[V 2.0 - General] Savefile stays unchanged in RAM after overwriting

[wulf 21]

This thing I metioned in other threads when I was playing around with savefiles nearly drove me mad for some time . Because I kept being reset to earlier game states while testing and wondered if I really did press that F5 button or forgot it?

But now I did do it in a way that makes it clear for me this is actually happening and made a screenshot each step. And I intentionally did not use the quicksave for it, so I wouldn't have to ask myself what I really pressed after that.

• made sure I had no preexisting savefile named test (deleted them)
• started the game from desktop, started a new game and placed my base in Latin Americe (Screenshot 1)
• saved the new game as "test" (Screenshot 2)
• quit to desktop
• started game from desktop again, started a new game and placed my base in Asia Pacific (Screenshot 3)
• saved the game as "test" again and confirmed the question if it should overwrite the savefile (Screenshot 4)
• loaded the "test" I did just create (Screenshot 5) ... aaaand magic! the base was suddenly back in Latin America (Screenshot 6)
• quit to main menu, then loaded the savefile again (Screenshot 7) ... and the base STILL is in Latin Americe (Screenshot 8) - so if you stop here you could think that game failed to actually save, but it gets better
• quit to desktop
• load "test" again and here comes the real magic: The base is suddenly in Asia Pacific, right where it was before saving the test a second time! (Screenshot 9)

So I think what really happens here is that for loading savefiles there was used some part of code that is intended for files that stay unchanged during the whole runtime of the game (like sprites, sounds, models). So upon accessing the save directories on game start, the engine just thinks "let's load these small files into cache right now, might save time if I need them later". And upon loading the file it would then just load what was already in RAM and never access the file system again to load the actual file, so it appears like the savefile was not saved again until quitting the game to desktop again.

Screenshot 1:

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Screenshot 5:

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Screenshot 8:

Screenshot 9:

 

[Chris]

 

21 hours ago, wulf 21 said:

This thing I metioned in other threads when I was playing around with savefiles nearly drove me mad for some time . Because I kept being reset to earlier game states while testing and wondered if I really did press that F5 button or forgot it?

Yeah, you're right - somthing we only discovered ourselves a few days ago because of your bug report with the personnel slots. This is fixed in the hotfix and the game no longer caches the save games.

I appreciate you pointing that out, by the way, as I think it would have caused us a lot of problems further down the line.