Hello all.
I have been following SovietWomble's save games of Rimworld for a while now, and he has just had a second save game corrupt.
While his first game corrupted due to a mod issue, this time it isn't so simple. This time its the game.
Upon attempting to load the world he received the normal "An error occurred while loading the map. See error log for more information" Believing it would be a relatively simple fix as he wasn't running any mods for the fear of losing another save game, he delved into the file and soon the problem was pretty obvious.
"Exception from asynchronous event line 122604 position 16." Seems pretty standard so far.
He says how he believes the time of the save corresponded to a slight power cut he experienced due to snow; but that's fine the save must be salvageable, right?
"Woahly sh*t i think i see the problem. Theres like 10,000 copies of the same line."
"Theres been an exception and its just been copied down about 10,000 times in the log"
"So theres an item here, basic shirt, health value, ooh. Okay, so it goes colour, then half way through the world colour it just had some sort of an exception and then the word null just goes down about 10,000 times."
"Oh god theres so many... i sh*t you not its like, good grief its all the way to the base of the log"
"Its reached some sort of character limit for the log so there is nothing after this shirt's attributes, its just null, more like a hundred thousand times down, and it just ends because its hit some sort of character limit"
So Womble's assessment leads him to pretty reasonably assume the exception made so many nulls (seemingly an infinite loop of them) that it hit a character limit for the save file, leading to an unknown amount of the save file to be lost which would have been saved after this one shirt; but thats fine there must be hidden autosaves, right? Wrong.
I wont quote the lines upon him realising there was no option of autosaves or recovery for the sake of this post staying up and being useful to someone without being taken down for profanity.
After this though he suggests a cause, the technicalities, implications and context of which are far beyond my current knowledge of software engineering. (I wont attempt to translate this as i'm sure creators of such a game have more than enough knowledge of the terminology and intricacies, and have had enough of people such as myself knowing little to nothing about the subject but still believing they have the answer.)
"It was just running through an array. Right, so this was just one small array like in the middle of the save file... it was just running through it and then it just saved and now its just 10,000 nulls right to the end, and it didn't bother closing that array..."
This quite vividly shows a gaping hole in the iron man mode; such a shame from such a good developer with such a good game. While i understand an iron man mode is meant to have no saves someone could revert to for gameplay purposes; i would have hoped hidden savefiles would have been made containing backups of the world or some other recovery option to be available to corrupted files such as this.
I have very little knowledge of the ins and outs of software engineering and coding and if someone such as SovietWomble, someone who used to be in the software engineering trade, has no hope of solving many issues such as this, what hope do us mere mortals have?
As i can only quote what i would see to be useful information from what is a famously secretive youtuber's 20 minute stream (Link to the stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/233663719) and have no knowledge of the issue, the file or the technology surrounding it i would urge you to please contact Soviet directly to try to find a fix; not just for his save but any that may come into the same issue in the future.
If Soviet updates us with anything i will be sure to update here as well just in case it is of any help.
-Thank you for reading and i hope this message finds you well
I have been following SovietWomble's save games of Rimworld for a while now, and he has just had a second save game corrupt.
While his first game corrupted due to a mod issue, this time it isn't so simple. This time its the game.
Upon attempting to load the world he received the normal "An error occurred while loading the map. See error log for more information" Believing it would be a relatively simple fix as he wasn't running any mods for the fear of losing another save game, he delved into the file and soon the problem was pretty obvious.
"Exception from asynchronous event line 122604 position 16." Seems pretty standard so far.
He says how he believes the time of the save corresponded to a slight power cut he experienced due to snow; but that's fine the save must be salvageable, right?
"Woahly sh*t i think i see the problem. Theres like 10,000 copies of the same line."
"Theres been an exception and its just been copied down about 10,000 times in the log"
"So theres an item here, basic shirt, health value, ooh. Okay, so it goes colour, then half way through the world colour it just had some sort of an exception and then the word null just goes down about 10,000 times."
"Oh god theres so many... i sh*t you not its like, good grief its all the way to the base of the log"
"Its reached some sort of character limit for the log so there is nothing after this shirt's attributes, its just null, more like a hundred thousand times down, and it just ends because its hit some sort of character limit"
So Womble's assessment leads him to pretty reasonably assume the exception made so many nulls (seemingly an infinite loop of them) that it hit a character limit for the save file, leading to an unknown amount of the save file to be lost which would have been saved after this one shirt; but thats fine there must be hidden autosaves, right? Wrong.
I wont quote the lines upon him realising there was no option of autosaves or recovery for the sake of this post staying up and being useful to someone without being taken down for profanity.
After this though he suggests a cause, the technicalities, implications and context of which are far beyond my current knowledge of software engineering. (I wont attempt to translate this as i'm sure creators of such a game have more than enough knowledge of the terminology and intricacies, and have had enough of people such as myself knowing little to nothing about the subject but still believing they have the answer.)
"It was just running through an array. Right, so this was just one small array like in the middle of the save file... it was just running through it and then it just saved and now its just 10,000 nulls right to the end, and it didn't bother closing that array..."
This quite vividly shows a gaping hole in the iron man mode; such a shame from such a good developer with such a good game. While i understand an iron man mode is meant to have no saves someone could revert to for gameplay purposes; i would have hoped hidden savefiles would have been made containing backups of the world or some other recovery option to be available to corrupted files such as this.
I have very little knowledge of the ins and outs of software engineering and coding and if someone such as SovietWomble, someone who used to be in the software engineering trade, has no hope of solving many issues such as this, what hope do us mere mortals have?
As i can only quote what i would see to be useful information from what is a famously secretive youtuber's 20 minute stream (Link to the stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/233663719) and have no knowledge of the issue, the file or the technology surrounding it i would urge you to please contact Soviet directly to try to find a fix; not just for his save but any that may come into the same issue in the future.
If Soviet updates us with anything i will be sure to update here as well just in case it is of any help.
-Thank you for reading and i hope this message finds you well