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Zulk RS

Zandronum save file trouble.

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I was playing through TNT - Evilution on Zandronum and I went up to MAP 22. Then for technical reasons, I had to transfer all my stuff to a new computer. Though Zandronum itself works fine, I can't load my save files.

Every time I try, it says something like, "Expected a name but got something else"

I moved them by moving the entire folder to a pen-drive and then moving it to the new PC. How do I fix this problem?

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Are you sure you are still using the exact same version of Zandronum? This may just be a savegame version incompatibility due to a newer EXE.

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Yes, I'm pretty sure that it's the same version of Zandronum. I literally cut-pasted the entire file from my old PC to my new one.

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I read somewhere that savegames in ZDoom based ports are dependant on computer architecture, particularly endianity and possibly 32-bit vs. 64-bit operating system / hardware. Do your two computer's specs differ in any of those?

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Heh, interesting. Didn't know that there's a source port with actual separate x86/x64 binaries. If save games are indeed raw memory/structure dumps, then of course they won't be compatible between different CPU architectures. If you used the 32-bit versions, then you must keep using that same version (and exact same revision).

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scifista42 said:

I read somewhere that savegames in ZDoom based ports are dependant on computer architecture, particularly endianity and possibly 32-bit vs. 64-bit operating system / hardware. Do your two computer's specs differ in any of those?


Savegame files should be identical between different systems. If they aren't it's a bug. I can't vouch for Zandronum, though.

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scifista42 said:

I read somewhere that savegames in ZDoom based ports are dependant on computer architecture, particularly endianity and possibly 32-bit vs. 64-bit operating system / hardware. Do your two computer's specs differ in any of those?


As far as operating systems go, both use Windows 8.1
The hard disk space, processor and RAM are different though.

Also, I should mention that when I first installed Zandronum, it wasn't a portable installation. All my configurations such as key binds and preferences got reset after the transfer.

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Graf Zahl said:

Savegame files should be identical between different systems.


That might be true if the save/load routines actually do marshalling/unmarshalling of the internal structures (or a mixture of marshalling and raw dumping, as the classic Doom save routine does), but any kind of raw binary dump, even if it was generated by the same source code may differ simply by changing compiler settings such as data alignment, padding, etc.

Doom source ports that are compatible with vanilla savegames do so because they go to painstaking lengths to parse everything as accurately as possible, maintaining equivalence, but many official ports (e.g. Doom for Mac, Doom95 etc. simply weren't that cross-compatible), and the most complex ones, in order to save their advanced state, simply don't bother with such a nitpicking marshalling/unmarshalling (hence, even subsequent minor revisions are often incompatible).

In any case, the OP is facing both a potential architecture change (x86 to x64) AND a revision change of the executable. In that case, I'd be surprised at the lack of a warning (e.g. ZDoom does warn you if you try loading savegames from different versions).

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You know what? I think it's not worth it. I'll just start TNT from scratch and delete the old save files. Thanks for the help anyway.

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Maes said:

That might be true if the save/load routines actually do marshalling/unmarshalling of the internal structures (or a mixture of marshalling and raw dumping, as the classic Doom save routine does), but any kind of raw binary dump, even if it was generated by the same source code may differ simply by changing compiler settings such as data alignment, padding, etc.


But this is about Zandronum, which is based on ZDoom's savegame code. And this does handle it properly.

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Graf Zahl said:

But this is about Zandronum, which is based on ZDoom's savegame code. And this does handle it properly.


I thought that ZDoom used its own savegame format, and that upgrading frequently broke older saves (or at least that's what the warning said: in practice, saves from reasonably close revisions would work, unless something major/critical was changed).

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ZDoom uses active versioning checks to keep savegames compatible for as long as possible. In the last few months there were several occurences where we had to break backwards compatibility because of the floating point rewrite and the portal stuff that got added required some change of save order.


Before that the last time savegame compatibility was broken was in 2011, so we got to keep it for almost 5 years.

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