[4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay - In-game warning coming in a future build.

Ask here if you experience technical problems with X4: Foundations.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by Imperial Good » Tue, 5. Oct 21, 23:40

That does not apply to me. I have not subscribed to any steam workshop mods, ever. The only addons listed are the official DLCs.

I am also kind of paranoid now, constantly pressing ESC to check for modification...

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by peteran » Sun, 10. Oct 21, 09:47

It seems I'm not spared either as my game turned itself modified. :evil:

This is after 15.5 in-game days since 4.1 went public and my total game-time in Steam is at 2153.1 hours.

It's not a coincidence that the number of people reporting gradually increases, but a serious bug introduced with 4.1 that needs to be fixed ASAP!

Since I had HWiNFO64 running the whole time, I see two things that concern me.

The first is the physical memory load which started falling as soon as X4 was closed.
Image

The second and more serious is SSD temperature and it was at hovering around 74 until I closed the game.
Image
The number of writes or reads hasn't risen dramatically, so more airflow to the motherboard is required.
Or maybe just dusting off the filters is enough.

Edit: Yes, the filter was in serious need of cleaning and I also went through the fan settings and noticed my industrial exhaust fan was completely turned off.

:o

Those two changes lowered the minimum drive temperature by eleven degrees and it shouldn't overheat. Although I'm not certain 81 degrees is actually overheating since Drive Temperature 2 shows the temperature on the die, IIRC. The first one is the airflow temperature and it's dropped by eight degrees.
Last edited by peteran on Sun, 10. Oct 21, 11:36, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by furirkeeper » Sun, 10. Oct 21, 10:07

I think it would be interesting to see statistics of what systems people experiencing this problem are running on. But I don't know how to set that up or what statistic would be interesting. To not drown in information perhaps cpu-brand, gpu-architecture, system-memory, gpu-memory could be a good start. I am far from a systems expert so perhaps this is pointless.
In any way, if we could for example see that all who experience this since version 4.0 or perhaps version 4.1 are running with the same "system component" then it could help narrowing this down.
Perhaps.
Isn't there a poll feature in this forum? It is just the problem of collecting a set of statistic and making it easy to interpret that could make this problematic.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by Alan Phipps » Sun, 10. Oct 21, 12:09

Unless posters are having the exact same issue as the OP with specific texture files involved, then a hardware comparison by disappointed posters who don't really know why their game has become modified (eg cooking their SSD ? ) could be rather pointless and just confuse and conceal the problem being reported here.
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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by furirkeeper » Sun, 10. Oct 21, 12:22

Alan Phipps wrote:
Sun, 10. Oct 21, 12:09
Unless posters are having the exact same issue as the OP with specific texture files involved, then a hardware comparison by disappointed posters who don't really know why their game has become modified (eg cooking their SSD ? ) could be rather pointless and just confuse and conceal the problem being reported here.
That is a good and valid point. My thoughts are that if this in fact has become more common with 4.1 then the majority of the people reporting will likely have the same problem. The game turning modified seems to have been much more uncommon prior to 4.1, which could be a good reason to limit this poll to people only experiencing this since the release of 4.1. As with all statistics it is good to treat with some skepticism, but could give an indication of what is the cause.
I will leave it to someone who would know what to ask and what to do with the results to decide if this is a good or bad idea.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by Imperial Good » Sun, 10. Oct 21, 16:41

I strongly believe the issue, at least in my case, is related to the 4.10 added sector/environment background feature for the station planner window. Since defaulting to that having that setting turned off (no sector background, like pre 4.10) and only turning it on when I am first planning a station (low exposure) I have yet to encounter a planet texture failing verification. Of course due to how infrequently it occurred before it could be luck, but the more I play without it happening the more likely it seems to be the case.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by Imperial Good » Thu, 14. Oct 21, 10:56

Even with sector environment models turned off it still happened... Although it is happening less frequently.

Code: Select all

[FileIO ] 414472.40 File I/O: Failed to verify the file signature for file '.\extensions\ego_dlc_terran\assets\textures\environments\planets\jupiter_4k_diffhq.gz' (error: 13)
[General] 414472.40 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 414472.40 CheckGzipHeader() not a gzip source buffer, magic bytes don't match!
[General] 414472.40 ======================================
This time it was possibly caused by the lower right com portrait loading Jupiter. I commed a pilot to give them a seminar.

Again I find it highly suspect that only planet textures are throwing this error. Something about them must be prone to causing this...

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by buds » Sat, 16. Oct 21, 10:07

i had this happen twice on 4.0. The first time i'd already saved a few times and so I started a new game. The second time I was going through those anomalies, one came out in scale plate green and i went to save and the escape menu said (modified) so I didn't save. I re booted and reloaded earlier save and have been playing for a while since with no probs (now on 4.1). Each time I of course verified the game files and have never modified any egosoft game ever. I have also switched to a new HDD now, the old one wasn't throwing errors (im in linux) but I have a feeling it was dodgy.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by Imperial Good » Thu, 21. Oct 21, 09:50

A user on discord called "veryinky" sent in a log file with the following error.

