Game will not save

Several people hvae seen issues with saving / loading games. Not sure whats causing it, and I don't remember if there are any workarounds.
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

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My favorites here are backward compatibility or lack there off and minor coruption of files in the pc's memory.

I have a P4 at 2.4 with 1 GB of RAM and 256 MB graphics card; don't think it's the issue.

Simply because you have 1 GB of ram doesn't mean its 1 GOOD GB of ram; "minor corruption of files in the PC's memory" could mean bad memory sticks installed -- run a memory test, theres one floating around somewhere thats shareware. I don't remember enough to track it down, and I'm too lazy to spend the time myself unless you really need the help.

Also, be aware that video memory size is not the largest issue with graphics cards these days, its actually pretty secondary to the speed of the memory, and the speed of the chips architecture. You only really need large amounts of memory for running larger textures, generally.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I am suddenly having a 'unable to save game' error. I have played the entire game with 1.20 and Balance Mod 1.01.

This sucks...

Javaslinger

As in if you reload the last good save does the game become unsaveable again? I have had this same error a couple of times, but its never been repeatable *GRRR* If it is then send your last decent saved game to Kwok and Aaron and tell them what you did before it became unsaveable.

I always play now with autosave on every turn which seems to stop this from happening (touching wood) as it hasn't happened to me since I started doing that (it being a random error it seems this could just be luck). Restarting from the last save will show if it repeats obviously.

Ok, I'll check.

Edit: Actually, I don't want to as I would have to close this game out... and I can still play it so I may just not close SEV until I finish.. (perhaps I won't sleep either... hmmmm.... )

I really didn't do anything unusual. It's been probobly 2 turns since my last save.... I have autosave on every 3 turns... It last autosaved 3 turns ago and attempted to autosave during the last end of turn and was unable to do so...

Damn it! I need to save this so I can take it with me on my laptop... or god forbid I have so socialize with the inlaws!!!

Please help! Mercy!

Javaslinger

From a mountain in Afghanistan, which is were I will flee to escape my in-laws all I can do is Sympathise and suggest something you may have already tried. Have you tried to save the game manually in a different save slot as that might help. I think the game you are running might have corrupted slightly in memory. I also don’t trust the Auto save thingy on the game

Hello, Javaslinger,

Just keep on playing and trying to manually save after each turn. Eventually, it will work. I've had it happen to me several times and that's the only workaround I've found after trying many, many different things.

You can forget the useless advice you've been given about bad memory and whatever - that's not the problem. The trouble lies in either the basic game engine - or, most likely - in the coding (programming). I'm sorry to say but the coding in this game is the ABSOLUTE SLOPPIEST that I've ever encountered in over 30 years of being involved in computers, networking and programming in general. People can complain all they want about Windows itself and Microsoft, but they are light-years ahead of this pitiful product.

Don't get me wrong here - I really like the game and enjoy playing it very much!! But the fact is that the programming (on a code level) looks like the product of an apprentice-level software engineer who is badly overworked.

OK, enough of the rant about the real facts, just do as I suggested and you'll find that you CAN save the game once in a while.

Does auto save help in these circumstances? Personally I have autosave turned on to saved every turn and haven't had a problem with saved games since the game was changed to make this a global setting rather than a per game setting.

The only problem I have with auto-save is that it saves at the start of the turn not the end, so all my work that turn (which can take well over an hour if I get in re-designing ships and units) can be lost if I need to go back too an autosave. That said autosaves at the start of the turn are wonderful for that *OPPS* I didn't mean to agree to that treaty, or surrender type moments.

Sorry, I don't know because I don't use Autosave since the game creates far too many files just as it is. Instead, I just save manually after having done something important like a particular tech level.

Do you come across the crash bug regularly? If so try putting autosave on just to see if it makes a difference. Yes it produces a load of files but they are rather small.

No, cordas, I don't. In fact I haven't had a full crash since two updates ago. However, what I have had that VERY annoying is when the game becomes almost totally unresponsive. I say "almost" because what happens is the cursor will only move a few millimeters on the screen before stopping and it can take several - MANY - minutes before you can place it where you want it. For example, hit escape to bring up the Main Game Menue and in perhaps five or six minutes you can finally get the cursor over the "Save Game" option. Then you'll spend about the same amount of time before getting it placed over the game name you wish to save at.

It's really tedious murder to go through, but no, it doesn't completely crash. (After having done all that, exit the game and then restart it and reload.)

Oh - and it's not the size of the Autosave files that bothers me at all - it's just (in my opinion) dozens of needless files that litter the directory and I got tired of doing deletes. It would be MUCH cleaner if the silly thing just stored them as a single file. I know you can do them from the Save Game Menu itself but it's very slow having to do one at a time - back and forth, back and forth with the mouse. (In Windows Explorer you can select a whole range and zap them all in one click.) So anyway, I just quit using it at all.

How big is your virtual memory setup, or does Windows handle it for you? I have mine manually set to 2gb (twice my ram) this might have something to do with that problem.... *SHRUG* The other thing is when did you last defrag your HDD and how much spare disk space do you have, if its less than a couple of hundred meg that might cause problems, but you would be having problems doing lots of things if that was the case.

I've got 2GB RAM and the swapfile is set for 4GB minimun and Windows is allowed to increase it if needs to. Free space is 28G+. Second drive has 40G free.

I defrag about once weekly but that, as a possible problem, is simply a red herring. It would never cause the MASSIVE slowdown I described.

And you're quite correct. I've no other problems at all, even running such big games as the latest CIV, AOE, and RON. And each of those is much bigger than SEV - but also written a LOT smarter, too.

FYI, I'm reasonably certian the auto save limits itself to 10 files, then starts overwriting the old ones.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.