"Journey Onwards" savegame data

[Achenar]

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone can tell me where the 'in built' save game is stored, and how to reset it. I'm asking from the perspective of building a new standalone game as opposed to running SI or U7.

Basically my game is crashing (I'm a bit worried as to why:), but though starting the game again may fix things. However it seems whenever I start my game (D:\Games\Exult\Exult.exe --game MyGame), it continues from where the last session left off. How do I prevent this and start afresh instead?

Thanks
Achenar

[artaxerxes]

it's in gamedat directory. Also the content of initgame is used when restarting a new game. I cannot say for sure how you can edit the content of initgame though...


Artaxerxes

[Michele]

Been years since I went dinging about in this file, but I remember it s being a combination of position pointers within initgame.dat follwed by the contents of the files themselves, always arrayed in the exact same file order.

The original initgame.dat file is not compacted. Keep this in mind if ya wanna look at it in hex.

I was deconstructing this back in the 90's under DOS with an hex editor for a World editor I had made in VBDOS, but not released, at that time.

Once I had its pattern down, I was able to build new copys of this file with a DOS exe, which actually worked.
Hex editing still has its advantages and that is where I learned this pattern.

I hope this is of some use.

[Achenar]

Thanks for the information, however i hopefully don't have to resort to editing the file manually.

Perhaps a better question is this - what actually happens in terms of the "journey onwards" data when you create a new game? It must clear out the old data somehow?

It's more complex in my case because I'm always just launching Exult with the "--game" parameter for a custom game (and notably, "editing" is also true in the config file), so Exult just seems to automatically continue from where I left off last time.

Is there some other command-line parameter or something that will actually force the game to re-start? I can't see anything along these lines in the documentation. It's kind of frustrating, because, for example, to test new conversation usecode I am forced to continue my previous game and have to invoke ES to reset "Met" and "In Party" flags to allow coverage of certain usecode paths etc.

Hopefully i'm making sense ...
Achenar

[artaxerxes]

delete the content of your gamedat directory (make a backup first). This should force the game to start at the beginning.

thx
Aurelien

[Achenar]

Thanks Aurelien ... I had tried that before, but get an error (assert failure) -

./shapes/vgafile.h, line 253, expression: shapes!=0

I think the code is trying to get a shape frame. It's odd since I don't know why it would be looking in gamedat for shapes...

[drcode]

I wonder if you also have a "patch" directory. If so, you could try deleting or renaming it so Exult doesn't find it.

[Achenar]

Yep I do have a "patch" directory, however my understanding was that it only stored static data? I.e. it basically overrides the contents of static? The patch directory seems to contain my custom game elements such as various vga files etc, but nothing I could really identify as relating to save data. I think if I delete/move it outright, it will really stop things working.

Nonetheless I will try the suggestion , perhaps I need to move some of my 'patch' contents to 'static' at some point anyway (I've always been slightly confused about the best way to set up for standalone game development).

Thanks
Achenar

[drcode]

The idea is that new stuff goes in 'patch'. Then, when it's mature, you move it into 'static'. You're right about needing the 'patch' contents for your new game. I'm just wondering if there's a bad file there that's causing the crash (so don't delete it, but just rename it as an experiment).

[Achenar]

Ok, through a process of elimination, I discovered I can safely delete everything in gamedat except "identity" and "npc.dat":

1) The assert crash above occurs if I delete "identity"
2) If I delete "npc.dat", all my npcs disappear, except the Avatar (although his 'walk' flag is also lost

Perhaps these constitute the basic minimum gamedat files set up when you start a new game?

Anyway, this pretty much achieves what I need, since other usecode flags (such as In Part / Met) seem to be cleared.

Thanks
Achenar

[Achenar]

Actually not quite Given that set-up, there is something funny going on usecode-wise.

For example, if I ask the party members to join, the usecode's attempt to set the "In Party" flag doesn't stick. If I copy usecode.dat and usecode.var into gamedat, however, the flags set and unset correctly (but as per my original post, this is no good because given the presence of these two files in gamedat, the game always starts continuing with the previous state of flags... )

@_@ confusing