Code: Select all

[General] 363420.21 ======================================
[FileIO ] 363420.29 File I/O: Failed to verify the file signature for file '.\extensions\ego_dlc_terran\assets\textures\environments\planets\jupiter_4k_diffhq.gz' (error: 13)
[General] 363420.29 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 363420.29 CheckGzipHeader() not a gzip source buffer, magic bytes don't match!
[General] 363420.29 ======================================
[General] 363420.64 ======================================
This matches the error that occurred in most of my cases.

I have been trying to purposely recreate the problem on demand, or at all, so far without any luck. I have forced Jupiter, and various planets, textures to load hundreds of times without error, even under extreme situations such as while riding around the highway loop. It seems that whatever the cause is, it is not a chance to error on loading the texture but rather some other sequence of events results in the next loading of the texture encountering the error. What this sequence of events is I am not sure yet.

Although speculation, such a random cause could be the result of dangling pointers or similar errors that can corrupt parts of memory, which would explain why gzip is throwing an error, but not why it is always planet diffuse textures that error and not other random files. It might also be possible to deduce another cause by tracing the flow of logic required to log those errors in that sequence. However at this stage it seems unlikely to be able to capture it in a debugger to know for sure.

If the cause cannot be found, the best alternative would be to implemented a warning prompt the instant X4 is marked as modified due to such verification failures, also listing the file or cause that triggered it. This will at least limit the damage to players and might also help track down the required sequence to reliably reproduce the error.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by furirkeeper » Thu, 21. Oct 21, 10:07

Imperial Good wrote:
Thu, 21. Oct 21, 09:50
A user on discord called "veryinky" sent in a log file with the following error.

Code: Select all

[General] 363420.21 ======================================
[FileIO ] 363420.29 File I/O: Failed to verify the file signature for file '.\extensions\ego_dlc_terran\assets\textures\environments\planets\jupiter_4k_diffhq.gz' (error: 13)
[General] 363420.29 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 363420.29 CheckGzipHeader() not a gzip source buffer, magic bytes don't match!
[General] 363420.29 ======================================
[General] 363420.64 ======================================
This matches the error that occurred in most of my cases.

I have been trying to purposely recreate the problem on demand, or at all, so far without any luck. I have forced Jupiter, and various planets, textures to load hundreds of times without error, even under extreme situations such as while riding around the highway loop. It seems that whatever the cause is, it is not a chance to error on loading the texture but rather some other sequence of events results in the next loading of the texture encountering the error. What this sequence of events is I am not sure yet.

Although speculation, such a random cause could be the result of dangling pointers or similar errors that can corrupt parts of memory, which would explain why gzip is throwing an error, but not why it is always planet diffuse textures that error and not other random files. It might also be possible to deduce another cause by tracing the flow of logic required to log those errors in that sequence. However at this stage it seems unlikely to be able to capture it in a debugger to know for sure.

If the cause cannot be found, the best alternative would be to implemented a warning prompt the instant X4 is marked as modified due to such verification failures, also listing the file or cause that triggered it. This will at least limit the damage to players and might also help track down the required sequence to reliably reproduce the error.
I am guessing you have also tried being in some busy sector and calling a crewmember/pilot in jupiter to sort of stress the texture loading in the background. I have had times when I call people and I never get to see them since the texture doesn't load at all. Though this did not cause a modified game at those times that I know of.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by Imperial Good » Thu, 21. Oct 21, 11:49

furirkeeper wrote:
Thu, 21. Oct 21, 10:07
I am guessing you have also tried being in some busy sector and calling a crewmember/pilot in jupiter to sort of stress the texture loading in the background. I have had times when I call people and I never get to see them since the texture doesn't load at all. Though this did not cause a modified game at those times that I know of.
I have not tried that yet. I did ride the highway loop and open a lot of station build windows. Station build window I think caused it in most of my cases.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by sirprosik » Fri, 29. Oct 21, 20:19

Recently started playing and older game from Nov 2020 and while playing using the nosteam.exe the save became modified somehow.
Reloading an older game prior to entering sol sectors and going through the plots again using steam and see if it 'breaks' again.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by steph_m37 » Mon, 1. Nov 21, 12:13

hi !

I have never encountered this bug before and it just hit me !!!
I'm not sure when it happened today , I was doing a lot of modification on the miners' spots of my old shipyard to the new shipyard.
on the old shipyard I noticed that the Earth stimulant module had an attachment node position bug during station modification.
but it appeared today it is sure during these manipulations.

