Hi
they disappeared from my save slots..found them in my computer documents and tried moving them to game folder but corrupted the game..I mean the slot one folder in my actual ame file was empty.....

could it have been a utility such as registry booster or pc pit stop optimize.also disk Md to defrag.?.Hate to go through this again.
Im running XP..

Why are you moving your saved games around? Leave them alone in the "Eschalon Book 1 Saved Games" folder in My Documents. And before you ask, slot one is for your quick save.

because they didn't show up in game..all slots were empty...they just disappeared .
although in my documents they weren't in game any longer

I have had this happen so often.... is this a Vista error perhaps? I think I get the save error about 5-10% of the time! The solution is to go to the saved games folder and recreate the missing slot[x] folder. You can actually just Alt+tab to get there while leaving the game open.

This is, IMO, a huge bug that needs to be fixed. It happens enough that it's driving me crazy! If a save fails and the folder gets deleted, the save routine just needs to recreate that folder the next time. Grrr....

I am not sure what is causing a certain number of people to experience this save game problem. In the updated engine (next game) we have re-written the saved game routine and I believe it is fixed, and we are working on putting these fixes into the Book I engine.

The problem might be caused be a virus checker that is preventing certain disk functions to work properly. If you are experiencing this error often and you have a virus checker (or two) running, just try disabling it while you play and see if that fixes the problem. If so, please let me know! That would go a long ways towards helping diagnose this problem.

If you have a corruption, your best solution is to grab the slots that you want to keep and delete the whole /Eschalon Book I Saved Games folder and all sub-folders, then restart the game and let the system remake the folders, then copy your saved slots back in to the new folders.

For me, I'm not running any firewall/AV programs on this laptop, but there are other tasks running that could maybe play a role. Acer 6920G... must have too many apps load by default. Typical.

Ummm... in case that wasn't clear:

I ran "msconfig" and disabled some of the non-Microsoft services and startup programs. No problems saving or loading for several hours. So either one of the indexing items or some other task caused issues.

For me, it actually happened WHILE I was playing. I went to do a quicksave, which had been working fine the 20 or so other times I had used it, and instead I got an error message (Sorry I wasn't quick-witted enough to think to write it down) and when I went to try and do a normal save, there was nothing listed on the save screen. I got the box, but no slots were visible.

Running The Demo Version V1.042c, on Windows XP, 1GB Memory, GeForce FX-5200, ~8gb free on C:
I was running AVG Anti-Virus at the time, but shutting it off hasn't brought back the saves.

Ken

Edit: Now that I know where to look, I went and poked around the save game files. The Directory for Slot1 is just missing. Slot2 - Slot10 are all there, as is a tmp directory (which is empty). I going to attempt copying Slot2 to create a new Slot1 and see what happens....

Yay! That's fixed it. I lost the quicksave, but my Slot2 save was really close, so no big deal. It seems like what's happening is that Slot1 goes hinky, and the game gets lost or just stops trying to process the rest of the slots.

I've now encountered this several times.

The save slots are populated from the slot1-10 directories, with the name stored in the savename file in the directory. Deleting or losing a slot means that all the slots below this do not appear. All slots above are fine. Even when a slot above is 'missing', you can still save a game in an invisible slot, but you won't be able to see it until you restore the missing one/s.

The error message is an error with deldir, though I can't remember the exact text right now. I'll write it down when it next appears and post here.

BW - if you want more info, I can investigate a bit.

Thanks Azazel- I think we may have it fixed now (in Book II at the moment). I will look into porting the fixes over to Book I. We just had to put some redundancy into the save process to deal with errors better.

I do need to know though...is this error happening when you are saving OVER an existing game?

Yes, in each case when I've had it happen. If I were to guess, it appears that your save routine does a rmdir, then recreates with all the new details. It seems to fail between deleting the directory and recreating it with the new info.

On the topic of saves, I note that you the saves are dumps of the game's current state (in the state-machine definition of state). I take it you're not too worried about people hacking their saves? I suppose it's not online, so nobody else is affected.

Nice spam!

It's been zapped!

Anyone have a fix yet?....I hate to keep starting over.

Are you only using QuickSave? This isn't an issue that would cause you to start over unless you are only using QuickSave exclusively.

I know it takes a few extra seconds, but make sure that you try using several different save slots during the course of your game. QuickSave should never be your exclusive save, but rather a quick way of saving between your "legitimate" saves. That way if slot1 goes bad, you just fix it as noted above and your other saves will be good.

No i'm not but i will start using multiple slots

thank you