Game crashes when attempting to load a saved game

[brett25]

Hi I am experiencing a crash to desktop when attempting to load a saved single mission. This is disheartening since it took me ages to arrive at the port of Curacao undetected (yeah it takes a while creeping by at 2knots) and I saved the mission hoping to continue the action today. Today was suposed to be when I wreak havok on the Harbor itself. I am playing GWX 2.0, however I noticed this happened with regular SH3. I assume I am using 1.4b, since none of the patches will ever work (they all say i am using an unkown text file "en_menu"), however I recently purchased the game from Amazon (DVD case version) which I heard ships as 1.4b?

Is there a way of editing the saved game file/profile? Or doing anything to salvage these files?

Please help, I am a new player of SH3 and really love it, but I am on the edge of moving on becase of the bugginesss and random behavior of the game. If one cannot save a game in the middle of a several hour mission, then the game is essentially useless to me. Thanks very much!

[brett25]

HI. its curtains for my saved game, o well I m already back at Curacao and resaved. But before I returned to the seas, I unistalled the game completely, and deleted eveything -all folders, all saved folders etc, then did a clean reistall and reapplied GWX 2.0. Howver I am doing the folowing when saving my games in the future (this is supossed to help but I dont know yet:

Suggested game save method:

1. Hit ESC and click on SAVE. Give a relevant name. Make as many such save points as you wish.

2. When ready to quit your patrol, follow the above procedure to save your game, return to the game, immediately hit ESC again, click on SAVE & EXIT, give the save point a name like "delete" or whatever.

The next time you revert to your patrol, select any of the SAVE points you want prior to the "delete" SAVE & EXIT point.

Hope this helps

[moscowexile]

The same has happened to me on several occasions and it is, to say the least, very disheartening after having spent hours on a mission only to find it inaccessible.

Of late I have been suffering from immense problems with this game. I don't know why, but it is very probably because of my ATI Radeon HD2600 Pro AGP board that I bought some 6 weeks ago: whenever I add mods, everything goes haywire.

I'm seriously thinking of giving up completely on this game.

All my other games work impeccably, but not SHIII with Grey Wolves expansion 2.0.

[deepboat]

HI. its curtains for my saved game, o well I m already back at Curacao and resaved. But before I returned to the seas, I unistalled the game completely, and deleted eveything -all folders, all saved folders etc, then did a clean reistall and reapplied GWX 2.0. Howver I am doing the folowing when saving my games in the future (this is supossed to help but I dont know yet:

Suggested game save method:

1. Hit ESC and click on SAVE. Give a relevant name. Make as many such save points as you wish.

2. When ready to quit your patrol, follow the above procedure to save your game, return to the game, immediately hit ESC again, click on SAVE & EXIT, give the save point a name like "delete" or whatever.

The next time you revert to your patrol, select any of the SAVE points you want prior to the "delete" SAVE & EXIT point.

Hope this helpsFirst of all, welcome Herr Brett25! Some pointers: save and save often. Try to save while surfaced. Saving while submerged apparently may cause some problems. Are you running SH Commander? It really helps in game play. There may be more knowledgeable people in the forums with better expertise.

[brett25]

hi deepboat,

no im not running commander. I just lost another mission "Curacoa" after playing for 4 hours tonite. perhaps its because im playing the non GWX version of this mission? I have been really careful about saving and I save many times. But when one file gets corrupted they all get corrupted so that doesnt help at all.Its hard to save while surfaced because I cant suface in order to save (i spend most of the game very deep down sneaking around the destroyers lol) O well. I really like the game, but saving is out of the question so I will just have to play and when I quit for the day, thats it. I wonder if SH4 does this?

[deepboat]

I have a habit of saving before I get into dangerous areas ie: ports, getting close to a convoy or just saving when the weather is ideal, seems to help. I know that if it crashed at a certain point, I try to remember what the instance was. I'll reload the game but select the previous save and delete the save that caused the crash. Don't know about SH IV though, I'm still researching a suitable graphics card that will allow me to play it and MOH Airborne which requires DX 10.

[harzfeld]

I have the same problem on my save games. I have to play one patrol completely and dock at port with at least 1 saves or no saves during a patrol. When one saved game is corrupted, then the next saves get to be corrupted too, have to go back to dock saves to redo. Maybe what causing it may have to do with length of time playing, or higher TC, or corrupting saves relating to bugs was not focused thoroughly due to ADHD, or UBI didn’t release SDK, or assumptions that all players don’t sleep and reject saved games during patrols for so called reason to realism, or to prevent players to reload after they died or to redo a part in same patrol after whatever their failures are, I don’t know. This same nuisance problem happened on previous versions too, and no idea if it will be fixed in the next. I’m using SH3 CMDR, it didn’t help and I thought it did at first. This bug is pretty random; sometimes we get to be lucky to have no corrupted saves. I thought of deleting all older saves to see if it helps but it would delete my entire career completely.

