Hunting the big savegame bug progress

[bn880 5]

I haven't tried ECP yet, will do so when I get the chance, what's the best mission/campaign to spark the savegame bug?

OT: You should, ECP is pretty awesome. And you know I wouldn't just say that for nothing. That combined arms default SP mission becomes just a wee bit better... (use DynamicRange CPP too)

[toadlife 3]

...what's the best mission/campaign to spark the savegame bug?

hehe...

My mission Operation LoJack 2 contains an autosave at the beginning of the mission, right after your squad hits the ground. Clicking retry afer this autosave triggers the bug 99.999% of the time.

[Placebo 28]

Okies thanks I'll try to remember to take a look over the weekend

[void_false 1]

Oh... i love to see that someone important (or how do you say it...) get his hands on this terrible problem

Thank you PLACEBO!

BTW. I agree that ECP causes this bug. Sometimes disabling ECP helps. But still it presents. Myself i have never expirenced this bug on official missions/campaigns. only user-made

[Placebo 28]

Well I must apologise because I read this thread when it was first posted and obviously didn't read it properly because I thought it was a minor issue related to some kind of poorly used scripting in one or two user missions, obviously that's not the case so I'll try to force it on to my computer and see what happens

Oh and thank you very much for calling me important, my ego is greatly stroked

[Placebo 28]

For everyone that has experienced it have you submitted an Email to Bis along with the files as indicated in this thread? Obviously if I can make this crash happen I'll be doing that as well

[void_false 1]

hm.. it is strange for me. I always thought that you, placebo, and others moderators of this forum are working on BIS..

Ok, i'll cause this bug now and send every info to bis

[Placebo 28]

Well we work on the forums yes but we're not employed by BIS, we're just fans the same as you guys.

But of course we are very important

[bn880 5]

I think BIS has known about htis problem for a very long time, in addition I posted a pretty good debugging result right in the first post here....

Remember the working mission nogova? That's where this bug killed any enthusiasm for such a mission, it was one of the first major problems with it.

[dayglow 2]

any progress on this?

[toadlife 3]

any progress on this?

No it won't be fixed in OFP - but there's allways OFP2.

[void_false 1]

any progress on this?

No it won't be fixed in OFP - but there's allways OFP2.  

uhh.. we got answer from development team, do we?!

[toadlife 3]

1.96 release candidate is out and the bug still exisits - that pretty much says it all.

[void_false 1]

maybe u right maybe not. 4 patches still remain

[Guest]

Hey, bn880, how are you mate?

Maybe you'd be interested to check out the ECP board at OFPEC [Topic: "The Future!", reply by Komuna on sunday].

Although i didn't find the cause of CTD's, I found the solution which will save ECP. For the ECP team eyes only. ;)

[doc stahlhelm 1]

for myself i found a way to kill this fucking savegame bug, but its a littlebit complicatet and uncomfortable:

i.e. when you have to abort a mission and leave ofp go to your

ofp-user-mission or campaign folder ,open the mission or campaign folder of the mission you abort- there is a file- save.fps.copy it to a save place.

next time when you continue your mission/campaign,dont continue

this game,start it new,go through the brifing,start the mission and use alt/tab to come on the desktop.now take back the save.fps on its place.click back to ofp-press escape and load the game from the optionsscreen.its afucking complicatet and unprofessional way but so i can continue with missions.when you want more savegames you have also go on desktop in your mission/campign folder and rename your save.fps (i.e.sarkhkjhf.fps).so opf dont find it and you can make another savegame in the optionsscreen.its crap i know but if you use the

savecheat(shift+- savegame) you crash on desktop.

i use this since two weeks with ecp and it works great.no crash to desktop anymore,just a little bit work.but i hope they will fix that soon.

sorry for my bad english,and ä its my first post in this forum,hi to alll

[void_false 1]

Hi and welcome!

Are you from Finland BTW?

It is not complicated, but it is... too boring for me. i'd better switch ECP off

[thobson 38]

OK so it has been 9 months since the last post.

I hit this problem yesterday with a mission I am building, I went looking for an answer and was pointed here.  Glad to see it is a known issue and not just me.  Sorry to see it seems not be being dealt with yet.  I have been using the workaround mentioned above about copying (or changing the names of) the save files, then Alt-Tab ing out of the mission to change them back. But it is a real pain.

From bn880's post at the start of this thread it seems possible to edit something (mission.sqs?) to make the problem go away.  Am I right in thinking this? If so are there any rules for how it should be edited or is it just trial and error?

[Placebo 28]

If you find the ECP thread in A&M:D you'll see that on of the new features is that the "save game bug" has been fixed

[thobson 38]

I will look, but I don't know that this will help me (I am not running ECP) unless that is I can find out how it is fixed and do the same with my mission.

[hardrock 1]

If you find the ECP thread in A&M:D you'll see that on of the new features is that the "save game bug" has been fixed

sorry, that's not quite correct I think.

They just meant to have fixed the bug that was appearing CONSTANTLY when saving games with ECP running, since ECP did use so many global variables that it was nearly impossible to save and load a game. Now they've "fixed" this one by using less global variables, but the bug in OFP still exists.

[thobson 38]

Thanks. I suspected as much.

[thobson 38]

In case anyone is interested I have solved the problem. Thanks to General Barron and HateR_Kint I was pointed in the right direction.

It seems that the OFP has a bug (I cannot bring myself to call something that kills the program a ‘feature’) that prevents it from resuming from a save. It appears that this bug is triggered when resuming a save game that has a lot of active variables.

From the little experimentation I have done it appears that the following are relevant:

the number of global variables;

the number of local variables in scripts that are running at the time of the save;

the number of units/objects (I do not know if a unit/object with a name has the same effect as one without a name).

Things I have done that stopped my mission hitting this OFP bug:

The mission is a big one so to minimise CPU consuming triggers I put a lot of stuff on slow looping scripts (~5 mins; ~15 mins and ~45 mins). I was also very modular about it so each script might have had several instances. All the scripts were running from the start of the mission. So basically I had all these scripts with all their local variables sitting around doing nothing for minutes at a time and then they would run for a few milliseconds and go back to waiting. Each script now runs and then exits, and I have a single ‘housekeeping’ script that calls these scripts at appropriate intervals. So at most any savegame will now only have the local variables for one script.

I also redid my custom made mines so that the cases are created when the mine is laid. This was on my list of things to do anyway just to tidy it up. Interestingly I was getting an error on Item25\data.value. I removed 30 named objects from the mission and the bug went away. I did not have the energy to put back 5 or 6 to see if the error was then on Item1 or 2.

[bn880 5]

It varies as to how many variables will trigger the problem. It is a combination of the number and NAME of the variables that creates problems, as you can probably see from the first post here.

[jts_2009 96]

about first post... where I can find it and rewrite?