my game just crashed (because of the Logitech RGB issue, which I have now googled and fixed, so nevermind that). The crash deleted all my characters and settings. I have found multiple threads referring to this problem in the past, but all of them have been auto-locked.
I’m not sure what’s being done about this, so I would just like to use this bug report to call attention to the fact that it is STILL happening, and I hope that this is fixed before 1.0. I only lost about 10 hours worth of playtime and don’t mind rerolling, but I can see this really ruining someone’s day.
Thanks for an otherwise great game so far-- looking forward to the multiplayer!
All savegames are LOCAL to your machine right now. This means that any crashes in the game that happen while the game is trying to access the savegames could potentially corrupt the physical files (plain text files) and this means that the characters associated with the particular savegames WILL have problems, no longer be playable or exist on the character list anymore. Savegames that are partially corrupted may even show up but the game may be unable to load them or loading them will cause the game to crash further. The way the system reads saves right now also means that if one save is corrupted, it causes problems with other saves in that it may prevent other saves from correctly saving progress.
This is exactly the same as any local application - if Word or your System crashes while you are editing a local Word document, there is a chance that the word document could become corrupted… And with Beta applications this is even more of a possibility.
There are no other backups of these files - if Steam Cloud is enabled, it has copies but Steam has no way of knowing if a file is corrupted or not so there is no guarantee that its copy will be ok once the local copy is corrupted.
If you do not make manual copies of your own savegames etc, there is nothing that can be done about this.
If there are no backups to replace the corrupted files, then the only way to resolve this is to delete the appropriate files.
There is NOTHING that EHG can do about this right now - the game is in beta and can crash, especially with performance related instability issues. EHG have no access to your files at all. As the game gets more stable and optimised, crashes should be less and therefore savegame corruption would logically be less.
When the Multiplayer version launches you will then have the option to create server based characters with server based savegames that will be saved by EHG and not be local to your machine. Crashes would then be unable to totally corrupt savegames locally… Note that local savegames will still be possible for offline characters so will be susceptable to local corruption.
EDIT: Forgot about _temp versions of files - these files are the last previous saves of the savegames and sometimes can be used to restore corrupted “live” savegames… simply by renaming the _temp to the normal file and seeing if its still ok… Unfortunately, these files are subject to the same corruption as normal files so its not always possible.
thank you for the welcome! I’ve seen your replies under the other threads as well and considered them. I’m also aware of the modalities around local savegames. My problem is not that I cannot restore them-- I’ve written them off, and don’t mind that they’re gone.
I would like the game to not corrupt any files on crash in the first place. I would think that is quite an obvious thing to ask, as many other games manage it. I’m aware that EHG is very busy and looking forward to the multiplayer mode myself, but I do think it is important to fix this before 1.0 as I can imagine this being a complete dealbreaker for offline players.
I’m not sure whether you are speaking officially for EHG, but telling someone wanting to play offline to use server saves is, respectfully, not terribly helpful from a customer service perspective. Again-- I have no issue with my characters being lost! This is a beta. I am aware. However, the core issue is that they CAN still be lost, which if I was 100+ hours in I would consider pretty grievous. Hence the bug report, since the old ones were mostly closed without activity.
In any case, thanks for your detailed instructions! I’ve just rerolled, though.
Firstly, I do not work for EHG, am not associated with them other than being a player and I am not a community tester (offered but I declined). Nothing I say has be approved by them or comes from them unless stated.
I have been helping out here for almost 2 years as a way of thanking the devs for their efforts.
I am not sure how well you understand development but what you are asking for is the holy grail of any application and while there are ways and means for developers to make their applications resilient to corruption, it is not always possible or practically feasible. Crashes can happen to any application - either by poor programming, bugs or something outside their control like a OS based issue or even hardware/power… There is no way to 100% prevent corruption of user files. The best application ever developed with the most stable and resilient system can still corrupt something if the computer receives a power spike or a system driver crashes at the exact moment it is access a file for read/write purposes.
I dont have anything to do with EHG. You never mentioned once that you do not want to play online or want to play offline either. The suggestion is a solution that WILL alleviate the problem in most instances because EHG will have the actual savegames and backups on its own system so 1) there will be less chance of corruption from crashes and 2) EHG could potentially correct corrupted saves or restore older copies in the event of problems.
Then make manual backups… Like I do, and have always done whenever I have used ANY beta application (game or not). After being involved with computers for well over 30 years I do it with everything - irrespective of the specific applications stability or my trust in the hardware not failing.
Well, then allow me to ask a somewhat facetious question: if the server and the client share engine code, and the client corrupts files on crash, who can guarantee that the server will not do so as well?
I think this is a question only the devs can answer, and this ‘holy grail’ has been managed by other games without any trouble. Speaking entirely out of my behind as a developer myself, I speculate that possibly LE streams the game state into an open file descriptor, and that is what corrupts the files on crash. There are various techniques around this, such as snapshotting or a differential log with checkpoints, or in a pinch just autosaving every x minutes. In other words, it can get fixed. I’m sure it will get fixed, if the problem is visible enough, hence this report.
Oops… who pulled the power cable… dammit there goes my lvl 100… oh well, better update the code to nuclear launch capability reliability and resiliance with triple backups.
