did anyone ever figure out how to fix the corrupted save game issue

[marioh99]

i'm running GWX3 and ran into the dreaded corrupted save game issue (on both my current patrol saves).
it happened because i think i was near a coastline. both were saved on the surface, no TC, and no nearby ships. i believe i was near the casablanca coastline.

anyone ever figure out how to fix the corrupted save file?
would rather not lose this patrol as i finally sank a major british warship (HMS Nelson) and have 115k worth of tonnage.

any possible way to find current uboat position in the save file and use a hex editor so i can change it?

i tried some of the possible fixes i found here, but none helped.
saves crash after a long delay on the "not so long ago..." screen.

TIA.

[Madox58]

anyone ever figure out how to fix the corrupted save file?


The short answer is no.
Many have looked at the files hard and long, but I've never seen anything close to a specification as to how to read the files involved in a successful save, let alone a corrupted save.

[Captain Nemo]

Some have said that unchecking the "read only" status of the SH3 game and save game folders can cure save game loading problems, but I haven't tried this myself yet. If you try this, please post if it worked for you.

Nemo

[marioh99]

Some have said that unchecking the "read only" status of the SH3 game and save game folders can cure save game loading problems, but I haven't tried this myself yet. If you try this, please post if it worked for you.

Nemo

I saw that, but it didn't work for me.
Ran elevated CMD prompt, removed and verified that none of the files and folders in both locations had any read only flag. :arrgh!:

[sublynx]

Sorry to hear that it did not work for you :/\\!!

I went from crashing all the time to zero save game crashes after changing the read-only attributes (praying the SH3 save game Lord that it continues like this for me) :lurk:

[marioh99]

i decided to try again, new patrol, same basic premise as the patrol that crashed (except i saved constantly this time).

i would goto my patrol area, complete the 24 hours in the area, and then make my way to the area to the west of the strait of gibralter, and sure enough, corrupt save issue again (load of save gets to "not so long ago" screen, and after an extended wait, CTD).

i backtracked and found a working save, right at the northern edge of CG89. my preplanned route was NNE from there, and my next save would've been in the next grid (CG86). since there was an extended time between the working save and the next save which was corrupted, that's usually indicative that i ran into, and sank an enemy merchant. there's something about that area which i believe has an issue with enemy ships being sunk as none of my subsequent saves in that area worked (over 20 saves). i had not exited the game during any of those subsequent saves, and had sunk multiple enemy ships in that time, so perhaps that may also be the issue.


i've not had any corrupted saves anywhere else, so i'm leaning towards an issue with that particular area. i guess i'll have to stay west of the CG86 grid area if i want to hunt ships coming and going thru the strait, or save, exit the game, and then verify that the save works every time i save when in that area. :down:

[Ramcourse]

I posted a way to deal with corrupted saves that works for me:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=196530

[marioh99]

I posted a way to deal with corrupted saves that works for me:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=196530

i tried that with no success. :arrgh!:

i think there's different types of corrupted saves. i remember having this same issue with the area west of the strait of gibralter when i first started playing this game years ago.

cheers. :salute:

[Ramcourse]

Too bad, it's not a panacea then. :hmmm:

How much RAM do you have?

[marioh99]

Too bad, it's not a panacea then. :hmmm:

How much RAM do you have?

8GB.

So far, I've been able to patrol/hunt in the strait of gibralter area by saving and exiting every in-game day (and then reloading the just saved game), and closing out the game completely every 2nd save. There must be something weird going on in that area that builds up over time that affects just saving and continuing the patrol. :hmmm:

I'll have to keep my fingers crossed and see what happens. Of course, this patrol has sucked with nothing but puny 2k and 4k ships and no convoys yet. :haha:

[Ramcourse]

I've been hanging out about 65 km south of Cadiz, and my savegames have not been giving me any trouble. I get crashes when saving in AM1155 though. I suspect it has something to do with the sheer amount of things the savegame tries -and fails- to contain. For instantce, saving near a broken ship of which the front half refused to go down crashed my savegame every single time. Anomalies like that don't like being saved.

[Captain Nemo]

8GB.

Have you applied the 4GB patch that will allow SH3 to use 4GB instead of 2GB of virtual memory on x64 platforms? If not see http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php . I'm not saying this will cure the problem, but it might help.

