crash while saving, restored, now restored game crashes while saving

pcostello · 07-27-2008, 05:27 PM

This is extremely aggravating, as it's the second save destroying crash I've experienced while playing OOTP.

While playing, the game began to run more and more slowly. I hit late September when the OSA rescouts the various leagues, and on one particular day it rescouts three or four leagues consecutively, and this literally took 10-15 minutes to complete. After that finally finished, I figured there was a memory leak and it was best to quit and restart.

I exit the game and it crashed while saving, I believe during the "closing database" stage. The game reloads fine and everything seems okay. Go to save it and it crashes again. This time when I reload, I have the issue with my roster and players being wrong, so now I know this save is toast. (I've had the problem once already and lost nearly two seasons.)

Fortunately (or at least I thought), I had done a backup less than a week earlier. I do the restore, which takes forever, but otherwise seems okay - my team is back to normal, although of course I'm a week earlier in the season. Then I go to save this game and it crashes again. Reload, and the player database is once again corrupted. So now this save is shot too.

Do another restore, and the same thing - restore seems to go fine, but the game crashes when I try to save, and I see the rosters are hosed when I reload. I notice that it crashed while saving messages. I check that save, and the messages.dat file has a zero size.

So I do ANOTHER restore and delete the messages.dat file. Load the game, and it's fine, except of course no messages. Save the game - and it crashes while saving players.

So basically, I've taken the precaution of doing regular backups, and it seems like I've still lost my game. I THINK I have a legit restore file, but I can't save that game again.

This is on a Windows XP system. I'm using the latest executable, I've defragged recently, and I have plenty of disk space.

I really enjoy this game, but these crash issues essentially make it unplayable. Is OOTP Developments offering refunds for players experiencing these kinds of issues?

dougmichel · 07-27-2008, 05:49 PM

I had that very same thing happen to me with a restored backup after a database corruption. Doesn't make a bit of sense since the backup should be ok, but it always crashes too. I have now become accustomed to CTRL-ALT-DELETE to exit the game so that it will not autosave. While I have had a database corruption during a normal save, it only happened once out of 4 total corruptions so it is a bit more safe. I sure hope they fix this issue soon.

pcostello · 07-28-2008, 01:53 PM

I believe only the the first crash was during an exit-save. All other crashes were during manual saves.

So the issue here is that I have a backup that I can successfully create and load a game from, but I can't then save that game. I actually played one of the restored games for several more months last night so I could finish the playoffs, and everything was fine. But once I finally went to save it, it crashed again.

I tried restoring from a different, much older backup, and as far as I can see, that backup works and saves correctly. So this would seem to be with this specific backup.

My big question is - is there any possibility of resurrecting this backup file so I can use it successfully? Or is the only way for me to play is if I start over with a brand new game AGAIN?

GBS · 07-28-2008, 02:39 PM

pcostello,

I think you might want to totally erase the game from your hard drive and start with a fresh install and then patch before starting a new game. A more important question, I wonder if this issue has been given a BZ#???
Another thing I have done is to go to the manager home screen and do a save from the GAME dropdown in the upper left. I always close from this screen also. I have been playing for about ten days now without this problem cropping up again. That for me is only about two seasons. I play slow. Fingers are crossed.

dagmar · 07-28-2008, 07:11 PM

I have the same problem. My game crashed around April of season 2 (yr. 2009 with real rosters). After the crash, reloading the game will only crash the game. Is my saved file forever doomed?

pcostello · 07-28-2008, 07:41 PM

GBS - Yar, I eventually tried a full uninstall/reinstall, but no luck. I've tried restoring about seven times now, each with the same result - the game loads and is playable, but cannot be saved.

I do normally save from the menu, as you described. The initial crash may have been during an exit save and not a manual save, I'm not sure - I don't care about that game now anyway. It's the restored games I'm concerned with, and when those crash during saves, I mean manual (from the menu) saves (it crashes during exit saves as well). It's bad enough that this game was destroyed in the first place, but the fact that I've dutifully been doing backups and still seem to have lost my game is pretty frustrating.

As far as I know, this issue has not yet been addressed by a moderator, so I doubt that a BZ# has been assigned.

Dagmar - did your game crash while saving? If so, I hate to say it, but I think it's lost. That's what I was told by a moderator when I lost another game a few weeks ago. The only reason that I'm holding out hope that I might be able to continue this game is because I have the backup. Although obviously that hasn't helped me so far, but maybe - MAYBE - whatever is preventing this backup from creating a saveable game can be resolved. Not likely, but possible.

