Custom league no longer loading

[oriole^]

This has been pretty frustrating, and hopefully someone can shed some light on the problem.

Standalone version; 20.6 build 55 (haven't loaded the new patch yet because I want to solve this error first); Windows 10. I have a custom league which I've created - new teams, rearranged leagues, things like that. I recently went on a cruise for vacation where I had no internet access at all. Not a problem; the few times where my wife wanted to take a nap or head off somewhere without me for a hour while we were at sea, I would just head up to the sun deck and play my custom league for a hour or so; no outside access needed.

Upon return home, and re-connection to the Internet, the league will not load, saying it was created with a different version of OOTP, then returning a second error immediately, saying the database is corrupt. Attempting to import the league's world.dat gives an error that the league was created with "OOTP -1".

I took a trace of the process and this seems to be the relevant portion, but I'm not certain where or why this would be causing a CSS problem:

2019-12-19 11:40:20 DATABASE::~DATABASE: Closing misc. objects
2019-12-19 11:40:20 DATABASE::~DATABASE: Closing config_file
2019-12-19 11:40:20 DATABASE::~DATABASE: Closing storyline_engine
2019-12-19 11:40:20 STORYLINE_ENGINE::reset: Closing storylines and ongoing stories objects
2019-12-19 11:40:20 DATABASE::~DATABASE: Finished 2019-12-19 11:40:20 load_database: styles_css_version in config_file is different from this version's FILE_VERSION_STYLES_CSS
2019-12-19 11:40:20 load_database: Error, could not update styles.css
2019-12-19 11:40:25 error_msgbox: OOTP cannot load this database because it has been created with an earlier version of OOTP. Please use the button 'Import OOTP 19' to import the database.
2019-12-19 11:40:25 clear_faces: Closing faces objects
2019-12-19 11:40:25 clear_players: Closing player objects
2019-12-19 11:40:25 clear_teams: Closing team objects
2019-12-19 11:40:25 clear_coaches: Closing coaches objects

At this point it looks like I'm out a whole bunch of work and time...does anyone have any suggestions?

[Alex Murray]

Hey Oriole,

Sorry to hear about that league issue it sounds like something may have gotten corrupt so lets see if we can fix that. The game automatically has an autosave feature that we can use to try and get the game back to a working position.

1) Open the game and on the start screen, click on Settings (or Preferences in OOTP 11-14).

2) Now click on the tab "Troubleshooting".

3) Click "Open folder containing saved games".

4) Now open up the league folder you're wanting to restore.

5) Then select all of the .dat files in the folder and back them up (just in case) by copying them to a temporary folder or creating a zipped file with them

6) Open the folder called "auto-save".

7) In there, select all of the ".dat" files and copy them to the league folder (the parent of the current folder) overwriting all of the ".dat" files in the league folder.

Now start the game and load your league. If it's successful, it will display a message letting you know it's cleaning up text files. This might take several minutes to complete (or even longer if the auto-save backup is older, like from the beginning of the year).

Let me know if that clears the issue. I would also highly recommend you updating your game to our latest patch just in case the issue with your league was due to an older bug we have since patched out.

Thanks
Alex

[oriole^]

Alex, Thanks for the tip; that seems to have done the trick. I hadn't considered it before because I hadn't seen any obvious difference in file sizes in the auto-save folder, but whatever it was seems to have produced the desired result. Appreciate your help greatly! Also, I took your advice and upgraded to the latest patch beforehand, but that alone didn't do it. Glad to know that all that work isn't lost. Thanks again!