Nemo

[marioh99]

Have you applied the 4GB patch that will allow SH3 to use 4GB instead of 2GB of virtual memory on x64 platforms? If not see http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php . I'm not saying this will cure the problem, but it might help.

Nemo

yes i have, the last thing i did after i installed and patched sh3.
thanks for the suggestion though ! :salute:

[Dave Kay]

As I see this is an older thread, I hope to shed a little lite on my recent save/corrupt/career problems in SH3.

WinXP machine w/2G RAM Pentium 4 CPU w/Nvidia 6800 GPU + SH3 from original disk patched + SH3 Commander + GWX and a few simple realism mods. Playing at 74% realism.

Having learned more, here on SUBSIM, about why crash/saves happen it lead me to a fix of sorts in which a certain problematic commander's career experienced ongoing crashes and recovery, e.g., the save would load and play just fine but crash when loading other times.

In either case, SH3 Commander would load SH3 all the way to the selected commander's saved career list just fine. The game would crash where the selected saved game loaded itself all the way to the "Long ago" screen then goes black then dumps you to Microsoft error reporting - cannot load, etc,.

The culprit, if it can be called that, was at this commander's saved games list screen; I scrolled up the list to inspect saved games dates and sure enough, there was a date out of sequence with the rest of the list. EXAMPLE: real-time game save dates Oct 2 2015 thru to the present date of last game save Sept 21 2916 ---- in that list a single date was out of sequence with the dates BEFORE and AFTER it. Why is unknown.

Naturally, if you delete that errant out-of-sequence entry everything after it is gone too. But what else to do if you wish to save that career at least up to that point in time?

Depending on how far back in the saved games history the out-of-sequence date is, you may not lose much of that commander's career however, in my case I had to delete nearly half a year of real-time game saves, what a shame.

Now, whenever I reach the page to load this commander's saved games, I scroll up the list to verify that date sequence is in order. Thus far I have not experienced any out of sequence game saves and things are going along swimmingly.

Hope this may help someone else navigating similar shoals.

[Dave Kay]

Sorry to report that my previously posted info no longer holds water: now I have a second commander's career crashing the same way:

"Windows has encountered a problem with SH3.." at the "Long time ago..." loading screen.

My SH3 installation on this PC (see previous post) has 4 different commanders on roster. Two have now become corrupt and unplayable resulting in wiping all saves and starting those careers over.

As my other two uncorrupted commanders seem to be working fine, so far, I fear their demise and conclude that this problem appears to be an SH3/WinXP error. All 4 of these commanders were in their career stages of early-to-middle 1942; the Beginning of The Hot Times. What to do?

My working solution at this point is to do a total reinstall of everything on this PC. Please pardon my ignorance and impatience but I DO KNOW how to do a total WINXP reinstall, been there done that 100 times over. But HOW do I specifically keep my as YET uncorrupted--- and very successful commanders career files intact--- to reinstall w/SH3 again?

Have searched "reinstall SH3" on the forum and everything looks good in that respect BUT--- maybe I'm missing the part where I may possibly reinstall my commander's SAVED CAREERS. :oops:

Any help?

[McDonnel]

I must say I had the same problem with GWX - crashing loaded careers on "Not so long ago..."...

and very infuriatingly, saves from single missions didn´t. After few days of unsuccessful tries, I gave up and decided to give try to LSH3.

There, during the installation process, was a simple troubleshooting guide:

When crashes occur at career loadings, make sure you have SH3.exe set on Windows 7 compatibility and running as administrator.

I told to myself, oh what the hell, you have reinstalled SH3 with GWX so many times, one more will not hurt you - did clean install, clean GWX install, performed the setting and...

Lo and behold, GWX issues with career loading solved. No corrupted saves anymore, I can save any time, any amount of contacts - middle of exploding convoy, exploding harbors when I tried deck gun barrage just to test it are not problem anymore etc.
It loads perfectly fine now.

Check your compatibility for Windows 7 and running as admin :)

[THEBERBSTER]

Hi McDonnel
This is one of the important aspects that I stress in all my SH tutorials.
Running applications as an administrator makes a big difference.
Windows 10 is changed to compatibility Windows7
Windows 7 I never had a problems with but can be changed to XP with SP3 also has made a difference for others.
Peter

[dk_sub]

Sorry to report that my previously posted info no longer holds water: now I have a second commander's career crashing the same way:

"Windows has encountered a problem with SH3.." at the "Long time ago..." loading screen.

