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Can't get world to reopen   
FlyJ85

FlyJ85
Australia  


  2/25/2019

I'm playing C2 & this issue has happened with several worlds now & has got me stumped. It says "unexpected file format" in the error message & won't reopen after previously working & eventually happens to every world I have been in. Just before it happens it has been giving a different error message saying "a sharing violation has occured" which I have never seen before in previous years. So when I recreated the world after seeing the sharing violation message I put a password on it but the same thing still happened again. When the error message kept coming up I closed the game, & reopened but then got the "unexpected file format" message again & after that is just fails to reopen even after restarting the computer. Anybody know how to fix this problem?
 
FlyJ85

FlyJ85



  2/25/2019

Also to add I am using windows 7 in case that's relevant to whatever the solution maybe if there is one.
 
GimmeCat

GimmeCat



  2/25/2019

Make sure you're using a fully patched version of the game. I believe GoG's Albian Years version of C2 is fully updated.

Inject all the recommended third-party patches, such as Albian Updates and (cough) Better Albia + Extras, plus all the various little fix-cobs that the game comes supplied with (EXCLUDING the 'Sleep Update' because that actually makes sleeping issues worse)

If you are using any other third-party cobs, list them here and we can investigate whether any of them are causing problems. This includes any breeds you've downloaded.

C2, in general, likes to corrupt its world files after a while. For this reason I tend to make regular backups of my worlds and restore them when a problem arises.

Lastly, if you wouldn't mind doing so, could you upload your broken world to somewhere like dropbox or mega.nz? I'd like to take a deeper look at it. I've been meaning to investigate why this happens and what can be done to 'save' broken worlds, and it would be handy to have something to dissect.

Btw, 'Sharing violation' has nothing to do with other people accessing your world. It's a technical term to do with the file being open and read by the system, and a failure to write data during a save attempt. So don't worry, it's nothing sinister. :)

 
FlyJ85

FlyJ85



  2/25/2019  1

Thanks so much for your help. Yes I can upload it to dropbox. I'd be interested to know the results of your investigation as this has been happening a lot. I don't remember it happening when I was using the CD version back in the 90's but maybe I just forgot. Right now I'm using the GOG version. I will make a list of the COBS I'm using. Some of my faves like the dark blue sea ledge that flattens the floor & the desert garden, no longer work for some reason. With breeds I've been unable to install nearly all of them, they keep trying to auto-install to a non existent folder (I used to have a free download that installed to a folder that titled itself Gog.com in c/program files(x86) - but this time I purchased the game & it is in a folder called Gog galaxy but even after remaking a folder called Gog.com the auto-install exe files tend not to work though I haven't tried to install many breeds yet as I've only had the purchased version for a couple of weeks). I have all the old cobs & breeds that I can't get anymore somewhere on a usb that I've been unable to locate & really hope I find as all of the att, spr, egg etc. files are already extracted & backed up so if I can find it I will be able to reinstall them all manually as I've noticed that in the past few years soooo many pages have gone down so that many breeds I used to have are unavailable now.

The COBS I was using in this world (frog norn semi-wolfling run I say semi coz I was still observing, helping, hatching & resuscitating not completely leaving them alone) when it crashed were desert garden, flood volcano, plato's project, barrel room, barrel room drinks, walk on rocks, walk on walk off boats, desert apple tree, turn small tree house to medicine vendor, grape vine, ammonite vendor, mussel vendor, shrimp vendor, water fountain, coke machine, dr pepper machine, beer vendor, tantris fruit wine vendor, tansafal juice vendor, multi food vendor, velociraptor, pikachu critter, underground sweepers, tree house barriers 1, 2 & 3, bumble ball, rainbow bell pepper plant, golden tomato, popping mushrooms, halloween doll, weinachtsengel doll, water doozi, volcano bridge, gelsemium bridge, updated bong, tiger barb fish, zummy fish, soft shelled edible crabs, seahorses, eat meat/ edible critters, C1 harp, desert incubator lift, cookie vendor, fire keese, deku scrub, zora castle, jellybaby vendor, burger vendor, biopod bananas, powerpunch vendor, strawberry plant, superball 2000, & coffee (the one in the yellow & blue cup with spoon). I had also added drinking updates, I think I did add the sleep update thanks for letting me know not to in future. & death update I think as well as room 155 & room 212 update. Oh & edible starfish. I think that's all. After I put in a certain amount it tells me it can't run anymore scripts so some like the spade or whatever I add & take out as I need them. There were a few others I had added & removed at different times. In the previous world that crashed most were the same but some were different.

Uploading the world to dropbox now, should I post the link in here when it's done or email it to you?

