starship game corpuption

[2ndhandspaceman]

Save game became corrupted after one day of playing. I recall saving manually then exiting the process normally. When attempting to reload the save the game simply crashes to desktop seconds after clicking play also unable to create another character without removing the save files entirely due to same crash on character creation. if the save file is of any use for your debugging I can send it to you.

I believe a "simple" solution to the issue for now is making the game able to recognize file corruption instead of crashing along with an option built into the game to enable a certain number of automatic save backups by simply pushing the previous save file into a backup folder.

I think this will would help significantly when the game goes live as loosing hours of work can be extremely frustrating if we don't manually backup game saves and would result in a negative play experience

[Kiwi]

I've been having the same issue, and have been backing up my saves and losing progress occasionally. I'd also be happy to provide some affected save files for analysis if needed.

[Kiwi]

Been looking into this some more. It seems like individual saves aren't necessarily "corrupted", but some saves are very likely to cause a crash. I've had "broken" saves load successfully after many repeated tries.

I used the visual studio debugger to see exactly what the fatal exception was for the crashes, and every time it was a stack overflow. After using a microsoft tool (editbin) to increase the stack size of "Hazeron Starship.exe" from 1MB to 100MB, previously "broken" saves are loading completely fine. (i'm not sure the stack actually needs to be set so large, it's just the value I picked to test.)

I'm not sure if some issue is causing the stack to grow much larger than intended during the loading process, or if the stack size just isn't set large enough during compilation, but hopefully this info helps in fixing the issue.

[Haxus]

I will do some searching at this end. One of the corrupted save files would be very helpful.

[2ndhandspaceman]

Sent a PM with a download link

[Haxus]

Thank you. This is my first priority this morning.

[Haxus]

At what point does the game crash for you? Does it crash before you get to the screen to select your avatar? Or does it crash when you try to enter the game universe?

[Haxus]

I will investigate the stack size issue. A large object may be getting put onto the stack during the game loading process. Thank you for that valuable information.

[Haxus]

Btw this ship in this saved game you sent is really awesome.

[Haxus]

I increased the stack size in the Windows builds. An update was posted. Please give it a try.

I had not trouble loading the saved game that you sent. Whew! Data corruption is a critical issue that I try extremely hard to avoid.

I have a long list of saved games going back for a year. They represent a lot of different changes in the data that is stored over time. I use them to insure nothing about loading the saved game data is broken.