Of course it can be mitigated and prevented with enough effort…
and all the others before yours that the devs have been aware of for years… all you are doing is insulting their intelligence.
I’m not sure why this has to devolve into a personal argument all of a sudden. I am simply trying to raise the issue again since the others have been closed automatically. If you’re looking to forum-fight someone, I wish you luck, but I will not be your opponent.
Lol… You questioned my involvement and if I had authority to reply, insulted my help and suggestions… I think you took it personal well before I replied…
thats said, I dont tend to get annoyed as quickly as this so perhaps I am just having a bad day…
I have not insulted your suggestions at any point. They are very helpful to someone who is trying to restore their corrupt files or prevent further loss manually. However, that is not the problem I would like to see addressed, so please understand. Furthermore, from your approach and style of writing, I was genuinely unsure whether you are related to the game in some capacity, since you have also answered others’ reports about this problem with similar instructions, much like a helpdesk person might. I hope that clarifies things and apologise for any offense my misconstruations have given. I hope your day improves.
1CHARACTERSLOT_BETA_1 is corrupted and must be manually removed. If you don’t you will have no end of errors.
Question here… did your game crash previously and this is log from the relaunch after that crash?
The reason I ask this, is that the game doesnt usually crash very often - the only time it does this with any regularity is if it is struggling from the known performance instability. i.e. the in-game settings are too high for the hardware AND the beta unoptimised state of the game.
If you have a player-prev.log - before this latest corruption - it may potentially indicate why the game is crashing in the first place…
A more stable game will obviously reduce the corruptions - one thing that definitely doesnt happen as often as it seems to happen for you.
EDIT: What settings are you running? I see 3440x1440 screen resolution on a 1080 GPU… If you are running unlimited / high FPS or High+ quality you are likely to experience a LOT of instability and crashing.
I actually can’t remember it crashing, now that you say it. I think I had just done the Armoury in the very beginning of the game on my rerolled character, moved on to the Upper District, and logged out at the waypoint. When I logged back in, the character was gone again. However, I’m fine with just assuming that was due to me not cleaning out all savegames from the previous crash and having some knock-on effects, if they corrupt the rest of the game as you say. The previous log is unfortunately too large to upload, but perhaps I can get a smaller one if it happens again. It only contains the same error, though, just more often.
I’ve read about the performance issues previously and am running capped at 60 FPS and medium settings.
The game is pretty good at recovering itself sometimes especially from a hang, but it can also have issues with incorrect shutdowns… i.e. the game actually crashed / hung on exit but didnt throw an error. The log can usually have info if this did happen.
Yip… the game (stupidly imho) loads all the savegames when it generates the list for the character selection screen and this means that ANY corrupted save messes up the game, even if you dont play it… This same issue actually causes the saving process in the game to fail when saving a non-corrupted character too - i.e. you can play for hours and “save” only to load up again and have no progress…
Thats probably from the Logitech RGB issue (it flooded the logs) - just delete the two log files - the game will create new ‘clean’ ones to work from and they should be simple to upload (obviously zipping if needed)
I hate to say this, but at 3440x1440 your GPU might still be struggling on Medium/60fps… I know people that are runing 2080s at those settings successfully (higher is unstable for them) but it may be stretching the 1080… Monitor your GPU usage - if its flatlining near or over 90% for most of the time, then thats too high to handle the instances between unloading and loading new maps - i.e. taking a portal… or loading up the game… Special features like grass and antialiasing have a big impact.
I tend to recommend people aim for 60% GPU usage while having a character standing in the End of Time location (or another town) and doing nothing… (achieved by playing res/quality/fps limit against each other)… . This seems to be the most stable sweetspot that allows the game to spike to 100% usage when needed without losing stability.
I’m guessing that’s what killed my replacement character then. Not ideal, but I can live with it. I honestly do not have an issue with any of those points whatsoever, really. My GPU usage seems fine too. I bought the game a long while ago but never really played it, so I’m still in the starting zones that don’t seem very graphically demanding. Apart from the Logitech thing, I have not had a crash.
You make me want to double check that by making a corrupted save and seeing what actually happens step by step… and maybe put more than one corrupted save in the mix to see the sequence…
I suppose the logs could be showing the “last recently played game” by default which is inevitably the one that got corrupted on the last run and then the logs would trap that without progressing to the others…
Still doesnt explain why if you have a corrupted save, you then have hassles with saving progress on others tho… that one I know is happening because its happened to quite a few players in the past. The moment the corrupted save is removed, other saves happen properly again…
but man… I dont feel like testing that right now… arggh…
Ok… My advice would be to clear all the savegames and then monitor what is happening. It doesnt look like you are using the Steam version so you shouldnt need to worry about Steam Cloud saves “restoring corrupted files”.
Regarding crashes etc… I’d keep an eye on the player.log - especially after you notice anything odd happening - and see if you notice anything Graphical related - there are some that happen for everyone and are in normal logs but if you start seeing repeated things like particle shaders, mesh colliders, textures & texture shaders, then those are usually an indication of the game struggling…
There may even be some sort of debug message that you notice prior to getting a corruption if it happens again…
I would definitely recommend that you do a manual backup of your saves - I do this regularly myself so that if anything does happen I dont lose any of my lvl 100s or my 150+ stash tabs… worst case is I lose a playsession, nothing else…
