UGH! Cannot load saves!

[Walruss]

Ok, sick to death of this....

Can someone tell me a workable load order for the following mods?
GWX Gold
OLC Gold optics mod
Merchant Fleet Mod
Real Depth Charge
Q ship mod for Gwx3
Brittish ASDIC MkI final
GWX3 Wilhelmshafen, st naz, ect.
DarkWraith's Water Disturbance
''"" ship plane fire damage
sobers real smoke
waterstream+exhaust combi
TorpedoTubesFfire Final

If anyone knows of a stable load order... let me know?

[BigRich]

I don't believe the mods you run are to blame for the failed saves because this issue goes back to stock sh3, but there are things you can do to minimise the risk of a ctd. This is what works for me.
After I have committed myself to starting a patrol I try to complete it by returning to base and then closing the game down. I have never had a saved game fail to load as long as my u boat is in base.
However if I have to save my game while still at sea then I make sure i am far away from land, from other ships and also that my u boat is on the surface. The save game usually (but not always) loads.
If I make more than one quick save during a patrol then the saves after the first one usually ctd.
My point is this, try to avoid saving games at sea, if you have to then make one quick save only, sticking to the rules above.
Making multiple saves during the same patrol is a waste of time.

[Walruss]

This has been a consistent problem for a while now (though never used to be) - nearly every save gets corrupted
- I am saving well out to sea and away from traffic
- There is no WAY I have the real world time on my hands to do one patrol per session...

Surely there must be a known root to this issue?

[Tom]

I had the same problem, all saves caused a ctd. I also had occasional memory issues, with a ctd at the beginning of a patrol.

I replaced MFM with the MFM-Interim-Beta version to save on memory and removed the Water Disturbance and Ship Plane Fire damage mods (since those were the last two I added before the problems began). I also checked the validity of my installation using SHValidator and manually fixed the few errors it showed.

After doing all of the above, the new career I started has had no CTD's so far. I've only done 4 combat patrols, and loaded a save for 4 or 5 times, so I can't tell for sure all my problems are gone. But it looks good so far.

After a patrol or two, I'm planning to reactivate the Water Disturbance and Ship Plane Fire damage mods and see if the game is still stable. I'm not planning to return to the MFM full version, at least not until I upgrade from XP to Windows 7, and that's not likely to happen in the near future.

[Redbear]

I know how frustrating that can be! I was having similar issues - I had recently uninstalled SH3, cleaned my PC including the registry, re-loaded the game and yet could never successfuly re-load a single saved game. I came across a thread that suggested that the water disturbance and fire damage mods were known to trash saved games a sea for some. I deleted both, and have since successfully (knock on wood) saved and re-loaded 11 patrols in a campaign. I'd suggest you give that a try.

[Tom]

One thing you might want to check is the memory usage of sh3.exe, especially if you're running Windows XP.

After starting a patrol my memory usage (as shown in Task Manager) for sh3.exe was (if I recall correctly) around 1 860 000 K when I still used the MFM full version. While this is still way below 2GB (and I even use the 4GB patch and load XP with the /3GB switch), I suspect this was at least partially responsible for my save game problems.

With the MFM-Interim-Beta version my sh3.exe currently uses 1 680 000 K, and I don't seem to have any save game issues.

Of course, your problem may be totally unrelated to mine. And my problem may have been caused by something else than memory usage.