Checking for Corruption

In regard to last weeks post, and a few good suggestions in the comments, the launcher and video mode changes now only comes up when needed. The first time the game starts you’ll see the launch dialog and options to change video mode. If the game starts and exits properly, you’ll never see it again.

If the game crashes or doesn’t shut down properly, the dialog will be shown on the next run of the game. You also be able to bring the launcher up manually by holding CTRL while the game starts, using the command line parameter ‘/launcher’.

I made a few other changes to some of the video system. The game now allows the windowed mode to be resized to any desired size, and keeps track of the location of the window so that it comes up in the last place it was when the game was shut down.

The field of view for extremely wide aspect ratios now works properly – something that had to be fixed for variable size window sizes. This also allows 32:9 or 48:9 multi monitor displays to work properly. There’s certainly more that could be done for super wide displays in terms of user interface elements, but that’s fairly low on my list of things to do.







I’ve also been fixing some errors that occur due to corrupt save games. I’m not sure exactly how this happens – the power goes out and the file write doesn’t finish? Something weird happens and bytes in the save game are changed? I guess something timing related and unexpected can happen, like auto save is occurring in one thread, and another thread or the main thread crashes at the same time.

For extra security, I may also change the save system to output to a temporary file, and then issue a move command once the write completes successfully.

Either way, a corrupt save game causes the save/load dialog to crash. So now extra checks and CRC computations are made to make sure files save games aren’t corrupt to the point that they can’t be loaded.







This issue can also occur with the file that is output that changes the display of the main menu to the last viewed scene when the game quits so I’m working on fixing this as well.

The rest of this week and next I’m going to be tackling the some of the reported game play bugs and hopefully try to get a proper update out soon after that. After that update I’ll be working on getting the mod kit out.