Greatgrampa · 07-28-2008, 08:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pcostello

GBS - Yar, I eventually tried a full uninstall/reinstall, but no luck. I've tried restoring about seven times now, each with the same result - the game loads and is playable, but cannot be saved.

I do normally save from the menu, as you described. The initial crash may have been during an exit save and not a manual save, I'm not sure - I don't care about that game now anyway. It's the restored games I'm concerned with, and when those crash during saves, I mean manual (from the menu) saves (it crashes during exit saves as well). It's bad enough that this game was destroyed in the first place, but the fact that I've dutifully been doing backups and still seem to have lost my game is pretty frustrating.

As far as I know, this issue has not yet been addressed by a moderator, so I doubt that a BZ# has been assigned.

Dagmar - did your game crash while saving? If so, I hate to say it, but I think it's lost. That's what I was told by a moderator when I lost another game a few weeks ago. The only reason that I'm holding out hope that I might be able to continue this game is because I have the backup. Although obviously that hasn't helped me so far, but maybe - MAYBE - whatever is preventing this backup from creating a saveable game can be resolved. Not likely, but possible.

The next update that Marcus says will be out on Wednesday will hopefully solve your problem. Since many of us have no problems with this kind of thing you are experiencing, I would say it is either something wrong with the computer or perhaps where you are saving your games, but mostly, I would say that the crashes may be caused by the backup or saved game may not have completed for various reasons. Perhaps you run out of memory or get very low on memory. If you have a memory reader, checker, I would check and see if you are getting very low on resources. There are a thousand things that could be causing the problems for you but maybe, just maybe this update will solve your problem. If not,get back to us and tell us a little more about the problem.

Anyway, good luck!

pcostello · 07-28-2008, 10:15 PM

Greatgrampa, are you a moderator (i.e., are you working for OOTP)?

I know that the restored game crash issue may not be common, but I have seen it appearing in a few other threads. And as far as crashes during saves, that DOES appear to be fairly frequent. But common or not, this is an extremely serious issue that's preventing some people from playing the game, so telling me that it's only happening to a minority of us doesn't really help, you know?

I don't have the newest computer in the world, but I have no issues running other games and applications. During the original crash, system resources did seem to be sparse, but that looks like it was caused by OOTP itself, as the process was spiking to 100% cpu usage. So if there is a memory leak or other issue with OOTP that causes it to chew up resources, and then there's a crash due to low resources, OOTP is basically making itself crash. That's a fault of OOTP, not of my computer system.

I backed up numerous times and there was never any indication that there was a problem with the backup process.

Are you saying that the patch may fix my current backup? Or only that you're hopeful it'll prevent further crashes if I start over again?

Is anyone at OOTP planning on looking over my backup files to see if a) they can determine the issue, and b) if it can be corrected? Weeks after reporting a previous game crash issue, no one at OOTP has even asked me to upload the files.

I'll say this again - I really enjoy this game, but this is frustrating as heck.

pcostello · 07-28-2008, 10:24 PM

Three questions...

1) Which .dat files besides messages.dat can be safely deleted from a save or backup without losing the "core" of your game or resulting in an error? If I'm willing to lose all non-essential history and any other non-critical information, what can I delete to try to narrow down the issue?

2) Is there any way I can view the .dat files myself? I do have programming experience and database experience, and if I was able to look through the various files, perhaps I'd see something indicating what the problem is.

3) It seems to me that if I have a backup that is "undamaged" enough that it can create a playable game, there's at least a chance this backup can be completely fixed so that I can then save the restored game. Or is that just wishful thinking?

pcostello · 07-29-2008, 12:02 AM

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.

orwell · 07-29-2008, 09:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pcostello

Weeks after reporting a previous game crash issue, no one at OOTP has even asked me to upload the files.

I'll say this again - I really enjoy this game, but this is frustrating as heck.

I've been having horrible crash problems also. No one invited me to upload files, either, so I just did it and then told them I had done so. To their credit, they did look at the files, although unfortunately they said they could not reproduce the problem. However, they did test with the soon-to-be-released patch, so they are hopeful the patch will address my problems. Otherwise, it's back to the "it's something your computer is doing wrong" purgatory.

Anyway, I would advise you to just upload your files and then tell them you've done it.

Nutlaw · 07-30-2008, 06:48 PM

For anyone having crashing problems, please give this a try and let us know how it works:

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...available.html

JoseRijo · 07-31-2008, 12:22 AM

my game was locking up at 94% on "closing database" ... This time, after this patch, it was still kinda slow at that point (perhaps repairing a problem?) but it resumed nicely, probably only a minute slower than usual! Thanks!

