March reloading bug

[Thalassicus]

Update: I've finally discovered the cause of this vanilla bug. Reloading from within an existing game breaks mods with lua code, including CiVUP and VEM. I've documented this bug on the vanilla bug report forum.

This bug can only be fixed by Firaxis, so it is absolutely necessary to exit to the main menu before loading a save file. If this is not done, global data in mods with lua code fails to initialize properly.



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Sometime recently a problem popped up where the game doesn't properly initialize if re-loaded within an existing game. This is puzzling because I haven't changed anything with save/load procedures in several months. I've been looking for the cause of this without success for several weeks. However, there's a simple workaround:

Solution:

1. Exit to main menu.
2. Load the save.

This avoids the bug where loading a save from within an active game causes the user interface to not initialize correctly.

 

[bluesatin]

I also suffer this bug, but upon trying to recreate it I couldn't; at least when I had first booted the game.

After a few hours I loaded a quicksave by accident and encountered the bug again.

I wonder if it's anything to do with the memory leak still present; makes it ever so annoying to deal with trades after an hour or two, because the leader screens become excruciatingly laggy.

Screenshot attached with what the bug looks like.

 

[Thalassicus]

As an update to this... I've been trying to reproduce the bug and it's oddly not happening for me anymore.

No need for a screenshot, the user interface just doesn't load. When the problem occurs, please open the tuner (info here), load the game, and copy-paste whatever output prints to the the tuner from the game loading process. I'm fairly certain some error messages should appear.

 

[jacktannery]

I have developed a new bug. I cannot load any save games from the medieval era or later, either quicksave or autosave; from either in-game or main menu. When I try to load a medieval-era game, CivV crashes. This started happening a few weeks ago. I only use TMB & Info addict.

I'll try to play a game without TBM and see if this happens with vanilla; but I doubt it as it only started recently. I always clear my cache & modinfo folder every time I update TBM, so it is not that.

 

[Thalassicus]

I'm able to load games okay, so there's something else added to that which is causing the problem. One thing to watch out for is... does the save game actually say it needs the mods you used for it? I've discovered that savegames will sometimes get corrupted and drop items off the "uses mods" list. When that happens it results in a crash like you describe. I don't think my particular situation is what causes it for you, though, because it happens for me whenever I update the mod while already in a game and forget to go back to the main menu to re-enable the mod. When a mod folder changes, it's apparently disabled even if there's an active game open. Some sort of caching issue.

In fact, I'm beginning to suspect the majority of weird problems we experience are due to Civ's cache code not being designed very robustly.

 

[jacktannery]

It does seem that the saves are corrupted all right. Do you think that this is related to me deleting the 'modinfo' folder prior to beginning a new game? It is odd that it only affects medieval+ saves though. And this has happened in the last four games I have played, always with TBM & infoaddict only, and with no problems at all loading/saving until the medieval period.

EDIT: This also happens on vanilla Civ V. I found the problem: I need to play on much lower graphic settings. Oddly, this only started with the last patch, and before that my new-ish computer could easily handle mid-high settings large maps. Since the patch, I have to go down to min settings small map. I note that several other people have had the same issue in the Gen Civ V Bug thread, so I'm not the only one. Very strange this.

 

[Thalassicus]

I suspect the loading issues in general are a vanilla problem. When it happens, in the lua console it spams hundreds of "getmetatable is nil" messages. I'm not sure how this is possible, because getmetatable is a core Lua function (used for all OO objects in Lua). It's like the game didn't start the Lua VM at all!

Another reason I think this is a vanilla bug is in vanilla (no mods installed!) when a game is exited to main menu, the console spams lots of messages about the variable "Game" being nil. This is impossible because Game is a global variable the vanilla game uses. There's clearly something wrong with the vanilla load/save game code.

 

[Thalassicus]

Does anyone encounter this problem anymore? For the past month I've been able to reload ingame without problems... perhaps Firaxis solved the bug.

 

[Thalassicus]

Updated the original post with new information.

 

[steffj]

I'm getting this error as of yesterday. It doesn't work in vanilla and ctd's when loading saved games and when starting new games (mod or not) it's fine until i build my first city then I get the 'slipped graphic' for a worker being built (like the above thumbnail) and production won't do anything when you click it. Oddly, yesterday was also when I installed your patch Thalassicus. Is there anything that you can do to help? (please be aware I'm not code savvy and have only just managed to find how to load mods!)

EDIT: I deleted local content and re-downloaded my steam copy and still got this bug.

 

[Thalassicus]

Have you tried the things on the Common Checklist?