Quote:
Originally Posted by kevinsue
On both occasions that this happened, the two things common were: many save games and also an uncredited plane crash in the area.
Not sure if it was the number of saves or the crashed plane (saved well out of visual range) or both that caused the corruption, but after going back and finding a previous save that loaded and deleting the saves prior to and after,(and staying out of sight of any aircraft that might decide to crash just for the hell of it) the game seemed to work normally again.
With regard to the Tonnage bar and Campaign progression, has anybody just used the "Continue Campaign" option exclusively to reload their game from the start?
The reason I ask is that I decided to use this option on one patrol for the sake of "realism" instead of Sober's "Dead is dead" mod (which I gather is completely terminal) 
Everything including Tonnage bar, reposition orders etc was working perfectly until I decided to see if my Flack gunner had shown any signs of improvement after his promotion, by staying on the surface during an air attack.
Unfortunately for the the crew and I, he was still as useless as tits on a bull and we were promptly dispatched to the seabed on short notice with the autosave deciding to do it's thing right then. Lying on the ocean bottom, with batteries and anything else able to help us back to the surface ruined, boat full of smoke, sparks and seawater and all the crew flatly refusing to lift a finger to help including the cook,  my resolve started to weaken and instead dying and becoming born again with a new career, I decided to load my save game!!
From that point on, all of the campaign progress automation stopped working. This game has so many files duplicated and triplicated throughout the various folders, I'm wondering if there is some other linkage to campaign progression that is now being bypassed with normal game saves under certain conditions that has been introduced by some small, inadvertent change somewhere within the file structure.
When I start my next patrol, I'm going to just use the "Continue Campaign" option to load the game and see if anything in the aforementioned observation is repeatable.
BTW....Fantastic to see Sober, Gap, Stormy and TDW visiting this forum during the past couple of days!!!  |
I can confirm that too... Yesterday , I was attacked by Swordfish airplane, I managed to destroy him but plane crashed on top of the submarine and damaged my U-boat badly... I saved the game 10-15 km from that location but save become corrupted, CTD in the middle of loading progress. Fortunately, my previous manual and clean game save from few hours before worked just fine and I was able to continue mu campaign without any problems.
With such complex gamesaves as Sileent hunter's, it's really important to keep them , like sober said, as clean as possible, on the surface and without units (especially damaged or destroyed) in your rendering area which is 60 km around the player's sub in TWoS.
If you decide to use only "continue campaign" feature that means that game will always load your last gamesave, manual or automatic, so make sure to always manually make clean gamesave before you decide to exit the game.
It's not good at all to use continue campaign if your last gamesave is autosave from some skirmish ...
I've updated my tips for stable gameplay, make sure to follow those notes and you'll have stable (enough) gameplay to enjoy campaign to the end of the war. For example, I've managed to finish, first two campaigns (Total Germany and Happy Times) with something like 180.000 tons and with only one random CTD and you should know that most of current day smart phones are more powerful then my PC...(AMD Athlon 5000+, 4GB DDR2, 8800GT)
Quote:
Originally Posted by vdr1981
Tips for stable gameplay:
- DO NOT add any additional mods if you are not 100% sure what you are doing! Especially not the mods which contains sim files...
- Avoid using autosave gamesaves. They become easily corrupted.
- Never overwrite old/previous game saves. Always make a new one...
- Keep your gamesaves clean. Try not to save game with AI or destroyed/damaged ( especially airplanes) units in your rendering area. (60 km around the sub)
- Occasional save and complete restart of the game during long patrols is highly recommended (at least 5-6 game restarts per patrol)!
- Game save with complete restart of the game at the beginning and at the end of each patrol (approx. 100-200 Km from home port) is recommended. This will improve game stability and further reduce number of random CTD's.
- Avoid gamesaving and using high time compression while bunch of things is happening around you, let's say 32/64 at max (deck gun attack, attacking large convoys, approaching ports ect...).
- I'm not 100% sure about this but it seems that SH3 user interface is more stable then SH5 interface. You can switch this using TDW Options File Editor.
- When things seem quite, surface the boat, recharge your batteries, load torpedoes and...save the game... (You can prepare special meal for your crew as well) 
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