[savegame fixed] Game Crash - raft and dogs gone, rope still in inventory

[Dr.Hossa]

First of all, Hello to you all and merry christmas!

Im really unhappy about my first post in the forum being a Bug(or at least a "Problem")- Report...
I never even expected a bug, much less a crash in that particular and great game, as i found it running highly stable all the time...
So, naturally i didnt copy my savegame-file. But thats not the point, what is lost can be re-traded for...
and i think its better for my resources not to have two hungry dogs, as winter is coming slowly, anyway...

To the Issue/Situation:

Coming back from a village exploring trip, I first rowed to my trap line, on a choke point on the island where my cabin stands. I was paddeling on a raft, while my two dogs were bound to me by leashes.

Traps are empty, i zoom out and row to my house.

Zoom in. Game Crash.(Zoom in-screen freezes before loading completely; screen has become opaque white like fog)
Never had that before

I didnt panic and restarted the game, expecting to stand on my raft and play on normally.
I find myself swimming on the tile i was zooming out, first, next to the trap site. But the raft, the items on it(just tree trunks/twigs and garbage) and both of my dogs were gone.

I think i got VERY lucky i didnt drown, being in very cold water("freezing to death") and almost dropped uncouncious. Managed to get in my hut, poke 20 twigs in the fireplace and wrap myself in all the furs i have. Hut gets warm, i dont die.

I still have all my good stuff, only lost two dogs and the raft whith some building materials. So the loss is not really an issue.
I searched all the tiles between the trap site and my home(which is not much), but the raft is nowhere to be found

I found it worth reporting since i think that is a thing that should not happen (and could have gone a very ugly way for me.)
Furthermore, i still have the two leather ropes which i cannot drop(red/cannot be selected).
Apparently, the two the dogs where leashed on. its only 2 lmbs, but still unnecessary...

Its not that it destroys the game for me, and i will definitely start to backup my saves, but im really courious about why it happened and even more so how to prevent it
i can send the file if you like

Thanks in advance

[PALU]

I make a backup after every play session. While crashes are rare, they do happen very rarely, and when they do, the cause is typically tricky to track down (all the easy ones were dealt with long ago). Also, crashes can corrupt the save completely if you're unlucky, or partially, as in your case, so a backup is definitely handy.

If you made a copy of your save immediately after the crash (i.e. before resuming), Sami might be able to get something out of it. If you didn't make a copy, I'd make one now to salvage whatever can be salvaged in terms of info in case Sami asks for it.

I'm unable to understand if your character was found swimming on the zoomed in map or if it was on the zoomed out one (as that's happened on one of my crashes), so it would probably be useful if you can clarify that. I'd also look for the missing items/animals on both the zoomed in map and the zoomed out one.

[Dr.Hossa]

Okay, i did not write that very good to understand, will clarify:

Instead of:
I find myself swimming on the tile i was zooming out, first,(...)

i should have wrote:
I find myself swimming on the zoomed out map.  I am on the tile i had been zooming out before
(referring to the moment "Traps are empty, i zoom out and row to my house.")


So, effectively the game rolled me back one turn(i performed one/two actions after zooming out – rowing one tile on the overland map to my cabin, and then zooming in, which crashed the game)

again looked after my stuff in the overland map, nothing there.

Hope that report can help sami to fix some issues. as i said, i posted this mainly to understand why that happened and how to prevent that from happening.


EDIT/a little offtopic: in that context i would like to add a question: Do i have to do something other than copy and paste my savegame-backup file into the main game directory(C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\UnRealWorld)?

I thought i would be easy to backup my saves that way. But i cant find the Test-character whom i made a backup from before i got him stupidly killed trying to wipe out a village.
Could it be that i corrupted the backup file by renaming it?(in order to be identified better)
i save my backups in another extra folder

edit again: stupid me, never mind. the file had too many letters. but i thought letting in that info for others who might run into that.

[Sami]

Finding out the actual cause of crashes is often hard work, especially if they're rare random occurrences.

What would have helped the most is that if you would have made backup your character folder right after the crash, before restarting the game and re-loading the character.
Then we could have investigated the character's situation as close to the issue as possible. In cases like that I can also do marvelous things for character's troublesome situations, probably restoring the pets as well.

Also, I wonder what did Windows say when the game crashed? Was there any kind of application has stopped working or debug dialog?

The game autosaves the character upon every map load, and that's oughta preserve all the gear and pets too if there are crashes/power losses, but in this case - since the pets were gone - the crash has apparently happened in critical point in-between map loads.

[Dr.Hossa]

I am stunned gawd himself came down to speak

erm

yeah, did not make savegame. I just didnt see it coming... had too much trust in the system
though i should have known better. Its not that i dont know that kind of issues from other games.
My little loss here isnt worth any trouble, but i see the point.
i am starting to make backups consequently now!


But could there be a simple way of just removing those two useless lmbs of rope from my inventory?

I had a simple windows warning that the program stopped working.
I fear there is not much for a dev to "mine" out of that

I just wondered if anybody experienced similar crash-situations. I can live with crashes, when i know how they are getting provoked to happen

thanks for your answers guys

[Sami]

I am stunned gawd himself came down to speak

Heheh. Well, it's just a part of my profession. 

yeah, did not make savegame. I just didnt see it coming... had too much trust in the system
though i should have known better. Its not that i dont know that kind of issues from other games.
My little loss here isnt worth any trouble, but i see the point.
i am starting to make backups consequently now!

Well the right order of things should be devs. being busy to fix crash potentials rather than players being busy with backups.
I think you shouldn't be especially afraid of crashes with this game.
But for the future:
if a crash (or stopped working) occurs, go backup your character folder before doing anything else. That's the save we then want to fix possible issues in the game.

