Deep6??

[DinkumThinkum]

I'm running W&W patched with WinXP Home, SP2 and all the latest Windows updates.

The only crashes I can remember are a couple when I reloaded a save game from inside the game. I.e., played for a bit, had a disaster and reloaded a save without exiting the game completely.

Other than that, I don't remember any crashes at all.

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The problem with the game crashing after reloading without exiting back to the desktop isn't something unique to W&W or to running games with WinXP: I've seen it with several games over the years, including one MS-DOS game back when Win 3.1 was the latest and greatest. [img]smile.gif[/img]

My best guess is that it's simply a problem with the game program not properly reinitializing data, memory pointers, etc. when a saved game is loaded over top of a game in progress.

I just try to remember to always exit back to the desktop when I need to reload (usually not too often), and that seems to prevent crashing in W&W; also seems to reduce crashing and instability in other games too.

No idea if that's related to any of your crashes, but you might see if you notice any crashes after reloading during a game in progress without going back to the desktop.

[ 04-15-2005, 03:50 PM: Message edited by: DinkumThinkum ]

[aleph_null1]

Originally posted by DinkumThinkum: My best guess is that it's simply a problem with the game program not properly reinitializing data, memory pointers, etc. when a saved game is loaded over top of a game in progress.

I've thought about the same, but I've also run into "corrupted" save games, i.e. the save just sucked (for some reason beyond my ken) and was unusable.

This only happens at key cusp points in the story, of course [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

[DinkumThinkum]

Originally posted by aleph_null1: I've thought about the same, but I've also run into "corrupted" save games, i.e. the save just sucked (for some reason beyond my ken) and was unusable. This only happens at key cusp points in the story, of course [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

I haven't had any problems with corrupted saves in W&W yet (knock on wood...), but I have run into corrupted saves in other games. That's a separate problem from the initialization problem.

With a corrupt saved game, the problem is bad data in the saved game file on the hard drive. Unless you have some way to edit the save and fix the bad data, the only solution is to go back to an earlier save file and delete or overwrite the corrupted one.

With the initialization problem, the save game file on your hard drive is fine: the data only gets scrambled when you load the save game over top of a game in progress. Once you realize a particular game has this problem, the solution is to just exit to the desktop and reload the game before loading a saved game.

(If you load a good save game file and it doesn't initilize properly, then save it, that is one way to cause a corrupted save file on your hard drive. This is easy to do if the initilization problem doesn't show any symptoms right away.)

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The nasty thing about both problems is that they don't always show symptoms right away: if the game seems to be working fine, you may save corrupted data into more save slots without realizing it, , and wind up with all your save games corrupted before you notice a problems.

That's why I'm not too fond of games like W&W that give you a very limited number of save game slots: unless you backup your saves outside the game, it's easy to wind up in a mess that can only be solved by starting the game over from scratch.

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With W&W, the very first time I loaded a saved game from inside the game after I'd been playing a while, the game crashed almost immediately. That was all the warning I needed to form a habit of first going back to the desktop any time I want to reload a saved game; I don't want more problems down the line.

[Bungleau]

That's strange... I've never run into a problem with casting the reverse time spell in my games. The only time I have to fall back on the "recreate world" spell is if I accidentally alt-tab out...

[DinkumThinkum]

Well, it could have been just coincidence.

All I know is: the very first time I reloaded a save game without exiting to the desktop, the game crashed a few seconds later. Other than that, the game has been completely stable for me: no crashes at all, even though I normally play for several hours at a stretch.

So it seemed reasonable to me that the crash was related to reloading from inside the game, especially since I've seen a few other games that also had problems if you didn't exit and restart the game before loading a saved game.

If nobody else has ever had problems related to reloading saved games over top of a W&W game in progress, I guess it was just bad luck in my case.

[A Black Falcon]

First, those issues are known things about W&W, A Black Falcon. You can't alt-tab from W&W... it just isn't that compatible. And I've never tried alt-F4ing from W&W, so I haven't seen that before. It sounds like what you're facing are just known issues... things we have to live with. Guess this means that you can't play W&W at work [Smile] So sorry... there's nothing to be done to fix those things.

I thought so... that's why I was so happy that the used copy I got came with the map and manual -- otherwise I'd have no way of seeing the spell descriptions, or stat descriptions, etc, while ingame because of how, like the classic game it is, it's got badly lacking ingame documentation... HTML manuals are useless when you have to go through the lengthy quitting-and-restarting procedure to use them. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Guess I'm lucky to not get the various crashes people here talk about... but really, the games the bug is known to have are bad enough -- getting stuck behind those stupid frogs in their narrow cave, trying to get through some underwater passages that seem too small, etc...