V25 Data Corruption Issue - help us find this annoying bug!

[Chris]

There's an annoying bug that's been in the game for quite a while now that we've not been able to find. In order to try and fix it, I've massively increased the number of autosaves that are retained by the game in V25.1 and hopefully our community testers can help us find the cause!

Bug Details:
This bug causes multiple different problems that all have the same root cause - random deletion of data on game objects. It most commonly affects aircraft and aircraft weapons, but it can affect almost anything.

Common effects of the bug are crashes when you try to load a tactical mission or return to strategy after completing a tactical mission, or when you try to equip an aircraft weapon. But it can have other weird effects too - e.g. aircraft sometimes disappear from the Aircraft screen despite being clearly visible in their Hangar on the Base screen (because the game has deleted data it needs to identify the aircraft as an aircraft, so it stops recognising that plane as something it should show on the Aircraft screen).

The problem we're having is that the player usually does not immediately realise something is broken - e.g. it might be many weeks before you try and swap out a corrupted weapon on your interceptor for something else and the crash occurs. And at that point the autosaves don't allow us to go back far enough to pinpoint exactly when the issue first occured, because by default only the last 5 strategy and tactical autosaves are retained.

How you can help:
Play V25.1 and keep an eye out for that kind of weird behaviour. We've increased the autosave limit so the game will retain hundreds of save games per campaign, and we're hoping that means we can find exactly when the problem happened.

It seems like it is linked to fighting manual air combat battles, but we don't really have much to go on right now, unfortunately!

[Alienkiller]

I will have an Eye on it. I play the Airbattles every time manually.