My SH3 installation on this PC (see previous post) has 4 different commanders on roster. Two have now become corrupt and unplayable resulting in wiping all saves and starting those careers over.

As my other two uncorrupted commanders seem to be working fine, so far, I fear their demise and conclude that this problem appears to be an SH3/WinXP error. All 4 of these commanders were in their career stages of early-to-middle 1942; the Beginning of The Hot Times. What to do?

My working solution at this point is to do a total reinstall of everything on this PC. Please pardon my ignorance and impatience but I DO KNOW how to do a total WINXP reinstall, been there done that 100 times over. But HOW do I specifically keep my as YET uncorrupted--- and very successful commanders career files intact--- to reinstall w/SH3 again?

Have searched "reinstall SH3" on the forum and everything looks good in that respect BUT--- maybe I'm missing the part where I may possibly reinstall my commander's SAVED CAREERS. :oops:

Any help?

Hi Dave.

I too had the save game crash. I'm using LSH and I think they installed the file "4GB_PATCH.exe I found in the SH3 folder. Run it and point to your SH3.exe. It will then be patched. It worked for me so maybe.....

[jscharpf]

It seems to me that no matter how many precautions you take, you might be the unlucky one who gets the crash that you can't recover from. Early on I had this happen to me.
What I did, is not a solution, but merely a "Band-Aid".

I simply keep a running set of 4 saves, all separated by some time or distance.
So, for example, I will save while out at sea, in the clear, do this two times, maybe three, each maybe 100KM from each other. I just call them save1, save2, etc..


The only thing this does of course is (hopefully) gives you several different restore points. This has always worked for me, one time going back to the third save. I really believe it was a certain location/time/situation which I may never see again unless I'm in the same place at the same time.

I keep the saves far enough away from each other so as not to all be corrupted, but close enough such that I don't lose an entire mission.


I realize this isn't the answer you want, but it has kept me going for the last year or two now.

Jeff

[THEBERBSTER]

Hi js
I have made over 70 game saves with LSH3-2015 and have never had a ctd, game save corruption, or game loading crash.
I only make 1 save per gaming session and position the boat not closer than 60km from any destroyed mark when making my game save.
Peter
https://s28.postimg.org/ghh0l6f99/lsh3_support_download_banner.gif

[Dave Kay]

Another point I should make is that something I have seen in another post on SUBSIM ???? mentioned mid-play game crashes when closely engaged (10KM) with any sinking or damaged ships. This I now realize is how several of my commander's crashed mission-plays became corrupt. EXAMPLE: mild weather, ship torpedoed and still afloat... ooops--- I gotta' go now so Save Game. Returning to mission play the next day game gives the Windows 'problem' screen and that mission is now corrupt and unplayable--- ERASE~!

Another example is in real heavy weather while stalking a convoy 10km distance the Watch spots a ship mid-convoy in flames struggling to keep station. No action taken by commander but Save Game results in next play the mission is corrupt and unplayable.

My advice; save, save, save when damaged ships in close proximity or--- bugout and find another convoy and nice weather. Hope that helps.

[gatordad]

I have just overcome saved game ctd issues when trying to load a saved game on my Windows 10 system. Realized after much trouble shooting that I was not running a compatibility mode for SH3.exe. As soon as I went to using Win XP sp2 compatibility mode, all is well with loading saved games in each of my supermod versions (GWX3.0Gold, NYGM, WAC, LSH2015).

Amazing that I never thought about compatibility mode first. Would have saved me much time and trouble with uninstalling/reinstalling SH3+Supermods+mods.

[Nemesis Bosseret]

Im having issues on Operation drum beat. saves keep corrupting and its such a long patrol you need to take breaks and get off but its incredibly infurating that i only get one good save and anything after corrupts. does anyone know of a work around?

[FUBAR295]

Here's a thread that covers some resolutions to some saves;

https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=166283

But there have never been a complete resolution on bad saves. It can be different factors or a combination that ruin a save.

I avoid saving while submerged, near enemy units, always pause the game before a save in the Navigation window, and I never use the SAVE option (I always wind up with a corrupt save when I do) always the Save and Exit option, you can always fire it thing up again the continue.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Good hunting,
FUBAR295