Image

it is shifted down from the node, I try to move it and then deleted and reinstalled the default is there.
it's in Venus sector (not checked other sector yet)

It's a big save I play without auto save but I do manual save (f5) when a lot of things are done.
but the last recent F5 (today too) is also marked Modified Unfortunately, I have a copy that dates back a month and it's a shame because currently I have made a lot of additions in the station, in sector cleaning xenon and the story with Dal busta :cry:

i checked the integrity of the files with steam, this backup from the beginning never had mod only official DLCs. (a lot of saves without any problems)
I have never had any problem with windows defender I do not use other antivirus.

this is my windows info :

Code: Select all

Édition	Windows 10 Professionnel
Version	21H2
Installé le	‎18/‎06/‎2020
Build du système d’exploitation	19044.1320
Expérience	Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.3920.0
So from what I read the backup is screwed up as I understand it, at least in vanilla mode ! :rant:

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by steph_m37 » Mon, 1. Nov 21, 12:29

CBJ wrote:
Mon, 20. Sep 21, 09:35
There is nothing you can do in-game that will "trigger" the game becoming modified. Aside from actually installing mods, causes for this are invariably external, the most common being file corruption or AV software delaying the reading of signature files. Since file corruption is relatively unlikely during play, try setting the game folder as an exclusion for your AV software.
hi !

checking today about corrupted files, there are nothing in event log viewer and windows defender did not detect anything during the game, and anyway do nothing with X4 as it is fully authorized app and folder.
since the beginning. (check the integrity of the files on the SSD too.)
So why today that is the question? yesterday everything was working fine in the same save sector including (F5 and save game function)!

EDIT
check on last month's backup the node placement fault with the module Stimulant Production already present.
Going back to file corruption if there was a file affected today why the backup from 1 month ago saved and reloaded today work?


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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by Imperial Good » Mon, 1. Nov 21, 14:37

steph_m37 wrote:
Mon, 1. Nov 21, 12:13
I have never encountered this bug before and it just hit me !!!
I'm not sure when it happened today , I was doing a lot of modification on the miners' spots of my old shipyard to the new shipyard.
on the old shipyard I noticed that the Earth stimulant module had an attachment node position bug during station modification.
but it appeared today it is sure during these manipulations.
Known issue, graphic only and during build mode only with built module in correct placement, fixed for next update. Not related, as this same sort of error affected some modules like storages in the past and the game did not turn modified back then. Also the reason the game is turning modified as far as I have been able to tell is due to planet related textures failing to load and so triggering the mod detection mechanics.
steph_m37 wrote:
Mon, 1. Nov 21, 12:29
checking today about corrupted files, there are nothing in event log viewer and windows defender did not detect anything during the game, and anyway do nothing with X4 as it is fully authorized app and folder.
since the beginning. (check the integrity of the files on the SSD too.)
So why today that is the question? yesterday everything was working fine in the same save sector including (F5 and save game function)!
It seems related to loading planet textures under some conditions. So far only Cradle of Humanity planets seem to be causing this, as captured in the debug logs. The problem is that the exact sequence that causes the texture to fail loading, and so X4 to become marked as modified, cannot be reliably recreated. It seems to happen frequently enough that multiple people, including myself, have encountered it many times, but random enough that no matter how hard I try to induce it, it does not happen. For example I have not had it happen at all during the past week or so, despite purposely trying to trigger it.

So far the only solution that I can recommend the developers do is to make X4 notify the player the instant a file fails verification and the X4 client becomes marked as modified. This will not only help track down a potential sequence of actions that can recreate the error, but also minimize the potential loss to players by making them aware the error happened and letting them quit before saving a modified game.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by steph_m37 » Tue, 2. Nov 21, 09:05

Imperial Good wrote:
Mon, 1. Nov 21, 14:37
It seems related to loading planet textures under some conditions. So far only Cradle of Humanity planets seem to be causing this, as captured in the debug logs. The problem is that the exact sequence that causes the texture to fail loading, and so X4 to become marked as modified, cannot be reliably recreated. It seems to happen frequently enough that multiple people, including myself, have encountered it many times, but random enough that no matter how hard I try to induce it, it does not happen. For example I have not had it happen at all during the past week or so, despite purposely trying to trigger it.

So far the only solution that I can recommend the developers do is to make X4 notify the player the instant a file fails verification and the X4 client becomes marked as modified. This will not only help track down a potential sequence of actions that can recreate the error, but also minimize the potential loss to players by making them aware the error happened and letting them quit before saving a modified game.
Hi !

Yes finally bug or not bug all I see is that I have a 14-day and 16-hour save screwed up for the future (online feature)
and I will not take it back a month back, if only I had known that there was this problem, I would have made more recent backups. now i am warned.
So there you have it, yesterday my fast F5 save messed up, I didn't mind and in the aftermath 30 minutes later I made my game save which was corrupted too bravo!
If you can even trust saving the game, it is wrong!

