
keycode 100 = Prior NoSymbol Prior

Save the file and move it to the /Contents/Frameworks directory inside of the SMAC app. For me this is /Applications/Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire.app/Contents/Frameworks. Rename the file to '.Xmodmap' (without quotes) and you should be good to go. Start the game up and the numpad now works like it should.

Also, holy sh*t that's cool - thanks! I've clipped that for future reference. I'm playing on a MBP with a wireless keyboard, so no numpad, but that could change. Cheers

I definitely wouldn't mind doing that at some point but I'm going to be out of town this weekend unfortunately.

You guys are killing my buzz.

We will make this happen though. I will pester and reminder you.

For one reason or another my saves are getting corrupted. I haven't lost a lot of time but it is annoying.

Ouch, that's awful! It hasn't happened to me - are you using Dropbox or anything like that?

Strangeblades wrote:

You guys are killing my buzz.

We will make this happen though. I will pester and reminder you. :)

Sounds great