Save Game Corruption

[Fintilgin]

Well, everything was going well in my game of Civ3. Large world, 12 Civs, I was the Japanese. (I've got an 866 PIII, with Gforce3 and 128 meg `o ram) Round about 1450 A.D. I went to reload one of the autosaves from the recent past. The game cranked away, hesitated around 57% for a long time then said something about unable to load some sort of city file.

Another error message popped up saying something was wrong with the save game, and my game then loaded up. The world was fine, all my units and improvements were there, but EVERY CITY IN THE WORLD WAS MISSING! I'm not entirely certain why this didn't result in instant death for everyone who didn't have a settler on the map, but I didn't go to the next turn to see what happened.

I tried to load all my other auto-saves from that game, and they all had the same problem. I finally found one of my manual save games from the early 1300's that worked ok. It looked like that one wasn't corrupted. Everything went well until about 1700 when I needed to reload because I accidently gave the most powerfull civilization a tech I was hoarding to keep a wonder (misclicked). With a certain amount of worry I loaded an auto-save.

No cities.

I'd saved manually more frequently, but all of THOSE had the same irritating error. Now, obviously I'm a little leary of spending six hours on another game only to get half way though and have my game get corrupted. Has anyone else encountered this, or know what might be causing it?

Joe

(BTW: The game itself rules... (love that aggressive land-grabbing AI) I just want to be able to play it!

[Mike Breitkreutz FIRAXIS]

Can you zip and post one or two of your autosaves? I can take a look at the problem and try to figure out what's going on. None of us have seen anything like this with any version of the game so I'm a bit puzzled....

[Beau]

I have th exact same save problem

The game runs pretty well on my celeron 466 processor and my 64 mb of ram, the problem comes with when I try to load my saved games they immediatly stop at %57 complete. NOw that I know I'm not the only one this has to be a bug, and a very annoying one at that since you don't find out til hours of wasted gameplay.

[Mike Breitkreutz FIRAXIS]

Re: I have th exact same save problem

Originally posted by Beau
The game runs pretty well on my celeron 466 processor and my 64 mb of ram, the problem comes with when I try to load my saved games they immediatly stop at %57 complete. NOw that I know I'm not the only one this has to be a bug, and a very annoying one at that since you don't find out til hours of wasted gameplay.

Now this is a different problem.... At 57% the game is usually loading the units on the map. The unit loading is considered "1 item" for the progress bar so the bar does not update again until all the units have loaded. Try waiting a little longer and the bar should progress past 57%.

[Fintilgin]

I can send you those autosaves, but who should I e-mail them too? I don't have web-space to stick them on so I can't just post them...

Thanks a bunch,
Joe

[Mike Breitkreutz FIRAXIS]

Originally posted by Fintilgin
I can send you those autosaves, but who should I e-mail them too? I don't have web-space to stick them on so I can't just post them...

Thanks a bunch,
Joe

I meant to post them to the forums but if you can't or don't know how, send me a private message and I'll give you an email address.

[Beau]

Its not unit loading

If I hit ctrl alt delete I cans ee the program running and after it hits 57% it says not responding.

[Mike Breitkreutz FIRAXIS]

Re: Its not unit loading

Originally posted by Beau
If I hit ctrl alt delete I cans ee the program running and after it hits 57% it says not responding.

While it is unit loading it is not going to be processing Windows messages which means that it will be "not responding".

Did you try waiting a little longer? Your machine is only slightly above the min. spec...

[ColdWizard]

Originally posted by Beau
The game runs pretty well on my celeron 466 processor and my 64 mb of ram, the problem comes with when I try to load my saved games they immediatly stop at %57 complete.

my laptop (pIII 850, 128meg ram) spends most of the load time at 57%. just be patient





Fintilgin, to post a zipped save game:
post a reply, but before submitting it click on the browse button to the right of "Attach file:" and select the zipped file.

[Nemo]

do you still want us to post corrupted files? i get the following error on the first attempt to reload a saved game:

DataIO operator system error: CITY


all subsiquent attempts to load this game gives me a civilization3 error box opens and says: "c:\directory\gameFolder\savedGameFolder\savedGame game file corrupted" (or something to that nature) and it loaded with no cities, just terrain and units. the first thing i did was hit F1 to go to my city screen, then Windows errored with "civ.exe error" (dr.watson log/msg)

my specs:
PII 450
512Mb RAM
Win2k SP2 (as admin)
GeForce 2 GTS
DirectX 8.0a
SB Live!

if you are interested, let me know, i will post the files. i emailed infograms on wednesday about this, but they never responded.

EDIT: 8 civs; large map; orinigal civilization3.ini file

[jones]

I'm getting the same DataIO CIV error as Nemo. This is the first time its happened to me, and this is my first game with more than 8 AI civs.

I have saves if you need them.

edit: oops, that error is DataIO CITY not CIV

[Fintilgin]

Yeah, the dataIO error is what I get too.

A note. If you try to load the game from the main menu, it gives you the error messages and dosn't load. You only get the vanishing cities if you load the game from the MAP.

Here are a couple of my games. Behold Prince A****aka of Japan and his Empire of Invisible Cities!

Joe

[Grunthex]

I get the same DataIO: CITY error, but mine doesn't even go to the game, just dumps me back to the menu. Savegame attached here. Note, all my autosaves from this game are the same.

This seems to be happening to people in the middle-late to late stages on larger maps, maybe just too much information?

[jones]

LOL .. this thread is turning into a little "who has actually played the game for some time" list.

Gruthex, Fintilgin, did you both have more than 8 civs in the game?

[Grunthex]

I did, 12 civs/large map. I think 9 were still alive (the Aztecs made a lot of sacrifices to their dirty little gods)