Alien Legacy exploration time bug

[Raywell]

Hello guys!

Long time Sierra fan here. I got my hands on the CD version of Alien Legacy (which I heard a lot of but never tried) and it seems like an awesome game, but I've run into some annoying bug right at the start that's putting me off real bad.

When I try to explore the planet surface with a fighter, the day counter advances by one each time I enter the 3D flight screen. Strangely enough, time consuming projects like construction, research, etc don't progress at all during this time. The only thing this does advance is the plot. And that seems like a serious problem.

I'm the explorer type who really enjoys checking out every inch of the map in the games I play, but if I want to explore the whole (or at least most) of the planet/planets, plot events will be upon me way too soon while my infrastructure and technology couldn't even hope to prepare since they're unaffected by this artificial passage of time.

Has anyone experienced the same problem or know any fix to it? Thank you in advance for any help!

[Collector]

There is one patch for the game, but the readme does not state what issues are fixed, so I do not know if the bug you encountered is one of the things it addresses. There is also the possibility that it is a timer bug, but DOSBox properly configured should avoid these. The new installer from here includes the patch and DOSBox should avoid any timer bugs.

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updat ... rs.html#AL

[Raywell]

I forgot to mention that I used the installer from this site (the one you linked) to install AL to begin with, so unfortunately, that didn't solve the issue.

The CD version is 1.10. As far as I know the AL patch is 1.01 and is for the floppy (1.00) version of the game.

But thank you very much for the lightning fast reply. I already did a lot of googling around for the problem, but no luck so far. I found some others who also had this issue but I'm yet to see someone mention explicitly that they tried it and didn't encounter this bug. Perhaps most people just don't notice it.

[Collector]

The installer is for both CD and floppy versions, so has resources for both versions. Try lowering your cycles down to, say 7000-8000.

[Raywell]

Alright, I tried lowering the cycles to around 4000 and gradually (in steps of 1000) going up all the way to 26000. Sadly, the problem remains.

[Collector]

I can't guarantee anything, but if you have a save game you can post, I can take a look.

[Raywell]

Okay, thank you very much for taking the time!

I uploaded the save of a fresh game I started just to test this bug.

Since my last post I looked around the net and downloaded like half a dozen abandonware copies of the game from various abandonware sites to try if they yield the same issue. They're all made from the floppy version 1.0 and 1.01 but the bug is still there.

Later today I'll try installing AL on my Vista 32-bit laptop and my older XP 32-bit machine to see if it makes a difference. I won't have my hopes up since DOSBox seems to create a pretty independent environment for itself, but if you're not getting this bug on your game, I can't really think of much else other than some local issue related to this particular pc.