Severe screw-up in SCXIIc
 

Warning! Wall of text!
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OK, here's how this went down; I created a mission out of morbid curiosity to see what would happen when a wall of Russian ships of various types were to fight a tightly packed US multi-carrier battle group.

I put a large multi-hundred-nautical mile distance between the groups so they wouldn't pop off long range missiles immediately and make the ships freak out and slam into each other. Well they got in each others' range, and started exchanging SSM variants of their SAMs (IE, Russians shooting SA-N-6 Grumbles and the Americans shooting SM-2s). Naturally the game slowed down quite a bit as they started shooting down missiles and firing heavier missiles, going back and forth like this for about a half hour.

After things started slowing down, the Russians had a Kiev, Admiral Kuznetsov, and several destroyers and heavy cruisers left, and the Americans had 2 of the 3 carriers + several of their own destroyers/cruisers. Well the Russian missile subs that I had tossed into the Russian battle group caught up with the remaining surface ships and started launching SSN-27s, Shipwrecks, etc., and I decided I would fire off my TASMs (playing as USS Seawolf).

At some point in this time period, the entire game locked up for a good 5 minutes, then......... this happened. The game locked up again at this point, for another 2-3 minutes, then resumed at the speed of 4 snails glued to the feet of a snapping turtle. During this slow period, the ships that messed up in that manner collided again and destroyed the survivors, with exception to my own ship and USS Nimitz, which were both literally knocked away from the... well, the huge mess they were in.

I quit the mission and decided not to play it again, so I went to Defend Motherland since it was a stock map that was simple enough and didn't require tons of crap flying around at once. Well as soon as I fired off a few SSN-27s and they started shooting back, the game locked up. But it didn't freeze. Every missile and aircraft in the air started flying in the direction they were flying and never stopped. Not even when they sank into dry land. My missiles never armed or locked on their targets, they simply flew in a straight line right through the ships. Because the US ships tried to evade, they ended up colliding and destroying each other but did not sink. They simply chugged along at their flank speed at 100% damage, never stopping for anything.

After playing several other missions I determined that after approximately 10 missiles were in the air at once, no matter their position or owner, the game screwed up in the same manner as I just described. No number of torpedoes could trigger this mess-up, only missiles.

As the title suggests, I was using patched Sub Command (not from the pack, the stand-alone game) with SCXIIc with no other modifications to the game itself. I uninstalled/reinstalled/repatched/reinstalled SCXIIc and the problem still stuck around.

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Also, no, I cannot reproduce the problem in stock patched Sub Command if anyone was wondering. It only occurs with SCXIIc. It worked perfectly before the initial muck-up. So, any idea if I triggered some sort of engine limitation, or if it's a bug with SCXIIc? Appreciate any helpful input.

My guess would be that the missile doctrine in SCX has some error in it ... try backing up the stock doctrine folder and switch it with the SCX one after install.

Good thinkin'. I'll give that a go later, busy with other things for the time being.

No I think this is a SC code related thing. I remember Jsteed looked at the SC code and said it had quite a few memory leaks in it. So you ran a really intensive scenario with many missiles and many identical doctrines being loaded and reloaded into RAM for each missile - hence the slow down - then you start a new scenario but the game memory is shot to hell.

I suggest exit SC, let your PC settle down and then restart SC and try the defend the motherland scenario. I think you'll find all working.

No, that didn't work. I'll try OneShot's suggestion here in a minute, we'll see how it works out.

Edit; well, it seems to have worked out as far as the missiles are concerned, at least in the stock missions (have not tried custom ones yet), but torpedoes do not function properly. They simply travel alongside the ship at the same speed as the ship when it launched the torpedoes, and do not respond to any override command except shutdown. Which doctrines control torpedo function so that I might use the SCX ones for that?

Second edit; Correction on the torpedoes situation; only player-controlled torpedoes malfunction in above manner. AI-launched torpedoes run straight at full speed and do not stop for anything, and do not acquire their targets. After 2 AI-launched torpedoes were in the water, the game screwed up in the same manner as I originally posted about.