But could there be a simple way of just removing those two useless lmbs of rope from my inventory?

If you send me your savegame I can do it for you. I think it's something that can't be easily done by player.

I had a simple windows warning that the program stopped working.
I fear there is not much for a dev to "mine" out of that

I just wondered if anybody experienced similar crash-situations. I can live with crashes, when i know how they are getting provoked to happen

Hmm. Stopped working is not a true crash in my books, it's something that a mixture of things running in your OS may also provoke.
And sometimes Windows may tag applications being in that state but then recover from the lag and things continue normally. So it may be good to wait 10, even 30 seconds before killing the application. I haven't heard of many "stopped working" issues in case of UnReal World, but true crashes have happened for a reason or another and can be found from the forums. We always try to solve them, and many bugs have been found and fixed based on crash reports.

[Dr.Hossa]

You know, its hard to find gems. And if i find one, dont want to annoy those who create and polish them.
In my opinion, a customer is something like a guest, and a guest is also expected to behave. expecially if he gets something for free. But modern society has this "customer is king"-rule, or better: religion   
My, say, more factual or secularistic point of view is: No money without work, but no work without money, too.  It has something to do with equality, and when i buy/pay for something, i must understand that there is a human person who probably earns his/her living behind that.

Not a machine, where i put money in, and get out whatever i want...

My living also depends on customers paying for my work. But i dont need all the customers, there's 7 billion on the planet.
Dont get me wrong; of course i appreciate your attitude, and there is nothing bad about doing favors, but it also has to be balanced somehow.

btw: Im not a fan of steam, i actually hate a lot of steam related stuff. But when it contributes to your work, i dont hesitate to pay the few bucks.


Okay, enough of my philosophic diarrhea 
I think there are many games out there which cost a ton of money, shining bright with graphics, but can deliver shit when it comes to deep gameplay. I also have my experience with pre-releases which promise to develop, but still are unplayable because of too many bugs. Like, making a brilliant open world survival game with complicated physics, weapon mechanics and surroundings, just to have players die by moving on some bugged stairs. And support does shit, still unable to get rid of such bugs despite so many years. Yet claiming the game is on a stable version.
So im happy to have found your, i dont want to say "pc-game" but "project".
It has still potential to change, to form, and it delivers more than it promises.

Should i send you the file via email? i cannot upload here...
But no rush its only two ****ing lmbs wont die because of that

I will definitely thank you for that by annoying you with one or two posts about gameplay/balancing/future ideas. Already brainstormed a lot of stuff, but i have to cut short and organize that pile of mental poop first. i Apologize for that coming posts in advance.

they wont be so slimy
Greetz
 

[PALU]

If it helps, you can consider a high quality bug report to be a twisted from of praise: You wouldn't put in the effort to report a bug is some piece of trash, would you?

As you can see, Sami tries to fix every bug found, and every bug fixed is a number of future bug reports that won't have to be written.

[Dr.Hossa]

yea, i will try to dig out all i can find. Although i feel there is not much besides a savegame copy(about 2 days – ingame)

i forgot to wrote down: I also think its kind of a win-dumbs-problem

perhaps i just pushed space key at the wrong time(i did, actually push space, by pure habit), and the program chrashed.
and it doesnt necessarily mean it was the program, but certainly some windooop issue

[Dr.Hossa]

Alrighty, there peoplez

i dont know

but i think i could have nailed it. got another crash.

really didnt provoke that. i was kinda training that backpedalling-thing(retrying again and again, mainly to test fur armor. Seems to be very tough... but they got me... clearing villages is not as easy as it used to be some time ago. at least not for me. seems that i still have to learn a lot about fighting. but i used to wipe out village after village before, that doesnt work anymore. Good thing, actually)

again, i punched that spacebar, just because of stupid habit again... just when i was in the dying message screen

little offtopic:

Spoiler: show

(His name was slave. he stupidly died trying to kill all members of the ukialukkkinaäinnenki village and didnt account for tobias, the old man with the knife. Slave was stupid to try. although he had a spear (64% profiency) full bear fur armor, and not more than 4% encumbrance after killing 7 or 8 villagers, he lost against the yoda-master who was very fatigued after running around a lot while his guys died while trying to kill me.
A determined badass, who seemed to have trained every single day of his life fighting spear-men with his knife. i guess a lot of the fighting outcomes depend on AI's weapon's skill. I mean, an old man can still be about, like 65 years or so, and be VERY fit. the problem really is that there's no way of estimating that in the game)

didnt really think about it. and this time windows just said it is looking for a reason to solve the problem...
I saved the copy of the savegame,short ingame -time before the crash. a couldnt save it after the crash, because i died.
I really think it is something about the spacebar, may it be windows, or the game.
I will stop hitting that key so rude in the future. i dont believe in homeopathy or other bullshit, but that is more than coincidence
I, I, I

[Sami]

Should i send you the file via email? i cannot upload here...
But no rush its only two ****ing lmbs wont die because of that

Yes, you can e-mail the savegame. But be prepared to cease playing with that character until I fix the issue and send the save back.

(Also, thank you for the compliments, with this simple and blunt reply I just prefer to keep bug report session sharp and crisp as there's room on other forums sections for more elaborate talks.)

--

Also noticed a mention of another suspected crash. Surely pressing spacebar shouldn't be an issue causing it. If you experience further troubles try to follow these instructions:
1) take a screenshot of your desktop immediately upon crash/freeze, so we see what your OS says.
2) if the game is in not responding state wait for 30 sec. to see if it recovers
3) if it doesn't recover go backup your character folder before killing the game
4) post a report, send a savegame