Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Technical Problems Corupted Save Games

Anyone have any fixes for an issue pertaining to my install of divine divinity crashing every time i load a game? its one of my two quicksave slots, and any time i try to load either of these games, DD crashes to desktop, and i have to kill the PID for divine divinity inorder to even stop the sounds from stopping after the game has already crashed.


I've just purchased this game, and so far am very unimpressed with it (the game itself seems very innovative and entertaining, but the fact that it is soo buggy has turned this into an aggrivating expereience)

I've patched DD to 1.34, and am running win2k.

Hard ware is as follows;

p4 1700/m processor
512 mb, pc-266 ram so-dimms (its a laptop)
4500 rpm 20 Gig drive
running directx 9.0a (needed for master of orion 3)
geforce2go, with the latest port of the detonator drivers


Any suggestions? as i'd really like to be able to say, leave the starting town, save and ACTUALY be able to load said save game =/

Thank you for your assistance in advance.

-Rich

Hi farris,

Did you try out the following already? (from our Technical Support FAQ)

5) Problem: Random crashes

* Make sure all your drivers are up to date and you have the latest service packs and windows updates installed.
* Turn down the windows hardware acceleration of the sound driver down by one notch.
* Make sure the color depth of your desktop is set to 16 bits.
* Make sure the integrity of your files is not compromised by executing a scandisk.
* Make sure you have no other applications running in the background
* Make sure you have enough free hard disc space
* Make sure you have full read/write access to the folder where you installed Divine Divinity

You also might want to check if there is a file called error.txt in the run folder of the folder where Divine Divinity was installed, as it might contain helpful hints.

If none of the above helps you, I would try uninstalling, reinstall, apply the patch and try again. Don't forget to backup your savegames! If I were you, I would first play again with a fresh install (so, don't copy your savegames) and see if it works. Then I would try again, with your older savegames. Maybe one of your current saves do contain corrupt files...

And if you backup your savegames on a cd, don't forget to uncheck the read-only flags when copying them to your HDD.

I've just tried playing not using the quicksave function, as it appears that my quicksave games have been screwed up, but i just ran into the exact same problem, i JUST started a new game on a fresh install of divine divinity, and proceeded to wander around playing. everything seemed fine untill i died, when i died i was unable to load the save game i'd been using, as none of the save game files were there, here is an excerpt from the error log.


*************************************************************************
Error at Fri Jun 20 21:22:24.268 2003

Error copying savegames\ONE\inv.i0 to dynamic\inventi.000


This was after i'd died, pressed escape to bring up the menu, and reloaded.

Any ideas on work arounds, fixes for this, as of now i am incredibly displeased that i wasted Thirty dollars on this unplayable piece of software =(

and aside from the crashing, the game looks wonderfull.

Any ideas on how i'd go about getting my money back? I contacted the store i've bought this game from, and they wont accecpt opened returns, but at this point, after several reinstalls, on two different machines both running win2k, i am still experiencing the same issues.

I just wasted another hour or so of my time playing this, only to find that after i've died, yet again, the program errors out while i try to load my saved game. This is 100% unaccecptable, and i cant believe anyone would ever release such a completly unoperational product. Has anyone else ran into this issue, or even a similar one?

This last test i've done was to save the game after making a slight ammount of progress, and then exit the game cleanly, then reload the game, and attempt to reload the saved game i'd just created. At this point the program errored out, with another error in the error.txt file indicating problems loading the save game (speficicly as follows)


*************************************************************************
Error at Sat Jun 21 01:11:53.747 2003

Error copying savegames\ONE\inv.i0 to dynamic\inventi.000

what's folder called "one"......?

"one" was the name of the save game i've made for that particular test, seems like the path for which ever savegame appears to be $whateverdivnedivinitydir/savegames/SAVENAME

so does it work now?

Someone else had a similar problem, and started saving multiple times to try to get at least one good save, then the game stopped corrupting the saves. I'll try to find the topic...


Maybe check out the file verification method listed in the Troubleshooting and Manual Install Procedure post (though two different computers would not have the same problem extracting files unless there was a problem with one or more of the install CDs themselves, or the computers had the same optical drives).

Try re-installing the game, but not installing the patch right away. Un-install, re-boot, shut down all non essential programs (especially anti-virus), re-install the game. Then start a new game, save a few times right away, and check out the number of files in each of the saved game folders (new saves should have 22 files in them).

After this you could re-boot, shut down all non essential programs, install the patch, re-boot, shut down all non essential programs, start the game and repeat the multiple save test.

<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

I'll give that another try, doing a clean install didn't help much last time, still the same issue. I've tried saving in a set of 3 save games, alternating between the three, but that didn't help much, usualy 2 of the 3 saves were corrupted.
Any luck locating the other post reguarding a similar issue?

Instead of overwriting saved games, you could save a couple times under unique names, then delete older saves if you know one of the more recent ones works. Would be a bit of a pain though... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />

I found a post where someone said this problem went away after they started saving multiple times, but that was pretty much all they said. A couple other topics (though no solutions);

1.34 Patch causing corrupt saves

Saved games keep corrupting


Sysinternals has a freeware utility Filemon, which may be useful in tracking down this problem.



If you are so inclined, start Divinity and load a game, start Filemon, stop monitoring and clear the list, add a filter so it is only monitoring the Divinity folders, start monitoring, save a game in Divinity under a new name, then save Filemon's list. Maybe that could help the Larians figure out what is happening, if they see what is going on during a save which gets corrupted?