Problem with Saved Game

[Vince Whirlwind]

I know it's only a save game, but things were just getting interesting (which is why I saved it) so I really want to get it working...

It fails on my old Toshiba laptop, a brand-new Dell laptop, as well as a P3 800 Viglen PC exactly the same.

Loading the saved game - about half way through, it fails with a message to the effect that: unknown lhs in "character {", ...
The only identifying info is where it says "in line 329762".

Unfortunately, I can't think of any program which will load up the saved game (which is about 13MB) and give me line numbers.

Sooooooo, I load it up into Excel, which loads up its max of 65535 lines and fails to load the rest.
I identify the last line in the excel file, then go back to a copy of my Save Game and delete all lines down to it.
I repeat this 5 times, then on the 6th time I load this copy into Excel, a simple bit of maths takes me to the line in question.
BINGO! a dodgy character just inside the closing } at the end of a character record. the character is y with an umlaut on top of it.
So, I delete the dodgy character and try loading up my save game again.

This time, it gets all the way to the very end of the load-up, but just at the point where loading a game often seems to pause for a few seconds before the screen changes after finishing loading -up, instead of pausing, it crashes, no error message, just the microsoft "do you want to send a error report etc...".

I have no idea what to look at for this....?

 

[unmerged(6777)]

The file should probably end with the interface block:

interface = { 
    mouse = { x = 617 y = 546 } 
    map = { x = 1467 y = 3394 } 
    zoom = 0 
    group1 = { } 
    group2 = { } 
    group3 = { } 
    group4 = { } 
    group5 = { } 
    group6 = { } 
    group7 = { } 
    group8 = { } 
    group9 = { } 
    group0 = { } 
    }

Right before that is a listing of all countries (IIRC) so maybe you have the dreaded "user tag insertion" bug? Try searching the file for "tag = U" and see if anything pops up.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Incidentally, you might want to look at Beyond Compare as a good piece of software for this sort of thing. You could even compare your most recent (working) save with the one that crashes and see what has changed.

 

[Vince Whirlwind]

Incidentally, you might want to look at Beyond Compare as a good piece of software for this sort of thing. You could even compare your most recent (working) save with the one that crashes and see what has changed.

Thanks for that - I'll have a look at it.

I am very much daunted by the sheer size of these save game files - I am used to working with small text or xml files (200k-ish) and this thing is monumentally huge!

 

[Vince Whirlwind]

Incidentally, when moving the save games for testing from one machine to another, I noticed that the small file contains the machine name.

What is this and should I change it when I move the save game files from one macine to another?

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Incidentally, when moving the save games for testing from one machine to another, I noticed that the small file contains the machine name.

What is this and should I change it when I move the save game files from one macine to another?

No worries on that. It's a default name for MP mode and is only used unless you choose a diferent name for MP play. It has no other effect on the game.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Incidentally, I'm moving this over to the bug reporting forum since I doubt that it's a technical issue (hardware/installation-related).

 

[Vince Whirlwind]

Sorry. I'll live & learn.

And I have not yet had a chance to use the info you provided about "user tag insertion" as a lot of beer-drinking is cutting into my game-playing time.

I will let you know next week about that one, I should get a chance to give it a go some time over the weekend.

 

[unmerged(31410)]

I'm using the April 15 beta patch and sometimes (doesn't seem to be an obvious pattern, will try to find out more) a savegame is not executed normally. This error did not happen on the official patches. Instead of a normal savegame (around 9 megs) only a small file (around 65K) is created. Occasionally a CTD occurs at the same time as the "small" save file. Those saves, obviously, cannot be loaded. Will try with April 28 patch if the same bug occurs.

 

[Vince Whirlwind]

back to the point....my SAVEgame file....

The file should probably end with the interface block:
...
Right before that is a listing of all countries (IIRC) so maybe you have the dreaded "user tag insertion" bug? Try searching the file for "tag = U" and see if anything pops up.

OK, I had a look and nothing looks amiss.

When I search for "tag=U", I get several results, in the format "tag=Unnn" (where nnn=019, etc..) and "tag=Uabc" where abc are letters (sorry, didn't make a note of them).

These don't look too bad, but is there something in particular I should be looking for?

 

[unmerged(6777)]

See this thread and in particular this post in it which gives you a stepby-step fix for the problem so you'll be able to continue your game.