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General FreeSpace => FreeSpace & FreeSpace Open Support => Topic started by: THEllisor on April 11, 2014, 09:24:26 pm

Title: Potential player file corruption issue
Post by: THEllisor on April 11, 2014, 09:24:26 pm

Greetings and salutations all,

I've been in #BP for a good ... 3 hours now, as Zacam (And IronBeer, and Vaktezraj) has been helping me try to track down some troubles I've been having with Blue Planet (Specifically War In Heaven 2), but that's not precisely why I'm posting here.

Zacam thinks that one or more of my pilot files may have become corrupted, and requested that I post my log and a zip with the player files so that y'all awesome codemonkeys can see if the problem is on my end (for whatever reason) or if there's something hiding in the FSO code that needs investigating. The log file is on pastebin here (http://pastebin.com/tfqxWn2W) and the player and .csg files are in a zip, that I am attaching to this post, along with a .txt file that details which files are which.

For giggles, I am on a 32bit version of Windows Vista (Home Premium) running a nVidia GeForce 210 GPU (expansion card, not on board) a dual core AMD 7450 2.4 gHz
Age:Old enough to be born
Eye color: yes
Gender: I think so
Blood type: Darned if I know
Number of toes: 10.4
Number of fingers: 1010 (binary)
Sanity: Looking

If y'all need more info from me, just shoot me a PM.

[attachment deleted by an evil time traveler]

Title: Re: Potential player file corruption issue
Post by: niffiwan on April 12, 2014, 06:50:53 am

So yeah, something is really sick with your BP WiH Act 3 campaign file (aka "Blue Planet - War in Heaven 2" in the campaign room).  If you just want to be able to play the campaign from the beginning again, just delete JD.bp2-p2.csg and select the campaign again.  In the meantime I'll see if I can figure out exactly what is wrong with that file....

edit: Well. In short that campaign file is corrupt and I don't have much hope of stitching it back together. You're probably best deleting the file as I suggested above and starting again.  From what data is in the file I'm guessing you'd only completed two missions, the intro (Icarus) and the 1st combat mission (vs the convoy, maybe, either that or the dreamscape).

Longer story, there's supposed to be some data in the missions section of the CSG file that records how much data was written in the section. That data is zero however, so it looks like FSO didn't complete writing that section successfully. In fact the entire section looks like corrupt data as the next bit of data is completely invalid (it records the number of completed missions, it's 31,784,968 when it should be less than 10! This is what is causing the crash). Despite that, the last section in the file (cutscenes) looks OK

Anyway, can you remember what the last successful thing was that you did with the original JD pilot?

Title: Re: Potential player file corruption issue
Post by: THEllisor on April 12, 2014, 01:18:37 pm

The original JD pilot should have just been used for FS2's main campaign. (I'd learned the hard way back in '06 to not use the same pilot for multiple mods >.>) But I started the BP and all of those pilots on a build just before the change to the campaign save system. I think that I have the files from the old system still (backed them up, being the paranoid nutter that I am) would those be helpful?
As far as how far I'd gotten

Spoiler:

I remember I'd gone and killed the traitorous Unbuntu council member, and the dreamscape after that. The last mission I remember playing was one where you have 6 or 8 different objectives that you have to try to get X amount finished... I think.

But it's been a good 6 months since I last played.

Also, it's looking like all of my pilots' progress was wiped across all mods. But, I've not gotten any more crashes so... yay?

Title: Re: Potential player file corruption issue
Post by: niffiwan on April 12, 2014, 07:57:37 pm

From what you've said it may be a pilot conversion issue... so yeah, the original "pre-3.7.0 FSO" pilot files could be useful.

Quote from: THEllisor on April 12, 2014, 01:18:37 pm

Also, it's looking like all of my pilots' progress was wiped across all mods. But, I've not gotten any more crashes so... yay?

Yeah, assuming you only deleted a single .csg file that doesn't sound right. I have some suspicions that something is not being cleared correctly when campaigns/mods are switched (I thought it was just in the stats data, I'm hoping its not more widespread...), there was at least one bug fixed for that semi recently so I suppose that if you last played 6 months ago you may have tripped over that bug.

Title: Re: Potential player file corruption issue
Post by: THEllisor on April 12, 2014, 08:56:32 pm

I didn't delete any .csg file, unless the update did that. I managed to get some progress back via copy-pasting the .cs2 file(s) from .../data/players/single/inferno into the players folder. So... should I toss up the older pilot files I have? (From Jan 2013 from the looks of it.) I think I may try just copying them over. I mean, worst case, I have to delete the save file that means I'll have to re-watch the WiH act 3 opening cinematic again. So no big deal. Or am I missing some other plausible scenario?

Title: Re: Potential player file corruption issue
Post by: niffiwan on April 13, 2014, 04:02:59 am

By "update" do you mean using 3.7.0? .csg files only get "auto" deleted if you delete the entire pilot from within FSO. So if the BP Act3 campaign started working again and you didn't manually delete the .csg then I'm confused  :p

Also, I thought 3.7.0+ would ignore any .cs2 files in data/players so I'm not exactly sure what's going on there either. Still, if you've salvaged some campaign progress that's good, and if you're happy with that progress then there's no need to post the older pilots.

Lastly, if you don't care much about your pilot stats, then deleting JD.bp2-p2.csg only means you lose campaign progress.

Title: Re: Potential player file corruption issue
Post by: THEllisor on April 13, 2014, 01:10:12 pm

Sorry, should have clarified, I got progress back on other mods/campaigns where I'd lost progress as well, but were not crashing when trying to open the related campaigns in the mainhall. I was still getting the same crash/lack of progress with copying over the old BP save files I said I found (and I only did it with copies, not the files themselves,) I finally  did delete the BP save files (.csg) related to the affected pilot, and that let me get back into action.

And the update I'm referring to, is where the pilot save system was upgraded by the SCP folks from the older, clunky, wonky, lop-sided, original way, that would bug out if you tried to run several mods via the same pilot file to a newer, sleeker, more stable, etc. that was supposed to allow us to only have to make 1 pilot, rather than working to keep up with which pilot was for what mod. I want to say that it was 3.6.15 or thereabouts, I know that it was after 3.6.10, and I think that it was post-3.6.12, but I cannot for the life of me remember exactly which update it was.

Title: Re: Potential player file corruption issue
Post by: General Battuta on April 13, 2014, 01:12:34 pm

I believe it was the jump to 3.7.0 (although BP builds had the new pilot system a little earlier, leading to a number of pretty awful bugs).