Problem loading saved file - SVN 12323

[mastra]

Hi everybody.
Sorry for posting here but looks like I've some problems when I try to submit a new bug in the bug tracker.

I'm running SVN rev. 12323 on a WinXP machine.
I saved a game (with one active mission) and when I reloaded it the next day I found something very strange.
Before saving I killed 3 luddites and 12 pirates' ships, but after the load of the game my stats show 3 homeland-security and 12 hunter killed! Obviously everybody was shooting at me so I had to restart a new game.
The game was saved before updating to 12323, if this can be of any help. It was saved the day before, with the rev.12322.
In the attachments I include my savefile (sorry for the .rar compression but I don't have a ZIP compressor installed).

Best regards.

[loki1950]

@mastra mission status is not saved IIRC so only save after you complete the mission

Enjoy The Choice

[Hawkeye86]

Mine, too. The faction listing order changed but the kill numbers didn't follow. Pirates and Luddites are further down the list now. Got to find the file to edit to correct this. This many enemies is not a good thing.

Vegastrike rocks!

[ace123]

The factions are saved as a simple list. If more factions are added then the list stays in the same order but each one corresponds to a different faction.
That's one reason savegames don't stay organized so well after updating svn.

[safemode]

One would think we'd cat the new factions on the end and save in the same order we read them in... so order is not so mixed up. Though, yea, trying to keep save games and such on an active SVN is at your own risk.

It is interesting to think how this will effect 0.5.0 to 0.5.1 releases though. Minor releases shouldn't really make savegames incompatible. We need to ensure that the order of lists doesn't change, it can only grow or shink at the end. Reorganization should be relegated to minor version releases (0.5 to 0.6 ) or major versions.

[bgaskey]

Or we could release with a little utility that converts savefiles up. That shouldn't be too much trouble.

[Zolk]

I think you' ve got a problem here. You point players encountering problems in the stable branches 0.4.3 or 0.5 zu the svn head and say that people using the active svn branch must risk broken save games.
The people want to play vegastrike without starting from scratch again and again, and at least some of them (i.e. me) don't like cheating (i.e. manipulating the money account in the save game file).
I know it may be to much work, but either you make bug fixes for the stable branches, or you make the save game files downward compatible, or you supply save game converter, or you lose a lot of potential players.
And if you have a save game converter, it shouldn't be too diffficult to add a version number to the save game file and do the converting automatically.

[ace123]

The savegame *format* has been pretty compatible. The problem is not the format of the saved games, but rather it is the fact that the data set changes.

For example, the units change stats between revisions. If you keep the old saved games the stats could be completely wrong. Sure, it might work, but it might be referencing an old mesh or something.

Also, dynamic universe has changed formats between 0.4.3 and 0.5.0, however it did try to upgrade from the old version (though it took a while to do so).

I will try to commit my changes to the faction problem into SVN tonight. Basically change faction stats from an array that is easily corrupted into using save variables so that it's based on the name of the faction. Also it will be a delta from the global relationship.

Version number is a good idea. However it is still pretty hard since it is not the game engine itself that makes most incompatibilities, but rather the data changes.
Still, having a version number for the sake of having one has never hurt anybody.