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[Feature request] Display in-game notification if game becomes modified while playing

Post by Rei Ayanami » Thu, 18. Nov 21, 18:37

Yesterday I was playing X4 when I noticed in the pause menu that my game displayed an orange "modified".

That is very odd, since I don't use any mods and I don't do any non-mod file modifications, since I want to keep my current save game for when ventures come back and to be able to do achievements.
Apprently all saves I made in the last 3 days were considered "modified", so I had to reload a save game from 4 days before.

After loading the 4 days old save game I checked the in-game menu, ok, not modified.
However, after playing for ~30 minutes the pause menu again displays "modified".

Through long trial-and-error I found out that entering certain Xenon sectors immediately caused my game to become "modified".
After more trial-and-error it turns out that apparently one of the game files were corrupted.
After letting Steam verify and re-download damaged files my game is working properly no longer becomes automatically marked as "modified".

I would like to request that if a game is running un-modified and suddenly the game thinks that the game is modified (and puts the "modified" into the pause menu), be it by a loading error because of a damaged file or any other reason, please automatically pause the game and display to the player a message, something like


"Attention player :
Your game seems to have become modified mid-play.
All saves done at this point will be marked as 'modified' and
are not eligible for participating in ventures or achievements.
If the game modification is not inteneded it could have been
caused by corrupted game files. In this case, please verify
your game file integrity."'

Press [ok] to continue playing.


I think this would be very useful to prevent unfortunate situations, where someone doesn't pay attention to the pause menu and, in a long gaming session, overwrites all of their save games with saves marked as moified. In my case I only lost 3 days, but since I save in sequential order this could've been far worse.
Last edited by Alan Phipps on Fri, 19. Nov 21, 22:13, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: merged at poster's request

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by Seon » Mon, 22. Nov 21, 01:45

I've encountered this bug too. I was trying to keep a save mod-free in anticipation of the new online features coming out... But sadly, out of no where, my game was marked as modified... And I didn't realize it for some time, as I didn't even notice it until all my saves were with this modified tag, meaning I'll have to start all over again from the ground up for an unmodified game.

It was really disappointing and disheartening to lose all that work, all the plot work, I had put into that game for the sake of future online capabilities.

While I understand this bug is extremely hard to pin down and fix, I can agree with a popup coming up to warn that a game has been modified when it happens. Since, if people are using autosaves, it can save people days/weeks/months of work due to not noticing the modified tag and continuing on as per normal to find out when it'd be too late.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by calisin » Wed, 24. Nov 21, 18:28

Same Problem, had a game being modified during play. Shows modified on returning to main menu.
Its happened twice to this play-through over the last 2 days.

4.10(458643) (English) (Custom start)
was unmodified at start of play.

Had "-log all" active because of repeats, unfortunately this covers 8 hours of play.
Save at 15:56:32 shows unmodified.
Save at 16:17:12 shows modified. (20 minutes prior to end of log)

Logs:
Full log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cx2y95cgpm0zw ... h.log?dl=0 (30734 lines)
Abriged: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lcj7wh17gcmhl ... h.log?dl=0 (514 lines - [Economy_Verbose] and ERR_TRADE removed)

Saves:
Modified: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yq1vh288hep94 ... ml.gz?dl=0
Unmodified: https://www.dropbox.com/s/im0gnp3mbvpbr ... ml.gz?dl=0

Honorable mention:

Code: Select all

[FileIO ] 116998.26 File I/O: Failed to verify the file signature for file '.\extensions\ego_dlc_terran\assets\textures\environments\planets\jupiter_4k_diffhq.gz' (error: 13)
[General] 116998.26 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 116998.26 CheckGzipHeader() not a gzip source buffer, magic bytes don't match!
in the log was mentioned before.

EDIT:
Happened again within 20 minutes, from the mentioned unmodded save.
Log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x2uvniifprm4w ... 2.log?dl=0
Same FileIO error is present.

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Re: [4.10] X4 "Modifying" Itself During Gameplay.

Post by buds » Thu, 25. Nov 21, 12:27

buds wrote:
Sat, 16. Oct 21, 10:07
i had this happen twice on 4.0. The first time i'd already saved a few times and so I started a new game. The second time I was going through those anomalies, one came out in scale plate green and i went to save and the escape menu said (modified) so I didn't save. I re booted and reloaded earlier save and have been playing for a while since with no probs (now on 4.1). Each time I of course verified the game files and have never modified any egosoft game ever. I have also switched to a new HDD now, the old one wasn't throwing errors (im in linux) but I have a feeling it was dodgy.
Just had this happen again, I only lost a couple hours since the last save so not too bad. Before id noticed the (modified) id teleported from neptune back to my fleet in hewas (battling the xenon). Maybe it is something loading wrong in terran sectors, it must be quite rare as I cant make it happen at will.

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