Nutlaw · 07-31-2008, 07:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JoseRijo

my game was locking up at 94% on "closing database" ... This time, after this patch, it was still kinda slow at that point (perhaps repairing a problem?) but it resumed nicely, probably only a minute slower than usual! Thanks!

Glad to hear it. Anyone else?

pcostello · 08-02-2008, 01:06 AM

My game has only crashed a few times. But when it did, it was usually during a save, and then bye-bye saved game. I think some folks are experiencing crashes pretty frequently, but that wasn't the case with me. I just had a handful of really nasty crashes.

Too soon to tell if this executable completely resolves crashes for me, but so far, so good.

I'm assuming this executable isn't designed to fix an already destroyed save or bad backup, only prevent further crashes from happening.

Nutlaw · 08-02-2008, 12:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pcostello

I'm assuming this executable isn't designed to fix an already destroyed save or bad backup, only prevent further crashes from happening.

Yeah, unfortunately corrupted files are almostly certainly lost for good.

Nutlaw · 08-08-2008, 03:44 PM

As the original poster has not responded to this thread in five days, this thread will be closed for housekeeping reasons. If you need any further assistance with this matter whatsoever, please don't hesitate to post a link to this thread in Tech Support and we will be happy to continue to help you. Thanks.

07-27-2008, 05:27 PM	#1
pcostello Bat Boy Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 12	crash while saving, restored, now restored game crashes while saving This is extremely aggravating, as it's the second save destroying crash I've experienced while playing OOTP. While playing, the game began to run more and more slowly. I hit late September when the OSA rescouts the various leagues, and on one particular day it rescouts three or four leagues consecutively, and this literally took 10-15 minutes to complete. After that finally finished, I figured there was a memory leak and it was best to quit and restart. I exit the game and it crashed while saving, I believe during the "closing database" stage. The game reloads fine and everything seems okay. Go to save it and it crashes again. This time when I reload, I have the issue with my roster and players being wrong, so now I know this save is toast. (I've had the problem once already and lost nearly two seasons.) Fortunately (or at least I thought), I had done a backup less than a week earlier. I do the restore, which takes forever, but otherwise seems okay - my team is back to normal, although of course I'm a week earlier in the season. Then I go to save this game and it crashes again. Reload, and the player database is once again corrupted. So now this save is shot too. Do another restore, and the same thing - restore seems to go fine, but the game crashes when I try to save, and I see the rosters are hosed when I reload. I notice that it crashed while saving messages. I check that save, and the messages.dat file has a zero size. So I do ANOTHER restore and delete the messages.dat file. Load the game, and it's fine, except of course no messages. Save the game - and it crashes while saving players. So basically, I've taken the precaution of doing regular backups, and it seems like I've still lost my game. I THINK I have a legit restore file, but I can't save that game again. This is on a Windows XP system. I'm using the latest executable, I've defragged recently, and I have plenty of disk space. I really enjoy this game, but these crash issues essentially make it unplayable. Is OOTP Developments offering refunds for players experiencing these kinds of issues?

07-28-2008, 02:39 PM	#4
GBS Minors (Triple A) Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 233	pcostello, I think you might want to totally erase the game from your hard drive and start with a fresh install and then patch before starting a new game. A more important question, I wonder if this issue has been given a BZ#??? Another thing I have done is to go to the manager home screen and do a save from the GAME dropdown in the upper left. I always close from this screen also. I have been playing for about ten days now without this problem cropping up again. That for me is only about two seasons. I play slow. Fingers are crossed. Last edited by GBS; 07-28-2008 at 02:43 PM.

07-27-2008, 05:49 PM	#2
dougmichel Minors (Double A) Join Date: Dec 2003 Posts: 104	I had that very same thing happen to me with a restored backup after a database corruption. Doesn't make a bit of sense since the backup should be ok, but it always crashes too. I have now become accustomed to CTRL-ALT-DELETE to exit the game so that it will not autosave. While I have had a database corruption during a normal save, it only happened once out of 4 total corruptions so it is a bit more safe. I sure hope they fix this issue soon.

07-28-2008, 01:53 PM	#3
pcostello Bat Boy Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 12	I believe only the the first crash was during an exit-save. All other crashes were during manual saves. So the issue here is that I have a backup that I can successfully create and load a game from, but I can't then save that game. I actually played one of the restored games for several more months last night so I could finish the playoffs, and everything was fine. But once I finally went to save it, it crashed again. I tried restoring from a different, much older backup, and as far as I can see, that backup works and saves correctly. So this would seem to be with this specific backup. My big question is - is there any possibility of resurrecting this backup file so I can use it successfully? Or is the only way for me to play is if I start over with a brand new game AGAIN?