[moscowexile]

Harzfeld, you have described exactly what I have experienced. Only once have I ever got so far in a career as to be transferred from Wilhelmshaven to L'Orient and to have sailed out of that French base twice on successful missions.

I have re-installed so many times and always, of course, to the book, that I am sure I could do it in my sleep now; nevertheless, when everything at last seems to be in order there is always a crash and then graphics mayhem. My last crash was yesterday after 4 days out of Wilhelmshaven and hunting with great success around the Orkneys: now the game always starts back at base, although my log says Sept. 4 1939. Furthermore, OLC's fine manual targetting mod is now malfunctioning: no Roman numerals on torpedo tube selector.

The thing that baffles me is that all my other games work fine, including MOH Airborne - and I have only DX 1.9c. I've experimented with all sorts of driver permutations and combinations and all my other games, including stock SHIII, continue to function normally. So the problem can't lie with my PC software nor with the hardware: it must be somewhere in GWX 2.0 or one of the mods. I should prefer to think it is the latter supposition, so I'm now painstakingly testing my favourite mods one by one. However, the only mods that I have been using of late are: OLC's targetting, wave texture and environment (8kms.) ones, officers' faces by THORN, Carotio's sea bed, Schleuse Holtenau Mod 1.0, and a couple of GWX mods. I also use many of my own ogg. files that have German light opera and popular music of the 1930s and '40s.

[Umfuld]

I sympathise with not being able to save underwater, brett25. But I have also read here that you shouldn't do this.


Escaping from multiple escorts often takes hours. And using TC makes it A LOT easier for them to detect you. (My biggest gripe about the game) So it's a BIG drawback to this game if you can't save while submerged as you may have to be down there for 12 hours or more!

I can just pause and leave the game for as long as I like - but understandable that not everyone is able to do this. :cry:


Maybe there is another reason for your problems though and someone can help you with it. I hope you are able to get it sorted. We need more good skippers in the Atlantic :ping:

[Jimbuna]

[quote=brett25]hi deepboat,

perhaps its because im playing the non GWX version of this mission? quote]

I think you may have found the answer to your problem http://www.psionguild.org/forums/images/smilies/wolfsmilies/pirate.gif

[jpm1]

I never have this kind of problems except once in a career i was in the middle of a convoy and deep charged by several ships i put this on the lack of memory ? since then i take care of saving in "calm" zones and well no more problems . I don't have GWX but i've got a lot of GWX mods . eventually try to raise the processus priority ..?

[Jimbuna]

moscowexile......It sounds like you have conflicting mods installed. Might I suggest you uninstall them all, then reinstall GWX, enabling only those mods that are supplied with GWX.

After that, I'd suggest any additional 3rd party mods you wish to use are installed only one at a time and the game is played after each install to ensure there is no conflict.

I would also advise you only use mods that are compatable with JSGME and that you back up any files your about to alter beforehand.

On the issue of saving whilst submerged.....DON'T, the game engine does not like it for some reason unknown to us all. Nor should you save whilst surfaced if your within approx 100km of a port because the port traffic lose their waypoints and tend to run aground or crash into each other. Another quirk of the SH3 game engine.

Good Luck http://www.psionguild.org/forums/images/smilies/wolfsmilies/thumbsup.gif

[brett25]

Hi Jimbuna,

Yes this is the most obvious variable ( playing a non GWX mission under GWX), so I am doing another test to see if this is the problem. However, after hearing from the others who are experiencing the same problems, I am not fully confident that this is the problem. My gut feeling is that a cfg file is getting changed/corrupted somewhere. I am determined to trouble shoot this fully and if I should be so lucky to figure this out I will post my findings here. There may be something getting written to these profile/saved games folders that are located in the "my documents/SH3 folder". One possibility is that I have not installed the game to the defaul C drive but rather to my E drive where all my games go. Also My document folder is located on my E drive as well. Can anybody else who is having saved game crashes verify if they are also instlaling to a non default folder? This would be one more test I will perforn. Once I get to know the files better, I will be in a better position to see what gets written apon saving and what that gets compared to in the main CFG file.

