Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack has finally arrived on Steam

[Blake00]

We recently celebrated the Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri 25th Anniversary here at CivFanatics talking about some of the amazing fan projects such as the very realistic fan film, the new fan game remake, some of the best fan patches out there, and of course where you could get the game from which for some strange reason was only Good Old Games and not Steam. However EA is making the news this weekend as they've released a huge amount of classic games in their catalog (ie the entire Command & Conquer collection) and sure enough Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is included too and finally on steam, on sale, and it appears to be the same as the Planetary Pack that's on GoG too meaning the expansion pack is included. Hopefully this will bring a fresh injection of fans back into the SMAC communities including our CivFanatics one! Now if we could just get 2K to do the same thing with Civ1 & Civ2 we'd be really set!

Save 50% on Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack on Steam

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack includes the original Alpha Centauri and the expansion, Alien Crossfire.

store.steampowered.com

 

[Minmaster]

got it last night!

 

[Blake00]

Me too! Despite having a perfectly working disc copy..

 

[Darsnan]

Me too! Despite having a perfectly working disc copy..

Me too! However when I try to launch the game it CTD. I've tried running in compatibility mode on the application in the SMACX subdirectory itself, same result. So what was the fix for this?

 

[Darsnan]

A player named Grifter has provided a solution that works for the Steam version (at least it works for me):

This PC > C: > SteamLibrary > steamapps > common > Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

From here I scrolled down to the note pad file (should be little white file with cog on it)

"Alpha Centauri"

After opening this file you will see this information,

[PREFERENCES]
ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1
[Alpha Centauri]

ds3d=1
eax=1
DirectDraw=0

FastUnitAnim=0
SmoothUnitAnim=0
MainFontSize=16
InterludeFontSize=16
DisableOpeningMovie=0

You need to change the,
"DisableOpeningMovie=0" to "DisableOpeningMovie=1"

Click file then save and close the window.

This will disable the game opening movie and should be able to play.

FYI in case anyone else is getting a CTD during the intro movie.

Edit: the game will also CTD when trying to play the Secret Project movies, which really sux as they are awesome. So if you are getting this crash you need to go into game settings and choose Game, Preferences, Audio/Video Preferences, and de-select "Secret Project movies".

D

 

[Blake00]

No crashes for me so I'm not help sorry, but yeah presumably a better solution will come on the steam forum from fans and may even already be on the GoG forum as it's looking like the Steam version is the same as the GoG one.

I wonder if installing PRACX on the steam copy helps as that plays around with the direct draw rendering stuff. The unofficial patch fixes a lot of crashes but I think that's all in-game gameplay stuff and not cutscene stuff.

 

[Darsnan]

I wonder if installing PRACX on the steam copy helps as that plays around with the direct draw rendering stuff. The unofficial patch fixes a lot of crashes but I think that's all in-game gameplay stuff and not cutscene stuff.

Is the PRACX patch here at CFC? If so can you point me to it and I'll give it a try when I get home from work tonight.

D

 

[Blake00]

Is the PRACX patch here at CFC? If so can you point me to it and I'll give it a try when I get home from work tonight.

D

Good question, it had a thread on AC2 but that's gone now and who knows what's here. Super busy this week at work but I'll do an investigation of the SMAC downloads area here at CivFanatics on the weekend and set up links to any the big fan patches. This handy thread on steam shall help me check..

Popular mods & fan patches for SMAC/SMAX :: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack General Discussions

Alpha Centauri Unofficial patch by Scient Install this first. This fixes bugs with yields for probe teams, farming, and several other issues that were never officially addressed. PlotinusRedux's GUI improvements and renderer for SMACX This allows better UI scaling, resolution and windowed...

steamcommunity.com

As for PRACX, thankfully it's home is now Github:

Releases · DrazharLn/pracx

PlotinusRedux's Patch for SMACX. Contribute to DrazharLn/pracx development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[Buster's Uncle]

I believe its original home is AC2. Draz took up fiddling Redux' work later, IIRC.

 

[Darsnan]

Super busy this week at work but I'll do an investigation of the SMAC downloads area here at CivFanatics on the weekend and set up links to any the big fan patches.

I can take a stab at this so you can focus on other things. Will keep you posted.

D

 

[Blake00]

I believe its original home is AC2. Draz took up fiddling Redux' work later, IIRC.

Amended my post sorry mate.

I can take a stab at this so you can focus on other things. Will keep you posted.

Cheers mate. I was probably going to use the external link option (instead of re-uploading files) when setting up the resource pages (if they're not already there) and then put either github release area or their forum threads here (as some people have setup threads here now) as the download link, that way the modders still have control of their download and can change/update their files without needing us. Although if the file is on a cloud storage sharing site instead of github or moddb I may re-upload as cloud sites can time out (I'm always having to rescue lost mods hosted on cloud sharing sites lol).

 

[B-29_Bomber]

Just got it myself this morning for a couple of bucks (figured why the hell not) and ran it on my Steam Deck OLED.

Ran fine even without a Proton Compatibility patch, unlike Civ3. You might have to tweak the controls a bit (I wouldn't know, never played the game before).

 

[JessIsGaming]

I got it as soon as I heard about it and I'm enjoying reliving my early 30s!

Where are the save files kept in Windows 10 for Steam's Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack? The SMAC file loading screen doesn't show date time data!

 

[Blake00]

The steam copy appears to still be putting it in the "Saves" folder in the game install folder still, although I'm using Windows 7.
Of course being a steam game the whole game will end up in a funny location eg something like C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

 

[Merchant of Bibracte]

I figure this is as good a place to ask as any, but I installed the Thinker and PRACX mods onto my copy of SMAC (GoG edition) and while it seems to run pretty well, there are a couple of issues. First is that I cannot get the unused tiles to display their yields in the city screen no matter what I do. I can see yields in the normal game, both the current and potential values, with no problem. It's just seeing them from within the city screen that's the issue. Secondly is that the overlays for seeing elevation and rainfall is highly glitchy looking, I can barely tell what exactly the colours are supposed to indicate.

Is this due to some incompatibility between these mods? I'm running Windows 11 and I'm running the Thinker mod on administrator mode. I'm having a hard time really figuring out what the deal is here.