 
GimmeCat

GimmeCat



  2/25/2019

(Responded via PM)

In the meantime, it sounds like you've got an interesting archive of old files-- if you have some spare time, it might be a good idea to check the Lost Download Detectives thread to see if you happen to have copies of any 'lost' files. Unfortunately, as you've noted, many well-loved Creatures sites have disappeared over the years, and due to people's protective attitudes over where and how their content is hosted, many of them took their files down with them.

So it'd be really cool if you had any of these files to share. :)

 
GimmeCat

GimmeCat



  2/25/2019  5

Okay, I've taken a look at the broken world file.

It's hard to say what exactly happened, but I have a strong suspicion the cause was the game running out of room in its script library. Here's the issue:

The program only has a fixed, limited amount of space to use for its scripts. If you have a lot of objects in the world, you can run into a dangerous situation where a loaded object attempts to call a new script (for instance: a beehive tries to spawn new bees, which all have their own set of associated scripts) and the game abruptly finds it has no space left for all that new data.

What does it do about this? Cancel the script execution? Delete the offending objects? Recover gracefully? Uhh... none of the above.

Instead of handling it at all, the game just sort of has a panic attack, fails to load in the complete data, and ends up with a script that trails off into unusable garbage.

All healthy worlds terminate with data that looks similar in pattern to this:



You've got the end of the final loaded script at the top, then a gap, a few bits of data in the middle, another gap, and finally a chunk of what looks like genome monikers, but I don't really know what that's for. All I know is, healthy worlds have it.

Here's what the end of the broken world file looks like:



You'll immediately notice that the above pattern is missing, and the data terminates much more abruptly. But also, pay attention to the words on the right: "retn,unlk,endm" is the end of a bee's TIMER script. However, even though "endm" generally denotes the end of a script (and thus, this whole script loaded in successfully)--in an unbroken world, this would NOT be the end of a bee's script data. There's actually one more, tiny script that normally comes after it, and it's very telling that this script is absent here.

The "120" script is only a few lines long:

scrp 2 17 2 120
tick 0
setv velx 0
setv vely 3
wait 20
kill ownr
endm


I suspect it handles a bee dying of old age, or somesuch. But in any event, this script is present in every healthy world file that terminates with the correct data.

(It's worth noting at this point that you won't always find bee-related scripts at the end of the world file like this. Scripts get shuffled around in the data as the game loads them in and out of existence. But the fact that there's bee data at the end of the broken world file -- and that not all of its scripts got written -- leads me to strongly suspect that a new bee spawned in the world, but there was no space for it... and so the world broke.)

The world broke because it couldn't fit a bee in it.

It's not the bee's fault, of course. Poor thing didn't ask to be born. The fault lies with the engine not properly managing its space requirements.

As for what you can do to avoid this moving forward, the only answer is to not overload your game with too many objects. Think of the world as a box, and each new seed, each new piece of food, each new fish, each new cactus and each new creature are all in the box, and eventually, the box is going to get full and start overflowing.

Using a weed-killer to get rid of the invasive Cactus plants is a good start. Things like the Desert Garden, which produce a lot of extra fruit, may also be contributing to the problem. In general, any tree/bush cob that produces an abundance of fruit can cause too much strain. Then there's also insects to be aware of-- too many ants and bees, as we've just seen, can also push it over the edge.

That's my halfway-educated diagnosis and, I suspect, the main cause of long-lived worlds suddenly dying: too many objects in the world, and probably, lots of orphaned scripts from dead objects that get retained in the data and not cleaned out properly by the game. It's virtually unavoidable-- all you can do is get there more slowly.

 
FlyJ85

FlyJ85



  2/25/2019

Wow thank you for the very in depth reply - what you have said sounds totally correct because I am definitely guilty of adding cobs until I can't add anymore but I had no understanding of what that meant for the game script, this gives me a much better understanding & now I know not to insert as many cobs & the why behind it. Brings a whole new light to it now that I have a better understanding of what's going on. Often when I've inserted a lot of cobs I get this notification "script full" & it stops me at a certain point but then eventually the world crashes, now it makes more sense why since the ecosystem is constantly regenerating in the background as well, I hadn't thought of that in this way before (plus the fact that I had sooo many creatures breeding prolifically in this particular world as well so if it couldn't fit a bee there's no way it could fit the norns that were hatching at the same time. So, less cobs. Thank you greatly, much appreciated. I should take a good look at some of the tutorials I have seen online to understand the finer details better, it is a complex game & I always enjoyed playing but didn't always get the science & mathematics behind it, your knowledge is way beyond my comprehension.
 
SpaceShipRat

SpaceShipRat



  2/25/2019  2


 
FlyJ85

FlyJ85



  2/25/2019

Lol!
 
Dragoler
Wrong Banshee

Dragoler


 visit Dragoler's website: TWB Development Thread
  2/25/2019  1

I don't play C2 but GimmeCat's troubleshooting is just the best thing to read.

Creator of the TWB/TCB genome base.

 


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