Sitting at the bottom at 180 meters doing nothing gives one plenty of time to reflect........

Happy sailing

[Jimbuna]

Good Luck brett25 http://www.psionguild.org/forums/images/smilies/wolfsmilies/thumbsup.gif

[trongey]

Brett25, are you using FSAutostart?
I was using FSA and having a terrible time with the game crashing when I tried to reload a save. Out of desperation I tried starting the game without FSA, and it came right up. Since then I went back in and made my SH3 profile in FSA a little less aggressive. Things have been working fine since then.

Tony

[brett25]

Hi Trongey,

No, im not using FS Autostart, but thats a good suggestion for some of the others.

S.O.S Save Our Saves

[moscowexile]

Sehr geehrter Kaleun Brett25:

I've been thinking along the same lines as you have as regards my not installing the game to the default C drive. I always install games to a games folder on D drive. I have, however, noticed that all the graphics glitches that I have had to endure these past 6 weeks or so disappear when I open the properties of D drive and toggle the "compress drive" and "allow indexing tabs". In that D drive games folder I also have in the Ubisoft file "Brothers In Arms", which game, needless to say, runs flawlessly.

I did yet another re-install in the early hours of this morning after having installed the Catalyst 8.3 Hotfix for my ATI Radeon HD2600 Pro AGP card: no change. (The purchase of that card has caused me innumerable problems, but that is another story.)

Another possible source of these gremlins that we suffer from when trying to play our favourite subsim could be codexes: I had problems before Christmas, which problem, I have noticed, somebody else in this forum has recently suffered from, namely that the game does not load after the intro film and one is faced with a black screen and a cursor that leaves a trail. I found out through trial and error that a codex in the K-lite pack was responsible or this problem: unfortunately, I only found this out the hard way after having re-installed Windows XP!

There is advice on another thread concerning this codex incompatibility problem.

I believe that another codex could possibly be causing these irritating problems that I am experiencing with the game: sometime in January I must have done something that has been the cause of my woes, because for about a fortnight after Christmas I enjoyed faultless gaming of SHIII/GWX 2.0 with favourite mods including OLC's superb targetting one.

I shall keep you informed of further developments.

Viele Grüße aus dem Moskauer Trockendock!

[canadaexile]

I have had the same experiance, only in career mode. Its a bit frustrating when you sight a convoy and save the game ( in my novice capacity a wise move) and then try to replay having learnt valuble lessons only to find that the game CTD and I have to begin at port again.
Another point I would like to raise is that I was told to go to the west coast of Africa for a mission. I only have a VIIb sub, so I thought that I would refuel half way there. On the journey I sank 2-3 ships and thought that my luck was going to change only to find out that when I refueled my points were deleted and my original mission was gone and a new 'null' mission was selected. Any mods to correct this?

[Jimbuna]

You save within 50km of any scripted units.....at your peril. The units have a tendancy to lose their waypoints and crash into each other.

[jpm1]

Sehr geehrter Kaleun Brett25:

.. Another possible source of these gremlins that we suffer from when trying to play our favourite subsim could be codexes: I had problems before Christmas, which problem, I have noticed, somebody else in this forum has recently suffered from, namely that the game does not load after the intro film and one is faced with a black screen and a cursor that leaves a trail. I found out through trial and error that a codex in the K-lite pack was responsible or this problem: unfortunately, I only found this out the hard way after having re-installed Windows XP! ...

Viele Grüße aus dem Moskauer Trockendock!

you need to disable the ffdshow codec with the CodecTweakTool.exe (K-Lite Codec Pack\Tools) if you don't want that to happen

[Chisum]

Hi I am experiencing a crash to desktop when attempting to load a saved single mission. This is disheartening since it took me ages to arrive at the port of Curacao undetected (yeah it takes a while creeping by at 2knots)...

Sorry to disturb(I don't want open a thread just for that) but I need some help cause it's exactly what I do actually: an escape to Caribean Sea hopping meet some big tankers.
But, something is strange, watch my map:

http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/224/sh3img123200822447312kd1.jpg


I left Lorient on October 12, 1940 and I arrived at this point on January 24, 1941 only !
That means 3 months at 2 knots, zero knot when surfaced for battery, a real pity !
And on this so looooong way I met only one ship near Gibraltar and one else near Porto Spain as you can see.
And all the time(as the big black line[representing my position every 24 h] shows) I stayed on the single cargo line !

Is it normal ??

Second question because I need now some reward: where must I go now to find many big ships ?
Curaçao ?
South USA ?

Thanks and sorry again if I disturb the subject.