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Reminder about save games and upgrading!


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Hi all,

Sometimes we forget you are a bit too enthusiastic to patch/upgrade, in that you don't finish your ongoing games before applying a patch/upgrade. This includes any PBEM, single player save games, or ongoing Campaigns. Now that I've seen a bunch of you experiencing the downside of jumping a little too quickly, this post here is a reminder to you guys about what can happen if you do this.

Back in the early days of CMx2 each patch that came out pretty messed with one or more things which prevented previous save games from reliably working. Save games usually wouldn't even load.

As things have firmed up in the guts of the CM game itself we've seen save games work just fine with new patches. Not so with Upgrade 2.0. In hindsight we should have prevented saves made in previous versions from loading.

So let me be clear...

Do not be surprised if v1.xx saves don't work properly under v2.xx

The big changes that are easily noticed are things like:

1. Soldier uniforms being a mix of things, including smeared textures and incorrect combinations of bits and pieces.

2. Unit "floating" icons not behaving correctly and not reflecting the new categories

3. No noticeable improvement in graphics. In fact, graphics might look worse than v1.11 because

4. Freezes in PBEM games

Thinking about this now, we should have explicitly disallowed save games to be loaded at all. We usually don't do that, but in this case we probably should have. We've made a note to ourselves for future Upgrades :)

Players wishing to finish up a legacy game have two choices:

1. Hold off upgrading (or downgrade to v1.11) until the game is complete and then upgrade after.

2. Create a second install and upgrade that one to v2.0 while using the original install to complete previous games in v1.11.

This will not consume any of your licenses since, technically, they are two separate products.

I know it's a bit after the cows have gotten out of the barn, but better to do it now than next week after I've read yet more threads about "bugs" which are related to loading old files with Upgrade 2.0 :D

Steve

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  • 9 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...
I am a few turns into a CW battle (Buron) via pbem. Will an upgrade to MG screw up the fight ? And If I update to MG has my opponent got to as well? Neither of us have issued any orders yet as far as I know, just prelim barrage going on so not much that could be affected in the save files?

I have not upgraded a game my self so I have no experience with this upgrade. You both have to upgrade to MG you cannot only have one of you upgrade. The MG module includes a patch that is not yet available to the base game - yet.

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I am a few turns into a CW battle (Buron) via pbem. Will an upgrade to MG screw up the fight ? And If I update to MG has my opponent got to as well? Neither of us have issued any orders yet as far as I know, just prelim barrage going on so not much that could be affected in the save files?

You can save your existing install as a copy with a new name, to a different location. Use THAT install to continue your pbem game.

Install MG over the original install. THAT allows you to play with the upgrades.

There =may= be DRM conflicts (MG's drm is different than CW's drm). Check the forum for threads on that before you try this.

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Saves are saves are saves as far as CM is concerned. The issue is that the game must put certain pieces of data into the save files so that when you reload the save variable elements don't suddenly switch to something else. That would be bad :D Which means some fixes are ignored because the game literally loads what you already have regardless of what a new game would look like.

What I said about going forward is that there will be fewer instances of the above sorts of problems having a detrimental effect on the game itself. For example crashing! Totally possible for the game to no load something old because it doesn't recognize the format any more. We used to have issues like this in the past because the game itself was changing quite a bit. Now the sorts of changes we're doing tend to be new features entirely, not fundamental changes to the underlying code. Upgrades, however, are more likely to produce problems than simple patches.

Simple patches might mean a dude with a wrong uniform continues to wear the wrong uniform, but otherwise the old save game will still function fine.

Steve

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Thank you, Steve.... Even though we should all know by now, it's often hard to remember in all the excitement of a new module or upgrade/patch that we need to remove our Z folders and also now our savegame files.

It would be helpful if a warning that that effect appeared as part of the install process so it's impossible to miss.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Install the version and modules you had before in a new directory. Now you have two copies of the game installed. Move your games over to the older version of the game. Keep playing. All good.

If you insist on upgrading coordinate with your opponent(s) otherwise they will see missing games on their end. Do the conversion as described at the beginning of this thread. Personally I recommend just playing your current games out on the older version and enjoy.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Though with Windows 8 it's becoming less certain that having two installs on the same computer will work. Has to do with how Windows 8 handled DRM.

Steve

I am pretty sure I can back this up. Before installing MG I made a copy of my CMBN folder and labeled in 2.01 so I could continue a PBEM I had going with DC. I then installed MG. But when I'd click the exe for MG the parachute icon would disappear off the main screen. It'd show up the next time I restarted, then vanish the next couple times. I eventually deleted the 2.01 folder and uninstalled 2.11 and have had some problems here and there ever since.

Mord.

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But when I'd click the exe for MG the parachute icon would disappear off the main screen. It'd show up the next time I restarted, then vanish the next couple times.

I have found that with my 2.01 and 2.12 installs that after running my 2.01 game J have to reactivate my MG module for 2.12. If I only play 2.12 games I do not need to reactivate. Thankfully my 2.01. Game just ended.

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  • 1 month later...

One of my great hopes for improvements is that at least campaigns saved between individual battles could somehow be loaded with no trouble. I can live with a saved game that is unplayable because of an upgrade, but having to start a campaign over from scratch is sort of a nuisance. I´ve had to do this twice with The Scottish Corridor (Yes, I know: I am a slow player).

I have no idea if it is possible technically, but if we somehow could at least could get uncorrupted saves when loading between-battle saves in campaigns, I would be happy.

The entertainment value can be great, though :D:

jhkt.jpg

Edit:

Just tried to play a single turn of this scenario to see what would happen - and most of the troops refused to run and got exhausted within the first minute. Seems like they haven´t just got wrong graphics for the guns - the weigth seems to be the same as well :D

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