Well, ive run into one weird bug.

Its september of 1999, and some time into the second day, a certain kind of ufo is detected by a hyperwave decoder of mine. Nothing unusual, right? Well, heres the stats of the ship:

Size: Very large
Altitude: Base-
Speed: Cant remember, but a normal fast speed for battleships
Zone: Varies each time

Craft type: Ethereal corpse
Race: Sectoid :alien2:
Mission type: Cant remember, but i think it was alien base...
Destination: Cant remember

And after a bit of flying, the game crashes straight to desktop (as always, with no error messages)

Now, ive heard of MANY bugs in this game, but never this one!

If anyone knows wats wrong, is there any remedy?? I was doing well for a change !

Also, this creates a disturbing mental image, but i'll spare the details

Lol, an interesting problem.

However, I suggest re-posting this in the UFO forum, as you're more likely to get a response there

Heh. i'd post a screen shot, but the print screen key doesnt notice either the geoscape nor the ufo detected screen.

do you have a saved game just prior to this? i'm courious as to what the mess look's like

LoL, I'm getting an image in my head of sectoids walking out of a gigantic ethereal corpse. Maybe the gigantic dead ethereal has a gigantic heavy plasma under it?

I'd be more than willing to send out some save files, but i'll need your email address, if you want it.

You have he CE version of UFO right? Well, use the F12 key. That'll save a screenshot in your game's directory. Then all you have to do is convert the .tga file into a gif, png or a jpeg and there you go. You might want to double the size of the screenshot first, as the f12 keys saves a pixel perfect image, 320x200. Looks all right on 640x480, but tends to be rather small on larger resolutions.

As for the bug -- well, I suppose it's like the rare but sometimes awesome Medic cannon. I don't know what causes it, but the game data gets corrupted and one of your weapons gets transformed into the medic cannon (or other names, but medic's been the most common one for me). It uses Avalanche missile launchers as ammo, and fires everything off in one salvo. Completely destroyed a battleship (no crash site) with it once before I even asked the ship to attack -- its firing range was beyond stand-off range.

Then there was another bug where a battleship popped up rather early --- but it didn't go anywhere. It just hung in the air. I didn't have a hyperwave decoder at the time so I didn't get the mission stats. It was probably the same as your problem.

There's no known fixes I'm afraid -- except to reload a previous mission. Or you could try shooting it down.

Heck, there was even one time where the game was getting unstable, and I somehow gained control of a battleship. Whoo, it was awesome, it flied about magestically in the air, but the moment I got it to return 'home' or attack someone, bang, the game crashed. This only ever happened once. I haven't been able to duplicate it since.

Of course, if anyone can figure out which file holds the alien UFO mission data and figure out how big each entry in the file is and what the individual bytes do, I suppose you could fix this problem by hand.

- NKF

Just for the record, I once had a bug where one of my Interceptors got transformed into something called 'Weapon 1'.
At the equip screen it showed the symbol for the hyperwave decoder instead of the normal ship and it still had the avalanche launcher. On geoscape it had endless fuel but it actually flew slower than a Skyranger.

Interesting Bug I had. When I started a mission on a medium scout, the UFO was warped, and had the walls at the wrong angles (90 degrees, so the wall wasnt a wall, but was as if they had been spun around 90 degrees on the y axis.) Also, there were 2 levels, all with similarly strange build-up

There were Grav lifts all over the map, and if my soldier went up it, he became graphically glitched for the rest of that level, and re-appeared on top of the UFO.

There was also a sectoid stuck in the wall (Someone had impaled the poor bugger )