[pcostello]

Okay, for the time being at least, I'm playing again.

I realized I didn't need to keep doing restores to try to troubleshoot this. First I made a copy of all the .dat files from the saved game I was trying to fix (i.e. copied them into a new folder). Then I replaced them all with .dat files from a known good (old) saved game (a backup would have worked as well). Then I replaced the old, working files with the new, potentially bad .dat files, one at a time, to see if the game would then crash when saving.

Started with players.dat, loaded the game, saved it, and surprisingly, all was still good. Next I did coaches.dat, and another one or two files, before finally trying retired.dat. Ater copying in retired.dat, the game crashed when saving.

I re-copied the old, good retired.dat, and then copied over every other remaining new .dat file, and the game appears to be stable. I simmed several days, saved, several more days, saved again, exited and saved once more, no crashes.

I have no idea if this is a long term solution, if the game will crash when more players retire, or if I try to view retired players (which I'm going to stay away from doing, I think), or if retired.dat being "out of sync" is going to cause problems down the road, or what. All I know is that as of now, I can continue my season. It appears that retired.dat has been been written too though, and at least that didn't cause a crash.

For the heck of it, I tried copying in retired.dat to another old crashed game (in which all my rosters and player links are completely incorrect) to see if this fixed it. Unfortunately, it did not. However, I believe that game has been saved with the "bad" rosters, so it may be too late. I wonder if somebody has a crashed game that they HAVEN'T saved, and copies in a "known good" retired.dat file, if they'll have any luck getting their game back.

I suppose that it's not necessarily always retired.dat that gets corrupted, and could be another .dat file. For me, for this save, it was retired.dat, but perhaps for someone else it's players.dat or world.dat or whatever.

If somebody has a destroyed save and at least some good games/backups to work with, they could use this technique to determine which file is actually causing the problem, and potentially replace it with a good version from another save/backup, assuming it's feasible (if your players.dat file from 2015 is hosed, and the only good one you have is from 2009, then it's really not going to help much).

I think what would be helpful would be if the game didn't auto-save on exit, and instead prompted you. This way, if we suspect there might be a problem (such as seeing OOTP is hogging resources, which seems to be a bad sign), we could forego a save at the expense of losing a bit of our season. Even better, give us a "save as" option, so that if there's a crash during a save, at least we haven't lost everything and can easily revert to an older game. I understand that being able to do multiple backups is more or less than same thing, but the backup/restore process is lengthy, and doesn't seem to be any more reliable than a standard save anyway.