Albion Prelude corruption bug - how to dupe/fix/workaround - Mod issue.

[glenmcd]

There appears to be a method of corrupting vanilla Albion Prelude games. It took me quite a bit of testing to track it down. I'm hoping that developers will see this as a good reason to release another update with the fix.

Imagine you are regularly saving your AP game, filling all ten save slots, and when full, saving over the top of existing saves. You get around the universe quite a lot, and so save / reload using very different current sectors. It's fairly obvious that larger save files result from being in a busy sector, particularly one of the war sectors with many bullets and missiles flying about. It's not hard to imagine that sooner or later, you'll get to save a small save file over the top of a larger one. All it takes is one save to be in a quiet sector and one in a busy sector. Now reload that save. The universe is now corrupt (not every time unfortunately), and I usually detect this from game locking up when ai attempt to dock in particular factories. It's not just one factory but multiple, and I'm not saying that this is the result every time. I haven't duplicated this to perfection just yet but I think that there's sufficient evidence thus far that one can deduce that there is likely corrupting happening from reloading saves that resulted from saving over the top of an existing save, with some other conditions prevailing.

Assuming this is the case, one way to fix would be for the game to ensure to set file length when saving over top of existing save. Another is to note file length at start of every file, but this would imply breaking compatibility with existing. Yet another may be to delete existing file automatically before saving over top. The workaround for this is obvious - don't ever save over the top of existing save. If your universe is already corrupt from this issue, the only way to uncorrup is to reload from a previous save, and avoid saving over top of saves from then on. I personally have experienced similar lockups over the years, but only yesterday made some headway with tracking down the cause.

[Alan Phipps]

Since files that replace do not inherently save over the top of the respective old file sectors on the drive, it is rather more likely that you are running into occasional system memory access or drive issues, or are developing file allocation table issues. Without any knowledge of your system and how full the memory/drives are, it is hard to tell what might be going on, let alone advise how to fix it.

File and save/load management as relevant here is an OS/system matter and not even a game responsibility.

[glenmcd]

I found the issue, it was actually caused by a mod of mine. When both you and the game tries to control a ship at same time, for some reason this results in lockup on docking to particular stations, although which station seems to vary.

[Alan Phipps]

Glad to hear that you tracked it down and that the devs didn't waste any time on a wild goose chase either.