The Drunken Lizard Pub

vironica wrote:To reproduce the problem just press the quicksave button as fast as you can. After some time, the DELDIR appears and after that nothing can be saved anymore in any slot. DANGER: this destroys your quicksave slot and none of the other saves can be loaded afterwards without manual copying.

Unable to reproduce.

I spammed my F2 key for a full two minutes (I even turned the keyboard around so I could hit it with my "gamepad thumb") and had no error. Tried this in both Book I and Book II with no problems.

It's interesting how this will happen repeatedly on systems that have that problem, and never on systems that don't.

I deleted the Eschalon Save Folder completely before this test. I created a new char and immediately started saving into all slots.

Then save randomly into a few slots. Then spam F2 again.

Interesting fact: Now everytime I try to save with F2, the DELDIR message appears 2-4 times.

And the slot I try to save to disappears from the savegame folder.

Still no luck duplicating the error. I spammed the F2 on a new char, saved in half the slots, spammed the F2, saved over some slots, spammed F2, etc, etc... and it worked beautifully every time.

Perhaps its something speed related... if something slows the savegame process (e.g. something running a scan or writing to the hard drive) enough it pukes... *shrug*

Well I already tried all this with the Windows Indexer and AV software disabled. Still no luck.

vironica wrote:Well I already tried all this with the Windows Indexer and AV software disabled. Still no luck.

Do you have english version of Windows? Do you have non-latin alphabetical characters in your login?

German Windows and Latin Only Username.

vironica wrote:German Windows and Latin Only Username.

No ideas then There was a known issue with non-latin characters in path, but I guess this is not the case.

Ok. Where do you have the game installed, and where is the save folder? I'm looking for the exact paths, if you don't mind.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Indie Games\Eschalon Book I\Eschalon Book I.exe"
C:\Users\vironic\Documents\Eschalon Book 1 Saved Games

Impulse Version.

Ok I debugged the problem using Process Monitor to look at the system calls. It appears my system is too fast executing eschalon or too slow todelete a file, however you want to look at it. It looks like a race condition of some sort.

Here's what's going down:

When writing to a save slot (let's use slot 1 as example) Eschalon does the following:

- Go through all files in Slot 1 and delete them 1 by one
- Check if Slot 1 is really gone
- Write new save data to tmp
- Copy all files from tmp to slot1

The problem is at the check step. When it works, it looks like this:

http://pastebin.org/152260

In Line 4, it deletes the slot1 dir.
In Line 7, it is confirmed to be gone ("NO SUCH FILE","Filter: slot1")

Notice the NO SUCH FILE at the end. That is Eschalon getting confirmation from the System that slot1 is really gone.

Now this is what happens when the error occurs:

http://pastebin.org/152240

In Line 4, the Delete Command is issued with the success result.
In Line 7, it queries for directory - and finds it! ("SUCCESS","Filter: slot1, 1: slot1")

And that is what confuses the savegame code.

After that Eschalon tries to use slot1 dir, but it's gone, because it got delay deleted just after looking for it. I can only image this whole thing happens from multiple threads and these threads are not synchronized properly.

That is enough debugging from my end. I hope this is enough information for the dev to fix it for good this time.

Hmm... I was going to suggest an installation of the game in a path such as C:\Games\Eschalon Book I\ with the creation of the save folder inside that directory... but I don't know if the Impulse version will let you get away with that. That way you completely eliminate any user/protected folder interference.

Is this going to be fixed anytime soon? I have bought both games a few month ago and am still not able to play them.

I've got this problem too. I use Microsoft's Live Mesh for sync my documents. I canceled the sync and everything works.