07-28-2008, 07:11 PM	#5
dagmar Minors (Single A) Join Date: May 2006 Location: san diego, california Posts: 64	I have the same problem. My game crashed around April of season 2 (yr. 2009 with real rosters). After the crash, reloading the game will only crash the game. Is my saved file forever doomed?

07-28-2008, 07:41 PM	#6
pcostello Bat Boy Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 12	GBS - Yar, I eventually tried a full uninstall/reinstall, but no luck. I've tried restoring about seven times now, each with the same result - the game loads and is playable, but cannot be saved. I do normally save from the menu, as you described. The initial crash may have been during an exit save and not a manual save, I'm not sure - I don't care about that game now anyway. It's the restored games I'm concerned with, and when those crash during saves, I mean manual (from the menu) saves (it crashes during exit saves as well). It's bad enough that this game was destroyed in the first place, but the fact that I've dutifully been doing backups and still seem to have lost my game is pretty frustrating. As far as I know, this issue has not yet been addressed by a moderator, so I doubt that a BZ# has been assigned. Dagmar - did your game crash while saving? If so, I hate to say it, but I think it's lost. That's what I was told by a moderator when I lost another game a few weeks ago. The only reason that I'm holding out hope that I might be able to continue this game is because I have the backup. Although obviously that hasn't helped me so far, but maybe - MAYBE - whatever is preventing this backup from creating a saveable game can be resolved. Not likely, but possible.

07-28-2008, 10:15 PM	#8
pcostello Bat Boy Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 12	Greatgrampa, are you a moderator (i.e., are you working for OOTP)? I know that the restored game crash issue may not be common, but I have seen it appearing in a few other threads. And as far as crashes during saves, that DOES appear to be fairly frequent. But common or not, this is an extremely serious issue that's preventing some people from playing the game, so telling me that it's only happening to a minority of us doesn't really help, you know? I don't have the newest computer in the world, but I have no issues running other games and applications. During the original crash, system resources did seem to be sparse, but that looks like it was caused by OOTP itself, as the process was spiking to 100% cpu usage. So if there is a memory leak or other issue with OOTP that causes it to chew up resources, and then there's a crash due to low resources, OOTP is basically making itself crash. That's a fault of OOTP, not of my computer system. I backed up numerous times and there was never any indication that there was a problem with the backup process. Are you saying that the patch may fix my current backup? Or only that you're hopeful it'll prevent further crashes if I start over again? Is anyone at OOTP planning on looking over my backup files to see if a) they can determine the issue, and b) if it can be corrected? Weeks after reporting a previous game crash issue, no one at OOTP has even asked me to upload the files. I'll say this again - I really enjoy this game, but this is frustrating as heck.

07-28-2008, 10:24 PM	#9
pcostello Bat Boy Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 12	Three questions... 1) Which .dat files besides messages.dat can be safely deleted from a save or backup without losing the "core" of your game or resulting in an error? If I'm willing to lose all non-essential history and any other non-critical information, what can I delete to try to narrow down the issue? 2) Is there any way I can view the .dat files myself? I do have programming experience and database experience, and if I was able to look through the various files, perhaps I'd see something indicating what the problem is. 3) It seems to me that if I have a backup that is "undamaged" enough that it can create a playable game, there's at least a chance this backup can be completely fixed so that I can then save the restored game. Or is that just wishful thinking?

07-29-2008, 12:02 AM	#10
pcostello Bat Boy Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 12	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.

07-30-2008, 06:48 PM	#12
Nutlaw Hall Of Famer Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 9,538	For anyone having crashing problems, please give this a try and let us know how it works: http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...available.html

07-31-2008, 12:22 AM	#13
JoseRijo Minors (Double A) Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 100	my game was locking up at 94% on "closing database" ... This time, after this patch, it was still kinda slow at that point (perhaps repairing a problem?) but it resumed nicely, probably only a minute slower than usual! Thanks!

08-02-2008, 01:06 AM	#15
pcostello Bat Boy Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 12	My game has only crashed a few times. But when it did, it was usually during a save, and then bye-bye saved game. I think some folks are experiencing crashes pretty frequently, but that wasn't the case with me. I just had a handful of really nasty crashes. Too soon to tell if this executable completely resolves crashes for me, but so far, so good. I'm assuming this executable isn't designed to fix an already destroyed save or bad backup, only prevent further crashes from happening.

08-08-2008, 03:44 PM	#17
Nutlaw Hall Of Famer Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 9,538	As the original poster has not responded to this thread in five days, this thread will be closed for housekeeping reasons. If you need any further assistance with this matter whatsoever, please don't hesitate to post a link to this thread in Tech Support and we will be happy to continue to help you. Thanks.